He placed her aboard his kyak and paddled off on his return journey. So Sedna went away with her lover and her father saw her no more on the cliff by the seashore that was her home. Came swift awakening and a bride’s tears! Sedna’s lover was no man at all, but a phantom man whose real self was a Bird! One of those peerless creatures of the arctic sky who, with “wide wing ... broad-spread to glide upon the free blue road” above the crashing floes, wheels over the bitter waters of the North. Some have it a Fulmar, and some a Loon. It was a Spirit bird, having power to transform itself into the semblance of a human thing. Falling in love with the maiden, it had taken the form of the hunter and decoyed her to its own. Sedna was inconsolable. She had the horror of a very human girl at her strange mate, and could by no means make his land her home and his people hers. The legend has it that the Loon provided for her as an ordinary hunter would have done; but she was wild and homesick, and passed her days bewailing, as lone and desolate an exiled maiden as ever cried, “Woe, woe!” (Sedna’s disillusionment is a note in the story wholly coarse to European ideas. The Eskimos are a people without prudery. A perfectly natural incident on the journey revealed that the lover was a bird.) But the father wearied for his daughter—the Eskimo word has the loving possessive “his own daughter”—and at length fitted out his boat and sailed away to that distant coast whither she had been borne. The husband Bird was from home when he came to this land, and it was a sad and sorry tale that greeted his ears from the wind-lashed, spray-beaten maiden that had been his smiling, contented child. Without more ado, he lifted her into his boat, made one swift turn, and fell to retracing his course. The craft—a tiny mark—was soon lost to sight in the welter of the waves. Then the Loon, returning, enquired and said, “But where is my wife?” The cry echoed round the naked cliffs. And answering cries, wind-borne on the darkening air, told him that his wife had fled. Her father had come and snatched her back, in grief and anger, to his bosom. At once, the Bird, assuming the Phantom form again, followed in his kyak; but when the Father saw him coming he covered up his daughter with the furs and things he had loaded in the boat. Swiftly the kyaker bore down upon them, and rushing alongside demanded to see his wife. “Let me see my wife!” he cried. “Let me only see her; pray let me see her!” The angry father refused, and held determinedly on his way. “Then let me see her hands only. I only ask to see her hands!” the Kokksaut cried, to be passionately rejected again.