When they were tired Kotuko would make what the hunters call a
"half-house," a very small snow hut, into which they would huddle with
the traveling-lamp, and try to thaw out the frozen seal-meat. When
they had slept the march began again--thirty miles a day to get ten
miles northward. The girl was always very silent, but Kotuko muttered
to himself and broke out into songs he had learned in the
Singing-House--summer songs, and reindeer and salmon songs--all
horribly out of place at that season. He would declare that he heard
the _tornaq_ growling to him, and would run wildly up a hummock,
tossing his arms and speaking in loud, threatening tones. To tell the
truth, Kotuko was very nearly crazy for the time being; but the girl
was sure that he was being guided by his guardian spirit, and that
everything would come right. She was not surprised, therefore, when at
the end of the fourth march Kotuko, whose eyes were burning like
fire-balls in his head, told her that his tornaq was following them
across the snow in the shape of a two-headed dog. The girl looked
where Kotuko pointed, and something seemed to slip into a ravine. It
was certainly not human, but everybody knew that the _tornait_
preferred to appear in the shape of bear and seal, and such like.
It might have been the Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear himself, or it
might have been anything, for Kotuko and the girl were so starved that
their eyes were untrustworthy. They had trapped nothing, and seen no
trace of game since they had left the village; their food would not
hold out for another week, and there was a gale coming. A Polar storm
can blow for ten days without a break, and all that while it is
certain death to be abroad. Kotuko laid up a snow-house large enough
to take in the hand-sleigh (never be separated from your meat), and
while he was shaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the
key-stone of the roof, he saw a Thing looking at him from a little
cliff of ice half a mile away. The air was hazy, and the Thing seemed
to be forty feet long and ten feet high, with twenty feet of tail and
a shape that quivered all along the outlines. The girl saw it too, but
instead of crying aloud with terror, said quietly, "That is Quiquern.
What comes after?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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