-sleigh and six or seven of the strongest
dogs, looking till his eyes ached for some patch of clear ice where
a seal might perhaps have scratched a breathing-hole. Kotuko the dog
ranged far and wide, and in the dead stillness of the ice-fields
Kotuko the boy could hear his half-choked whine of excitement, above a
seal-hole three miles away, as plainly as though he were at his elbow.
When the dog found a hole the boy would build himself a little, low snow
wall to keep off the worst of the bitter wind, and there he would wait
ten, twelve, twenty hours for the seal to come up to breathe, his eyes
glued to the tiny mark he had made above the hole to guide the downward
thrust of his harpoon, a little seal-skin mat under his feet, and his
legs tied together in the tutareang (the buckle that the old hunters
had talked about). This helps to keep a man's legs from twitching as he
waits and waits and waits for the quick-eared seal to rise. Though there
is no excitement in it, you can easily believe that the sitting still in
the buckle with the thermometer perhaps forty degrees below zero is
the hardest work an Inuit knows. When a seal was caught, Kotuko the dog
would bound forward, his trace trailing behind him, and help to pull the
body to the sleigh, where the tired and hungry dogs lay sullenly under
the lee of the broken ice.

A seal did not go very far, for each mouth in the little village had a
right to be filled, and neither bone, hide, nor sinew was wasted. The
dogs' meat was taken for human use, and Amoraq fed the team with pieces
of old summer skin-tents raked out from under the sleeping-bench, and
they howled and howled again, and waked to howl hungrily. One could
tell by the soap-stone lamps in the huts that famine was near. In good
seasons, when blubber was plentiful, the light in the boat-shaped lamps
would be two feet high--cheerful, oily, and yellow. Now it was a
bare six inches: Amoraq carefully pricked down the moss wick, when an
unwatched flame brightened for a moment, and the eyes of all the family
followed her hand. The horror of famine up there in the great cold is
not so much dying, as dying in the dark. All the Inuit dread the dark
that presses on them without a break for six months in each year; and
when the lamps are low in the houses the minds of people begin to be
shaken and confused.

But worse was to come.

The underfed dogs snapped and growled in the passages, glaring at the
cold stars, and snuffi