This seemed to satisfy the wizard that he was receiving all that he could get in payment for his services, and he finally picked up the pelts and laid them behind him. The boy reentered the igloo and came out leading an old woman, whose wails of “Ah-nu-_nah_!” were louder as they reached the spot where stood the wizard. She pressed both hands to her head, as if that were in great pain, and crouched before the Ankut, who was immediately transformed from an immobile and haughty personage into a sort of wild skirt dancer. He whirled about the old woman in a circle, and from his clothes somewhere appeared a couple of great knives with which he juggled in an astonishing manner, tossing and catching them deftly, and surrounding himself with a circle of flashing steel. Harry gave an exclamation of astonishment at this. It was so little like the clumsy and awkward manner of the every-day Eskimo. A crowd of people had surrounded the group, and gazed with wonder and awe on this performance, scattering like leaves in the wind when the dancing juggler of knives swung too near them. The wizard soon began to howl and clap his hands to his own head, still in some mysterious manner keeping the knives whirling. The sick woman had forgotten her own pain in wonder at this exhibition, and sat mute and open-mouthed. Suddenly the wizard shouted, “Come out, spirit! Leave the woman’s head and come out!” He whirled up to the side of the sick woman before she could recover from her astonishment, slipped one of the knives out of sight again in his own clothes and with the other made a slash that cut deep into her temple, and pretended to draw something from the wound. This he held up in the sight of the surrounding crowd. It was a curious, brown, many-legged worm, such as are found in rotten wood, and which no doubt infest the tundra moss, or might have been obtained from driftwood from the sources of the Kukpowrak, which has its rise far inland in the timber line. The crowd murmured with astonishment at this, the wizard retired to his igloo with his fox and ermine pelts, and only the boy remained, sitting in stolid grief beside the old woman, who lay where she had dropped at the slash of the knife. It had cut deeper than the wizard perhaps intended. Certainly he had cured her headache, for she was dead. The barbarous cruelties of the Ankuts, in their attempts to deal with the sick, are beyond description, and the boys had seen only one of the least, but they turned away, sick at heart, and willing to believe that the little oasis in the midst of the barren wastes was anything but an Eden to those who must live there under the cruel rule of the pretended wizards.