far as the eye could reach all along the north line of the floe.
>From where Kotuko and the girl were, the confusion looked no
more than an uneasy, rippling, crawling movement under the
horizon; but it came toward them each moment, and they could
hear, far away to landward a heavy booming, as it might have
been the boom of artillery through a fog. That showed that the
floe was being jammed home against the iron cliffs of Bylot's
Island, the land to the southward behind them.

"This has never been before," said Kotuko, staring stupidly.
"This is not the time. How can the floe break NOW?"

"Follow THAT! the girl cried, pointing to the Thing half
limping, half running distractedly before them. They followed,
tugging at the hand- sleigh, while nearer and nearer came the
roaring march of the ice. At last the fields round them cracked
and starred in every direction, and the cracks opened and
snapped like the teeth of wolves. But where the Thing rested,
on a mound of old and scattered ice-blocks some fifty feet high,
there was no motion. Kotuko leaped forward wildly, dragging the
girl after him, and crawled to the bottom of the mound.
The talking of the ice grew louder and louder round them,
but the mound stayed fast, and, as the girl looked at him,
he threw his right elbow upward and outward, making the Inuit
sign for land in the shape of an island. And land it was that
the eight-legged, limping Thing had led them to--some granite-
tipped, sand-beached islet off the coast, shod and sheathed
and masked with ice so that no man could have told it from the
floe, but at the bottom solid earth, and not shifting ice!
The smashing and rebound of the floes as they grounded and
splintered marked the borders of it, and a friendly shoal ran
out to the northward, and turned aside the rush of the heaviest
ice, exactly as a ploughshare turns over loam. There was danger,
of course, that some heavily squeezed ice-field might shoot up
the beach, and plane off the top of the islet bodily; but that
did not trouble Kotuko and the girl when they made their snow-
house and began to eat, and heard the ice hammer and skid along
the beach. The Thing had disappeared, and Kotuko was talking
excitedly about his power over spirits as he crouched round the
lamp. In the middle of his wild sayings the girl began to laugh,
and rock herself backward and forward.

Behind her shoulder, crawling into the hut crawl by crawl,
there were two heads, one yellow and one black, that belonged to
two of the most sorrowful and ashamed dogs that ever you saw.
Kotuko the dog was one, and the black leader was the other.
Both were now fat, well-looking, and quite restored to their
proper minds, but coupled to each other in an extraordinary
fashion. When the black leader ran off, you remember,
his harness was still on him. He must have met Kotuko the dog,
and played or fought with him, for his shoulder-loop had caught
in the plaited copper wire of Kotuko's collar, and had drawn
tight, so that neither could get at the trace to gnaw it apart,
but each was fastened sidelong to his neighbour's neck.
That, with the freedom of hunting on their own account,
must have helped to cure their madness. They were very sober.

The girl pushed the two shamefaced creatures towards Kotuko,
and, sobbing with laughter, cried, "That is Quiquern, who led
us to safe ground. Look at his eight legs and double head!"

Kotuko cut them free, and they fell into his arms, yellow and
black together, trying to explain how they had got their senses
back again. Kotuko ran a hand down their ribs, which were round
and well clothed. "They have found food," he said, with a grin.
"I do not think we shall go to Sedna so soon. My tornaq sent
these. The sickness has left them."

As soon as they had greeted Kotuko, these two, who had
been forced to sleep and eat and hunt together for the past
few weeks, flew at each other's throat, and there was a
beautiful battle in the snow-house. "Empty dogs do not fight,"
Kotuko said. "They have found the seal. Let us sleep. We shall
find food."

When they waked there was open water on the north beach of the
island, and all the loosened ice had been driven landward.
The first sound of the surf is one of the most delightful that
the Inuit can hear, for it means that spring is on the road.
Kotuko and the girl took hold of hands and smiled, for the
clear, full roar of the surge among the ice reminded them of
salmon and reindeer time and the smell of blossoming ground-
willows. Even as they looked, the sea began to skim over between
the floating cakes of ice, so intense was the cold; but on the
horizon there was a vast red glare, and that was the light of
the sunken sun. It was more like hearing him yawn in his sleep
than seeing him rise, and the glare lasted for only a few
minutes, but it marked the turn of the year. Nothing, they felt,
could alter that.

Kotuko found the dogs fighting over a fresh-killed seal who was
following the fish that a gale always disturbs. He was the first
of some twenty or thirty seal that landed on the island in the
course of the day, and till the sea froze hard there were
hundreds of keen black heads rejoicing in the shallow free water
and floating about with the floating ice.

It was good to eat seal-liver again; to fill the lamps
recklessly with blubber, and watch the flame blaze three feet in
the air; but as soon as the new sea-ice bore, Kotuko and the


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