er to the sub-chief. Finally he dispatched his
eldest sons, Bakshuak and Kommak, with a big team of dogs, to hurry
down north and bring the belated and forgotten boat back with all
speed.

Kalleligak, obsessed by his jealousy and chagrin, was able from his
camp to watch every movement of the chief's. He positively brooded so
much over the incident that he came to believe that his life was in
danger at Kaiachououk's hands. The next steps were easy, for he was
favoured both by the innocence of his superior and the weather. Days
are short in the late fall in the North, and darkness falls before
work is finished.

In the late afternoon, two days after Bakshuak and Kommak's departure,
while Kaiachououk was still out of his igloo and the darkness was
rapidly coming on, Kalleligak stole inside and took the chief's gun.
This he unloaded and then reloaded with two balls. Early next morning,
before the dawn, he crept out, carrying his own and the stolen weapon,
to watch his chance. Kaiachououk, emerging soon after from his snow
house, turned his back on Kalleligak's igloo while he stooped to make
a trifling repair on his own. Without a second's hesitation,
Kalleligak seized Kaiachououk's own gun, and crawling and crouching up
behind the five-foot snow ramparts which the Eskimos invariably build
around their winter houses, he fired two bullets through the
unsuspecting man's back and body. The chief fell head foremost, having
received two fatal wounds; but Kalleligak, throwing down one gun had
instantly grabbed the other, in order if necessary to finish the deed
before the mortally wounded man could tell who was responsible. But
Kaiachououk never moved, and his enemy slunk inside, believing that he
had been unobserved.

As fate would have it, Anatalik, another of the hunters, appeared at
the entrance of his igloo just in time to see the smoking gun-barrel
over the edge of the snow wall. Running to his fallen chief, he begged
him to tell him what had occurred. The dying man had only strength
left to whisper "Kiapevunga?" ("Who has killed me?"), and Anatalik
could barely discern from his eye that he understood the answer,
"Kalleligamut" ("It was Kalleligak who did it").

It was probably this, to us, unimportant item which caused a
confession ever to be made. Kalleligak, now convinced that the spirit
of his dead chief knew he was the murderer, believed it would haunt
him without mercy, and that his own life might be immediately f