girl loaded the hand-sleigh, and made the two dogs pull as they
had never pulled in their lives, for they feared what might have
happened in their village. The weather was as pitiless as usual;
but it is easier to draw a sleigh loaded with good food than to
hunt starving. They left five-and-twenty seal carcasses buried
in the ice of the beach, all ready for use, and hurried back to
their people. The dogs showed them the way as soon as Kotuko
told them what was expected, and though there was no sign of a
landmark, in two days they were giving tongue outside Kadlu's
house. Only three dogs answered them; the others had been eaten,
and the houses were all dark. But when Kotuko shouted, "Ojo!"
(boiled meat), weak voices replied, and when he called the
muster of the village name by name, very distinctly, there were
no gaps in it.

An hour later the lamps blazed in Kadlu's house; snow-water was
heating; the pots were beginning to simmer, and the snow was
dripping from the roof, as Amoraq made ready a meal for all the
village, and the boy-baby in the hood chewed at a strip of rich
nutty blubber, and the hunters slowly and methodically filled
themselves to the very brim with seal-meat. Kotuko and the
girl told their tale. The two dogs sat between them, and
whenever their names came in, they cocked an ear apiece and
looked most thoroughly ashamed of themselves. A dog who has
once gone mad and recovered, the Inuit say, is safe against
all further attacks.

"So the tornaq did not forget us," said Kotuko. The storm blew,
the ice broke, and the seal swam in behind the fish that were
frightened by the storm. Now the new seal-holes are not two days
distant. Let the good hunters go to-morrow and bring back the
seal I have speared--twenty-five seal buried in the ice. When we
have eaten those we will all follow the seal on the floe."

"What do YOU do?" said the sorcerer in the same sort of voice as
he used to Kadlu, richest of the Tununirmiut.

Kadlu looked at the girl from the North, and said quietly,
"WE build a house." He pointed to the north-west side of Kadlu's
house, for that is the side on which the married son or daughter
always lives.

The girl turned her hands palm upward, with a little despairing
shake of her head. She was a foreigner, picked up starving,
and could bring nothing to the housekeeping.

Amoraq jumped from the bench where she sat, and began to sweep
things into the girl's lap--stone lamps, iron skin-scrapers,
tin kettles, deer- skins embroidered with musk-ox teeth, and
real canvas-needles such as sailors use--the finest dowry that
has ever been given on the far edge of the Arctic Circle, and
the girl from the North bowed her head down to the very floor.

"Also these!" said Kotuko, laughing and signing to the dogs,
who thrust their cold muzzles into the girl's face.

"Ah," said the angekok, with an important cough, as though he
had been thinking it all over. "As soon as Kotuko left the
village I went to the Singing-House and sang magic. I sang all
the long nights, and called upon the Spirit of the Reindeer.
MY singing made the gale blow that broke the ice and drew the
two dogs toward Kotuko when the ice would have crushed his
bones. MY song drew the seal in behind the broken ice.
My body lay still in the quaggi, but my spirit ran about on the
ice, and guided Kotuko and the dogs in all the things they did.
I did it."

Everybody was full and sleepy, so no one contradicted; and the
angekok, by virtue of his office, helped himself to yet another
lump of boiled meat, and lay down to sleep with the others in
the warm, well-lighted, oil-smelling home.

.....

Now Kotuko, who drew very well in the Inuit fashion, scratched
pictures of all these adventures on a long, flat piece of ivory
with a hole at one end. When he and the girl went north to
Ellesmere Land in the year of the Wonderful Open Winter, he left
the picture-story with Kadlu, who lost it in the shingle when
his dog-sleigh broke down one summer on the beach of Lake
Netilling at Nikosiring, and there a Lake Inuit found it next
spring and sold it to a man at Imigen who was interpreter on a
Cumberland Sound whaler, and he sold it to Hans Olsen, who was
afterward a quartermaster on board a big steamer that took
tourists to the North Cape in Norway. When the tourist season
was over, the steamer ran between London and Australia, stopping
at Ceylon, and there Olsen sold the ivory to a Cingalese
jeweller for two imitation sapphires. I found it under some
rubbish in a house at Colombo, and have translated it from one
end to the other.



'ANGUTIVAUN TAINA'

[This is a very free translation of the Song of the Returning
Hunter, as the men used to sing it after seal-spearing.
The Inuit always repeat things over and over again.]

Our gloves are stiff with the frozen blood,


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