id not know
exactly what telling a real lie meant, still less how to steal. They
were content to spear their living out of the heart of the bitter,
hopeless cold; to smile oily smiles, and tell queer ghost and fairy
tales of evenings, and eat till they could eat no more, and sing the
endless woman's song: "Amna aya, aya amna, ah! ah!" through the long
lamp-lighted days as they mended their clothes and their hunting-gear.

But one terrible winter everything betrayed them. The Tununirmiut
returned from the yearly salmon-fishing, and made their houses on the
early ice to the north of Bylot's Island, ready to go after the seal
as soon as the sea froze. But it was an early and savage autumn. All
through September there were continuous gales that broke up the smooth
seal-ice when it was only four or five feet thick, and forced it inland,
and piled a great barrier, some twenty miles broad, of lumped and ragged
and needly ice, over which it was impossible to draw the dog-sleighs.
The edge of the floe off which the seal were used to fish in winter
lay perhaps twenty miles beyond this barrier, and out of reach of the
Tununirmiut. Even so, they might have managed to scrape through the
winter on their stock of frozen salmon and stored blubber, and what
the traps gave them, but in December one of their hunters came across a
tupik (a skin-tent) of three women and a girl nearly dead, whose men
had come down from the far North and been crushed in their little skin
hunting-boats while they were out after the long-horned narwhal. Kadlu,
of course, could only distribute the women among the huts of the winter
village, for no Inuit dare refuse a meal to a stranger. He never knows
when his own turn may come to beg. Amoraq took the girl, who was about
fourteen, into her own house as a sort of servant. From the cut of her
sharp-pointed hood, and the long diamond pattern of her white deer-skin
leggings, they supposed she came from Ellesmere Land. She had never seen
tin cooking-pots or wooden-shod sleighs before; but Kotuko the boy and
Kotuko the dog were rather fond of her.

Then all the foxes went south, and even the wolverine, that growling,
blunt-headed little thief of the snow, did not take the trouble to
follow the line of empty traps that Kotuko set. The tribe lost a
couple of their best hunters, who were badly crippled in a fight with
a musk-ox, and this threw more work on the others. Kotuko went out, day
after day, with a light hunting