"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,
and Kotuko was talking excitedly about his power over spirits as he
crouched round the lamp. In the middle of his wild sayings the girl
began to laugh, and rock herself backward and forward.
Behind her shoulder, crawling into the hut crawl by crawl, there were
two heads, one yellow and one black, that belonged to two of the most
sorrowful and ashamed dogs that ever you saw. Kotuko the dog was one,
and the black leader was the other. Both were now fat, well-looking,
and quite restored to their proper minds, but coupled to each other in
an extraordinary fashion. When the black leader ran off, you remember,
his harness was still on him. He must have met Kotuko the dog, and
played or fought with him, for his shoulder-loop had caught in the
plaited copper wire of Kotuko's collar, and had drawn tight, so that
neither could get at the trace to gnaw it apart, but each was fastened
sidelong to his neighbor's neck. That, with the freedom of hunting on
their own account, must have helped to cure their madness. They were
very sober.
The girl pushed the two shamefaced creatures toward Kotuko, and,
sobbing with laughter, cried, "That is Quiquern, who led us to safe
ground. Look at his eight legs and double head!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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