. Others, again, rose
up bodily out of the water when they shoaled, twisted as though in
pain, and fell solidly on their sides, while the sea threshed over their
shoulders. This trampling and crowding and bending and buckling and
arching of the ice into every possible shape was going on as 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, a