Evening Star Newspaper, October 26, 1895, Page 19

THE EVENING STAR, SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26, 1895-TWENTY PAGES. 17 y (Copyright, 1 py Irving Bacheller.) CHAPTER L “He has opened his eyes. Look!” “Put him in the skin again. He will be a strong dog; on the fourth month we will rame him.” “For whom?” said Amoraq. Kadlu’s eye rolled round the skin-lined srow hot till it came to fourteen-year-old Kotuko sitting on the sleeping bench mak- ing a button of walrus ivory. “Name him for me,” said Kotuko, with a grin. “I shall need him some day.” Kadlu grinned back till his eyes were al- most buried in the fat of his flat cheeks, and nodded to Amoraq while his puppy's fierce mother whined to see her baby wrig- gling far out of reach in the little sealskin pouch hung above the warmth of the blub- ber lamp. Kotuko went on with his carv- ing and Kadlu threw a rolled bundle of leather dog harnesses into a tiny little room that opened from one side of the hcuse; slipped off his heavy deerskin hunt- irg suit, put it into a whalebone net that Tung above another lamp and dropped down on the sleeping bench to whittle at a piece of frozen seal meat, till Amoraq, his wife, should bring the regular dinner of boiled meat and blood soup. He had been Dealt Out Justice. wut since early dawn at the seal holes, eight miles away, on the ice at the edge of the floe, and had come home with three big seals. Half way down the long, low snow passage or tunnel, that led to the inner door of the house, you could hear snap- pings and yelpings, as the dogs of his sleigh team, released from their day's work, scufiled for warm places. : When the yelpings grew too loud, Kotuko lazily rolled off the sleeping bench, and, picking up a dog whip with an eighteen- inch handle of springy whalebone, and twenty-five feet of heavy plaited thong, he dived into the passage, where it sounded as though all the dogs were eating him alive; but that was no more than their regular grace before meals. When he crawled out of the far end of the passage half a dozen furry heads followed him with their eyes as he went to a short gallows of whale Jaw bones, from which the dog’s meat was hung, split off the frozen stuff in big lumps. with a broad-headed spear, and stood, his whip in one hand and the meat in the other. Each beast was called by name—the weak- est first—and woe betide any dog that moved out of his turn, for the tapering lash would shoot out like thonged lightning and flick away afi inch or so of hair and hide. Each beast simply growled once, rapped once, choked once over his portion, and hurried back to the protection of the snow passage, while the boy stood on tha snow under the blazing northern lights and dealt out justice. The last to be served was the big black leader of the team, who kept order when they were harnessed, and to him Kotuko gave a double allowance of Meat, as well as an extra crack of the whip. A said Kotuko, coiling up the lash, I have a little one over the lamp that will make a great many howlings. Sar- pok! Get in!” He crawled back over the huddled dogs, dusted the dry snow from his furs with thé whalebone beater that Amoraq kept by the door; tapped the skin-lined roof of the house to shake off any icicles that might have fallen from the dome of snow above, and curled up on the bench. The dogs in the passage snored and whined in their sleep, the boy baby in Amoraq’s deep fur hood kicked and choked and gurgled, and the mother of the newly named puppy lay at Kotuko's side, her eyes fixed on the bundle of sealskin—warm and safe above the broad, yellow flame of the lamp. ‘And all this happened far away to the north; beyond Labrador, beyond Hudson's strait, where the great tides throw the fee about, north of Melville peninsula— north even of the narrow Fury and Hecla straits on the north shore of Baffin Land, where Bylot’s Island stands above the ice of Lancaster sound like a pudding bowl wrong side up. North of Lancaster sound there is nothing we krow anything abeut except North Devon and Ellesmere Land; but even there live a few scattered people next door, as it were, to the very pole. Kadlu was an Inuit—what you call an juimau—and his tribe, some fifty® per- s all told, belonged to the Tununirmlut he country lying at the back of some- In the maps that desolate coast is cafied Navy Board inlet; but the Inuit name is best, because the country lies at the very back of everything in the world. For nine months of the year there is only ice as hard as rock, snow, and gale after gale. with a cold that no one can realize who has never seen the thermometer go down even to zero. For six months of those nine it is dark, and that is what makes it so horrible. For the three months of the summer it only freezes every other day and every cther night, and then the snow be- The Vid Woman Told Ghost Stories. gins to sweep away to the southerly slopes, and a few ground willows put out their woolly buds, a tiny stone crop or so makes believe to blossom; beaches of fine gravel and rounded stones run down to the open sea, and polished bowlders and streaked rocks lift up above the granu- lated snow. But all that goes away in a few weeks, and the wild winter locks down again on the land; while at sea the torn and powdered ice tears up and down the offing, Jamming and ramming, and splitting and hitting, and pounding and grounding, till it all freezes together ten feet thick from the land outward to deep water. In the winter Kadlu would follow the seals to the edge of the land ice and spear them as they came up to breathe at thelr blow holes. The seals must have open ‘water to live and catch fish in, and in the desp of winter the ice would sometimes un eighty miles without a break from the DYARD KIDLING nearest land. In the spring he and his peo- ple retreated from the thawing floes to the rocky mainland, where they put up tents of skins, and snared the sea birds or speared the young seal basking ori the beaches. Later, they would go south into Baffin @and after the reindeer and to get their year’s store of salmon from the hun- dreds of streams and lakes of the interior, coming back north in September or Octo- ber for the musk ox hunting and the reg- ular winter sealery. This traveling was done with dog sleighs, twenty or thirty miles a day, or sometimes down the coast in big skin “woman boats,” when the dogs and the babies lay among the feet of the Towers, and the women sang songs as they glided from cape to cape over the glassy cold waters. All the luxuries the Tunun- irmiut knew came from the south—drift- wood for sleigh runners, rod iron for har- poon tips, steel knives, tin kettles that cooked fish much better than the old soap- stone affairs, flint and steel and even matches, colored ribbons for the women’s hair, little cheap mirrors and red cloth for the edging of deerskin dress jackets. Kadlu traded the rich creamy-twisted narwhal horn and musk ox teeth (these are just as valuable as pearls) to the southern Inuit, and they in turn traded with the whalers and the missionary posts of Exeter and Cumberland sounds, and so the chain went va till a kettle picked up by a ship’s cook in the Bhendy bazar might end its days over a blubber lamp somewhere on the cool side of the arctic circle. Kadlu, being a good hunter, was rich in iron harpoons, snow knives, bird darts and all other things that make life easy up there in the great cold, and he was the head of his tribe, or, as they say, “the man who knows all about it by practice.” This did not give him any authority, except now and then he could advise his friends to change their hunting grounds, but Kotuko used it to domineer a little, in the lazy, fat Inuit fashion, over the other boys when they came out at night to play ball in the moonlight or to sing the child’s songs to the Aurora Borealis. But at fourteen an Inuit feels himself a man, and Kotuko was tired of making snares for wild fowl and kit foxes, and most tired of all of helping the women to chew seal and deerskins (that makes them supple as noihing else can) the long day through while the men were out hunting. He wanted to go into the quaggi, the sing- ing house when the hunters gathered there for their mysteries, and the angekok, the sorcerer, frightened them into the most delightful fits after the lamps were put ut, and you could hear the spirit of the rein- deer stamping upon the roof, and when a spear was thrust out into the open black night it came back covered with hot blood. He wanted to throw his big boots into the net with the tired air of a head of a family, and he wanted to gamble with the hunters when they dropped in of an evening to play a sort of home-made roulette with a tin pot and a nail. There were hundreds of things that he wanted to do, but the grown men laughed at him and said: “Wait till you have been in the buckle, Kotuko. Hunting is not all fat!” Now that his father had named a puppy for him, things looked brighter. An Inuit does not waste a gcod dog on his son till the boy knows something of dog driving; and Kotuko was more than sure that he knew more than everything. If the puppy had not had an tron con- stitution he would have died from over- stuffing and overhandling. Kotuko made him a tiny harness with a trace to it and hauled him all over the house floor, shout- ing: “‘Aua! Ja aua! (go to the right) Choiachoi! Ja cholachoi! (go to the left!) “Ohaha!” (stop). The puppy did not like it at all, but being fished for in this way was pure happiness beside being put to the sleigh for the first time. He just sat down on the snow and played with the seal hide trace that ran from his harness to the pitu, the big thong in the bows of the sleigh. Then the team started and the puppy found the heavy ten-foot sleigh run- ning up his back and dragging him along the snow, while Kotuko laughed till the tears ran down his face. Then there fol- lowed days and days of the cruel whip that hisses like the wind over ice, and his com- panions all bit him because he did not know his work, and the harness chafed him, and he was not allowed to sleep with Kotuko any more, but had to take the coldest place in the pessage. It was a sad time for the puppy. The boy learned, too, as fast as the dog; and a dog sleigh is a heart-breaking thing to manage. Each beast is harnessed—the weakest nearest to the driver—by his owr separate trace, which runs under his left fore leg to the main thong, where it is fustened by a sort of button and loop, whicn can be slipped by a turn of the wrist, thus freeing one dog at a time. This is very necessary, be- cause young dogs often get the trace be- tween their hind legs, where it cuts to the bone. And they, one and all, will go visit- ing their friends as they run, jumping in and out among the traces. Then they fight and the result is more mixed than a wet fishing line next morning. A great deal of trouble can be avoided by scientific use of the whip. Every Inuit boy prides himself as being a master of the long lash; but it is easy to flick at a mark on the ground, and difficult to lean forward and catch a shirking dog just behind the shoulders when the sleigh is going at full speed. If you call one dogs name for “visiting” and accidentally lash another the two will fight at once and stop all the others. Again, if you travel with a companion and begin to talk, or by yourself and sing, the dogs will halt, turn around and sit down to hear what you have to say. Kotuko was run away from once or twice by forgetting to block the sleigh when he stopped, and he broke many lashings and ruined a few thongs before he could be trusted with a full team of eight and a light sleigh. Then he felt himself a person of consequence, and on smooth, black ice, with a bold heart and a quick elbow, he smoked along over the levels as fast as a pack in full cry. He would go twenty miles to the seal holes, and when he was on his hunting ground he would twitch a trace loose from the pitu and free the big black leader, who was the cleverest dog in the team. As soon as the dog had scented a breathing hole Kotuko would reverse the sleigh, driving a couple of sawed-off antlers that stuck up like per- ambulator handles from the back rest deep into the snow, so that the team could not get away. Then he would crawl forward inch by inch and wait till the seal came up to breathe. Then he stabbed down swiftly with his spear and running line, and presently would haul his seal up to the lp of the ice, while the black leader came up and helped to pull the carcass across the ice to the sleigh. That was the time when the harnessed dogs yelled and foamed with excitement, and Kotuko laid the long lash like a red-hot bar across all their faces till the carcass froze stiff. Going home was the heavy work. The loaded sleigh had to be humored among the rough ice, and the dogs sat down and looked hungrily at the seal instead of pulling. At last they would strike the well-worn sleigh road to the village and toodle kiyi along the ringing ice, heads down and tails up, while Kotuko struck up the “‘Angu tivun tai-na tau-na ne-taina,” the song of the re- turning hunter, and voices hailed him from house to house under all that dim, star- lit cold. When Kotuko, the dog, came to his full growth he enjoyed himself, too. He fought his way up the team steadily, fight after fight. until one fine evening over their food he tackled the big black leader (Kotuko, the boy, caw fdir play with the whip) and made second dog of him, as they say. So he was promoted to the long thong of the leading dog, running five feet in advance of all the others. It was his bounden duty to stop all fighting in harness or out of it, and he wore a collar of copper wire, very thick and heavy. On special occa- sions he was fed with cooked food inside the house and sometimes was allowed to sleep on the bench with Kotuko. He was a good seal dog and could keep a musk ox at bay by running round him and snap- ping at his heels. He would even, and this for a sleigh dog is the last proof of bravery, he would even stand up to the gaunt arctic wolf, whom all dogs of the rorth as a rule fear beyond anything that walks the snow. He and his master—they did not count the team of ordinary dogs as company—hunted together day after day and night after night—fur-wrapped boy and savage, long-haired, narrow-eyed, white-fanged yellow brute, All an Inuit has to do is to get food ana skins for him- self and his family. The women folk make the skins into clothing and occasionally help in trapping small game, but the bulk of the food, and they eat enormously, must be found by the men. If the supply fails there is no one up there to buy or beg or borrow from. The people must die. CHAPTER II. An Inuit does not think of these chances till he is forced to. Kadlu, Kotuko, Amoraq and the boy baby, who kicked about in Amoraq’s fur hood and chewed Pieces of blubber all day, were as happy together as ary family in the world. They came of a very gentle race—an Inuit sel- dom loses his temper and almost never strikes a child who did not know exactly what telling a He meant, still less how to steal. They were content to drag their living out of the heart of the bitter, hope- less cold; to smile oily smiles and tell queer ghost and fairy tales of evenings, and eat till they could eat no more, and sing the endless woman's song: “Amna aya, aya ainanah ah! ah!’ through the long, lamp-lighted days as they mended their clothes and their hunting gear. + But one terrible winter everything be- trayed them. The Tununirmiut returned from the yearly salmon fishing and made their houses on the early ice to the north of Bellot’s Island ready to go after the He Tells of His Tornaq. seal as soon as the sea froze. But it was an early and savage autumn. All through September there were continuous gales that broke up the smooth seal ice where it was only four or five feet thick and forc- ed it inland and piled a great barrier some thirty miles broad of lumped and ragged and needly ice, over which it was impos- sible to draw the sleighs. The edge of the floe off which the seal were used to fish in winter lay perhaps twenty miles be- yond this barrier and out of reach of the Tununirmiut. Even so, they might have managed to scrape through the winter on their stock of frozen salmon and stored blubber and what the traps gave them, but in December one of their hunters came across a tupik, 4 skin tent, of three women and a girl nearly dead, whose men had come down from the far north and been crushed in their kajaks (their little skin hunting boats) while they were out after the loig-horned narwhal. Kadlu, of course, ceuld only distribute the women among the huts of the winter village, for no Inuit would dare refuse a meal to a stranger. He never knows when his own time may come to beg. Amoraq took the girl, who was about fourteen, into her own house as a sort of servant. From the cut of her sharp-pointed hood anf the long diamond pattern of her white deerskin leggins they supposed she came from Ellesmere Land. She had never seen tin cooking pots or wooden-shod sleighs before, but Kotuko, the hoy, and Kotuko, the dog, were rather fond of her. ‘Then all the foxes went south, and even the wolverine, the growling, blunt-headed little thief of the snow, did not take the trouble to follow the line of empty traps that Kotuko set. The tribe lost a couple of their best hunters, who were badly crippled in a fight with a musk ox, and that threw more work on the others. .Kotuko went out day after day with a light hunting sleigh and six or seven of the strongest dogs, Icoking till his eyes ached for some patch of clear ice where a seal might perhaps have scratched a breathing hole. Kotuko, the dog, ranged far and wide, and in the dead stillness of the ice fields Kotuko, the boy, could hear his half-choked whine of excitement above a seal hole three miles away as plainly as though he were at his elbow. When the dog found a hole the boy would build himself a little low snow wail to keep off the worst of the bitter wind, and there he would wait ten, twelve, twenty hours for the seal to come up to breathe, his eyes glued to the tiny mark he whad made above the hole to guide the down- ward thrust of his harpoon, a little seal- skin mat under his feet, and his legs tied together in the tutareang—the buckle that the old hunters had talked about. This helps to keep a man’s legs from twitching as he waits, and waits, and waits for the quick-eared seal to rise. Though there is no-excitement in it, you can easily believe that the sitting still in the buckle, with the thermometer perhaps 40 degrees below zero, is the hardest work an Inuit knows. When a seal was caught Kotuko, the dog, would bound forward, his trace trailing behind him, and help to pull the body to the sleigh, where the tired and hungry dogs lay sul- lenly under the lee of the broken ice. A seal did not go very far, for each mouth in the little village had a right to be filled, and never bone, hide nor sinew was wasted. The dogs’ meat was taken for human use and Amoraq fed the team with pieces of old summer skin-tents raked out from un- Hi f th Like Things in a Nightmare. der the sleeping bench, and they howled and howled again, and waked to howl hun- grily. One could tell by the soapstone Jamps in the huts that famine was near. In good seasons, when blubber is plentiful, the light in the boat-shaped lamps would be two feet high, cheerful, ofly and yellow. Now it was a bare six inches. Amoraq carefully pricked down the moss wick when an unwatched flame brightened for a mo- ment, and the eyes of all the family fol- lowed her hand. The horror of famine up there in the great cold is not so much dy- ing as dying in the dark. All the Inuit dread the dark that presses on them with- out a break for six months in each year, and when the lamps are low in the houses the minds of people begin to be shaken and confused. But worse was to come. The underfed dogs snapped and growled in the passages, glaring at the cold stars and snuffing into the bitter wind, night after night. When they stopped howling the silence fell down again as solid and as heavy as a snowdrift against a door, and men could hear thé beating of their blodd in the thin passages of the ear and the thumping of their hearts that sounded as loud as the noise of sorcerers’ drums beaten across the snow. One night Kotuko, the dog, who had been unusually silent in har- ness, leaped up and pushed his head against Kotuko’s knee. Kotuko patted him, but the dog still pushed blindly forward, fawn- ing. Then Kadlu waked and stared into the glassy eyes. The dog whimpered as though he were afraid, and shivered be- tween Kadlu’s knees. Then the hair rose about his neck and he growled as though a stranger were at the door; then he barked cry and rolled on the ground and at Xotuko’s boot like a puppy. “What is it?’ said Kotuko, for he was beginning to be afraid. “The sickness,” Kadlu answered. “It is the dog sickness.” Kotuko, the dog, lifted his nose and howled and howled again. “I have not seen this before. What will he do?” said Kotuko. Kadlu shrugged one shoulder a little and crossed the hut for his short stabbing har- poon. The big dog looked at him, howled again and slunk“away down the passage, while the other dogs drew aside right and left to give him ample room. When he was out on the«snow he barked furiously as though on the trail ef a musk ox, and barking and leaping and frisking passed out of sight. Tkis was not hydrophobia, but simple plain madness. The cold and the hunger and>above all the dark had turned his headg and when the terrible dog sickness once: shows itself in a team it spreads like wildfire. Next hunting day another dog sickened and was killed then and there by Kotuko as he bit and strug- gled among thertraces. Then the black second dog who‘tad been the leader in the old days suddenly gave tongue on an im- aginary reindeesiitrack, and when they slipped him from the pitu he flew at the throat of an ice cliff, and ran away as his leader had done, his harness on his back. After that no one would take the dogs out again. They neéded them for something els2 ani the dogs knew it, and though they were tied down and fed by hand their eyes were full of despair and fear. To make things worse the old women began to tell ghost tales and to say that they had met the spirits of the dead hunters lost that zutumn, who prophesied all sorts of horrible things. Kotuko grieved more for the loss of his dog than anything else, for though an Inuit eats enormously, he also knows when to starve. But the hunger, the darkness, the cold and the exposure told on his strength, and he began to hear voices inside his head and to see people, who were not there, out of the tail of his eye. One night he had unbuckled himself after ten hours’ waiting above a “blind” seal hole, and was stagger- ing back to the village, faint and dizzy—he halted to lean his back against a bowlder which happened to be supported like a rocking stone on a single jutting point of ice. His weight disturbed the balance of the thing, it rolled over ponderously, and as Kotuko sprang aside to avoid it, slid af- ter him, squeaking and hissing on the ice slope. That was enough for Kotuko. He had been brought up to believe that every rock and bowlder had its owner (its inua), who was generally a one-eyed kind of a woman thing called a tornaq, and that when 4 tor- naq meant to help a man, she rolled after him inside her stone house, and asked him whether he would take her for a guardian spirit. (In summer thaws the ice-held rocks and bowlders roll and slip all over the face of the land, so you can easily see how the idea of live stones arose.) Kotuko heard the blood beating in nis ears as he had heard it all day, and he thonght it was the tornaq of the stone speaking to him. Be- fore he reached home he was quite certain that he had held a long conversation with her. and, as all his people believed that this was quite possible, no one contradicted him. “She said to me: ‘I jump down. I jump down from my place on the snow,’ cried Kotuko, with hollow eyes, leaning forward in the half-lightcd hut. “She said: ‘I will be a guide.” She says: ‘I will guide you to the good seal holes.’ Tomorrow I will go, and the tornaq will guide me.” Then the angekok, the village sorcerer, came in, and Kotuko told him the tale a second time. It lost nothing in the telling. “Follow the tornait (the spirit of the stones) and they will bring us food again,” sald the angekok. Now the girl from the north had been lying near the lamp, eating very little and saying less for days past, but when Amoraq and Kadlu next morning packed and lashed a little hand sleigh for Kotuko and loaded it with his hunting gear and as much blub- ber and frozen seal meat as they could spare, she took the pulling rope and stepped out boldly at the boy’s side. “Your house is-my house,” she said, as the little bone-shod:sleigh squeaked and bumped behind them in the awful, silent arctic night. “My house isi your house,” said Kotuko, “but I think that we shall both go to Sedna together.” i Now Sedna is the mistress of the under- world, and the Inuit believes that every one who dies must spend a year in her hor- rible country before going on to Quadlipar- miut, the happx place where it never freezes and the fat reindeer trot up when you call. Through the village people were shouting: “The tornait have spoken to Kotuko. They will show him ‘open ice. He will bring us the seal again.” Their voices were soon swallowed up by the cold, empty dark, and Kotuko and the girl shouldered close to- gether as they strained on the pulling rope or humored the sleigh through the broken ice, in the direction of the Polar sea. Kotuko insisted that the tornaq of the stone had told him to go north, and north they went under Tuktugdjung, the reindeer—what we call the Great Bear. No European could have made five miles a day over the ice rubbish and the sharp- edged drifts; but those two knew exactly the turn of the wrist that coaxes a sleigh round a hummock, the jerk that neatly lifts it out of an ice crack, and the exact strength that goes to the few quiet strokes of the spearhead that make a path possible when everything looks hopeless. The girl said nothing,but bowed her head, and the long wolverine fur fringe to her ermine hood blew across.her broad, dark face. The sky above them was an intense velvety black, changing to bands of Indian red on the horizon avhere the great stars burned like street lamps. From time to time a greenish wave of the northern lights would roll across the hollow of the high heavens, flick like a flag and disappear; or a meteor would crackie from darkness to dark- ness, trailing a shower of sparks behind. Then they could see the ridged and furrowed surface of the floe tipped and laced with strange colors—red, copper and bluish; but in the ordinary starlight everything turned to one frostbitten gray. CHAPTER III. The floe, as you will remember, had been battered and tormented by the autumn gales till It was one frozen earthquake. ‘here were gullies and ravines, and holes like gravel pits cut out of ice, lumps and scatter- ed pieces frozen down to the original floor of the floe; blotches of old black ice that had been thrust under the floe in some gaie and heaved up again; roundish bowlders of ice; saw-like edges of ice carved by the snow that flies before the wind, and sunk pits where thirty or forty acres lay five or six feet be- low the level of the rest of the field. From a little distance you might have taken the lumps for seal or walrus, overturned sleighs or men on a hunting expedition or even the great ten-legged white Spiritbear himself. but in spite of all these fantastic shapes, all on the very edge of starting into life, there was neither sound nor the least faint echo of scund. And through this silence and through this waste where the sudden lights flopped and went out again the sleigh ond the two that pulled it crawled like things in a nightmare—a nightmare of the end of the pond at ee end of the world. en 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. Wren they had slept, the march began again—thirty miles a day to get ten miles nerthward. The girl was always very silent. Lut Kotuko muttered to himself and breke out inta 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 weuld run wildly up a hummock tossing his arms and speaking to some one in loud, threatening tones. To tell the truth, Ko- tuko 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 rf come right. She was not surprised, theréfore, when, at the end of the fourth mardh, Kotuko, whose eyes were burning Hike /fire balls in his head, told her that his) tornaq was following them across the show in the shape of a two-headed dogs; Ghe girl looked where Kotuko pointed aif something seemed to slip into a ravige. It was certainly not hu- man, but everyhods: knew that the tornait preferred to appear in the shape of bear and seal, and such like. It might havé’been the ten-legged white Spiritbear himself, -or it might have been anything, for Kotuko and the girl were so starved that their eyes betrayed them. They had trapped nothing and seen no trace of game since they had left the vil- lage; thelr food would not hold out for another week, and there was a gale com- irg. A polar storm will sometimes blow for ten days without break, and all that time it is certain death to be abroad. Kotuko laid up a snowhouse large enough to take in the hand sleigh—it is never wise to be separated from your meat—and while he was shaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the keystone 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 in- stead of crying aloud with terror, said “That is Quiquern. What comes the snow knife trembled in his hand as he spoke, because, however much a man may believe that he is a friend of strange and ugly spirits, he seldom likes to be taken at his word. The Quiquern, too, is the phan- tom of a gigantic toothless dog without any hair who is supposed to live in the far north and to wander about the country just before things are going to happen. They may be pleasant or unpleasant things, but not even the angekok care to speak about Quiquern. He makes the dogs go mad. Like Spiritbear, he has several extra pairs of legs—six or eight—and this thing jump- ing up and down in the haze had more legs than any real dog needs. Kotuko and the girl huddled into their but quickly. Of course, if Quiquern had wanted them he could have torn it to pieces above their heads, but the sense of a foot- thick snow wall between themselves and the wicked dark was a great comfort. The gale broke with a shriek of wind caught in the jagged ice, like the shriek of a train, and for three days and three nights it held, never varying one point and never lulling even for a minute.They fed the stone lamp between their knees and nibbled at the half- warmed seals’ meat, and watched the black soot gather on the roof for seyenty- two hours. The girl counted up the food in the sleigh; there was not more than three days’ supply, and Kotuko looked over the iron heads and the deer sinew fasten- ings of his harpoon and his sealhook and his birddart. There was nothing else to do. “We shall go to Sedna soon—very soon,” the girl whispered. “In four days we shall lie down and go. Will your tornaq do noth- ing? Sing her an angekok’s song to make her come here.” He began to sing in the high-pitched howl of the magic songs, and the gale went down slowly. In the middle of his song the girl started, laid her mittened hand and then her head to the ice flcor of the hut. Kotuko followed her example, and the two kreeled staring into each other's eyes and listening with every nerve. He ripped a thin sliver of whalebone frem the rim of a bird snare thai lay on the sleigh, and after straightening it set it up upright in a little hole in the ice, firming it down with his mitten. It was almost as delicately ad- justed as a compass needie, and now in- stead of listening they watched. The thin rod quivered a little—the least little jar in the world—then it vibrated steadily for @ few seconds, came to rest and vibrated again, this time nodding to another point ot the compass. “Toc soo7!” said Kotuko. ‘Some big floe kas broken far away outside.” The girl pointed at the rod and shook her head. “It is breaking,” she said, ‘Listen to the ground ice. It knecks.” When they kneeled this time they heard the most curious muffled grunis and kiock- ings under their feet. Sometimes it sound- ed as though a blind puppy were squeak- ing above the lamp; then as if a stone were being ground on hard ice; and again like muffled blows on a drum, but all dragged out and mate small, as though they trav- eled through a little horn a weary distance away. “We shall rot go to Sedra lying down,” said Kotuko. “It is a breaking. The tor- naq kas cheated us. We shall die.” All this may scund absurd enough, but “That is Quiquern.” the two were face to face with a very real danger. The three days’ gale had driven the deep water of Baffin's bay southerly and piled it on the edge of the far-reaching land ice that stretches from Bylot’s {sland to the west. Also the strong current which sets out of Lancaster sound carried with it miles and miles of what they call pack ice, rough ice that has not frozen into fields: and this pack was bombarding the fice at the seme time that the swell and heave of the storm-worked sea was weakening and underminivg it. Whet Kotuko and the girl had been listening to were the faint echoes of that fight thirty or forty miles away, while the ifile rod quivered to the shock of it. Now, as the Inuit say, when the ice once wakes after its long winter sleep there is no knowing what may happen, for solid floe ice changes shape as swiftly as a cloud. The gale was evidently a spring gale sent out of time, and anything was possible. Yet the two were happier in their minds than before. If the floe broke up there would be no more waiting and suffering. Spirits, goblins and witch people were mov- ing about on the racking ice, and they might find themselves stepping into Sedna’s country side by side with all sorts of wild things, the flush of excitement still on them. When they left the hut after the gale the ncise on the horizon was steadily growing, and the tough ice moaned and buzzed al! around them. “Is it still waiting?” said Kotuko. CHAPTER Iv. On the top of a hummcck sat or crouched the eight-legged thing that they had seen three days before, and {t howled horribly. “Let us follow,” said the girl. “It may know some way that dces not lead to Sed- na,” but she reeled from weakness as she took the pulling rope. The thing moved off slowly and clumsily across the ridges, heading always toward the westward and the land, and they followed while the growling thunder at the edge of the fice rolled nearer and nearer. The foe's lip was split and cracked in every direction for three or four miles inland, and great pans of ten-foot thick ice, from a few yards to twenty acres square, were jolting and ducking and surging into one another and into the yet unbroken floe as the heavy swell took and shook and spouted between them. The battering-ram ice was, so to speak, the first army that the sea was flinging against the floe. The incessant erash and jar cf these cakes almost drowned the ripping sound of sheets of pack ice being driven bodily under the floe as cards are hastily pushed under a table cloth. Where the water was shallow these sheets would be piled one atop of another till the bottommost touched mud fifty feet down and the discolored sea banked behind the muddy ice till the increasing pressure drove all forward again. The many shal- lows and sand banks on the northeast coast of Bylot’s Island made it impossible io foretell the course of the rushing ice. For instance, in addition to the floe and the pack ice, the gale and the currents were bringing down true bergs, sailing mountains of ice, snapped off by the frost from the Greenland side of the water or the north shore of Mel- ville bay. They pounded in solemnly from the offing, the waves breaking white round them, and advanced on the floe like an old- Yellow and Black Together. time fleet under full sail. But a berg that seemed ready to carry the world before it would ground helplessly in deep water, reel over and wallow in a lather of foam and mud and fiying frozen spray, while a much smaller and lower berg would rip and ride into the flat ice,flinging tons of ice on elther side and cutting a track a mile long before it was stopped. The bergs were perhaps the most terrible things to watch, because there was no saying how or where their towers and pinnacles would fall after the sheck of collision. Some fell like swords, shearing a raw-edged canal through tke floe; and others, falling on hard ice, could not break through it but splintered into a shower of blocks weighing scores of tons apiece that whirled and circled among the hummocks. Others again rose up bodily out of the water when they shoaled, twisted as though in pain and fell solidly on their sides, while the sea thrashed over their shoulders. This tramp- Ing and crowding and bending and buck- ling and arching of the ice into every possi- ble shape was going on as far as the eve could reach all along the north line of the floe. From where Kotuko and the girl were the confusion looked no more than an un- easy, rippling, crawling movement under the horizon, but it came toward them each mo- ment, and they could hear far away to the landward a heavy booming, as it might have been the boom of artillery through a fog. The Return. That showed that the floe was being jammed “against the iron cliffs of Bylot’s Island, the land to the southward, behind them. “This has never been before,” said Kotuko, staring stupdly. “This is not the time. How can the floe break now?” “Follow that!” the girl cried, pointing to the thing, half limping, half ruaning, dis- tractedly before them. They followed, tug- ging at the hand sleigh, while nearer and nearer came the roaring march of the ice. At last the fields round them cracked and started in every direction, and the cracks opened and snapped like the ieeth of wolves. But where the thing rested on a mound of old and seattered ice bocks some fifty feet high there was no motion. Kotuko leaped forward wildly, dragged the girl after him, and crawled to the top cf the ingund. The talking of the ice grew louder and louder round them, but the mound stayed fast, and as th rl 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 of 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, drifting 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 plowshare turns over loam. There was a 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 crack and hammer ard skid along the beach. The thing had disappeared, and Kotuko was talking excitedly about his knowledge of and power over spirits as he crouched over the lamp. In the middle of his wild say- ings the girl began to laugh and rock her- self backward and forward. Behind her shoulder, crawling into the hut crawl by erawl, there were two heads —one yellow and one black—that belonged to two of the most sorrowful and ashamed dogs that you ever 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 extraordi- nary fashion. When the black leader ran off, you remember, his harness was still on him. He must have met Kotuko 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 dog could get at the trace to gnaw it apart, but was fastened sidelong to his meighbor’s neck. The girl pushed the two shamefaced crea- tures toward Kotuko, and, sobbing with laughter, cried: ‘That is Quiquern which led us to safe ground. Look at his eight legs and double head. Kotuko cut them free, and they fell into his arms, yellow and black together, try- ing to explain how they had got their senses back again. Kotuko ran a hand down their ribs, which were round and well clothed. ‘They have found food,” he said with a grin. “I do not think we shall g0 to Sedna so soon. My tornag sent these. The sickness has left them.” As soon as they had greeted Kotuko these two, who had been forced to sleep and eat and hunt together for the past few months, flew at each other’s throats, and there was a_beautiful battle in the snow house. “Empty dogs do not fight,” Kotuko said. ‘They have found the seal Let us sleep. We shall find food.” When they waked there was open water on the north beach of the tsland and all the loosened ice had been driven landward. The first sound of the surf is one of the most delightful that the Inuit can hear, for it means that spring is on the road. Ko- tuko and the girl took hands and smiled, for the clear full roar of the surge among the ice reminded them of salmon and rein- deer time and the smell of blossoming ground willows. E as they looked the sea begen to skim over between the float- ing cakes of ice, so intense was the cold, but on the horizon there was a vast red glare that was the light of the sunken sun. It was more like hearing him yawn in his sleep than seeing him rise, and the glare enly lasted for an hour or two, but it marked the turn of the year. Nothing,they felt, could alter that. Kotuko found the dogs fighting over a fresh-killed seal, who was following the fish that a gale always disturbs. He was the first of some twenty or thirty seal that landed on the island in the course of a day, and, till the sea froze hard, there were hundreds of keen black heads rejoicing in the shallow free water and floating about with the floating ice. It was good to eat seal liver again, to fill the lamps_reckle: with blubber and watch the flame blaze three feet in the air, but as soon as the new sea ice formed Ko- tuko and the girl loaded the hand sleigh and made the two dogs pull as they had never pulled before in their lives, for they feared what might have happened in their Mage. The weather, of course, was as pitiless as usual, but it is easier to draw a sleigh loaded with good food than to hunt starving. They left five and twenty seal carcasses buried in the ice of the beach all ready for vse and hurried back to their people. The dogs showed them the way as soon as Kotuko told them what was ex- pected, and, though there was no sign of a landmark, in two days they were giving tengue outside Kadlu’s house. Only three dogs answered them; the others had been eaten; and the houses were all dark. But when Kotuko shouted: “Ojo!” (boiled meat) weak voices answered, and when he called the call of the village name by name, very distinctly, there were-no gaps in it. An heur later the lamps blazed in Kadlu’s house, snow water was melting, the pots were beginning to simmer and the snow was drifting from the roof as Amoraq made ready a meal for all the village, and the boy baby in the hood chewed at a strip of rich nutty blubber and the hunters slowly and methodically filled themselves to the very brim with seal meat. Kotuko and the girl told their tale. The two dogs sat be- tween them, and whenever their names came in they cocked an ear apiece and looked most thoroughly ashamed of them- selves. A dog who has once gone mad, the Inuit say, is safe against all attacks. “So the tornaq did not forget us,” said Kotuko. “The storm blew; the ice broke and the seal swam in, behind the fish that were frightened by the storm. Now the new seal holes are not two days’ distant. Let the good hunters go tomorrow and bring back the seal I have spared—twenty- five seal buried in the Ice. When we have eaten those we will all follow the seal on the. floe.”” “What do you do?” said the angekok, the sorcerer, in the same sort of voice. as he used ty Kadlu, the richest of the Tununir- miut. Kadlu iooked at the girl from the north and sald, quietly: ‘“‘We build a house.” He pointed to the northwest side of Kadlu’s house, for that is the side on which the married son or daughter always lives. The girl turned her hands palm upward A Sudden Change, HE giving way of summer to winter is often very quickly : done, and unfortunately the giv- ing way of the human beings by this. change is often as sudden and sad. But when you stop to think, why should it not be so? The pores of the skin are open, the muscles are relaxed, the thermometer falls, the winds blow, the pores are closed and the body becomes chilled, and then you are sick. Now do you ever stop to think that all this work is thrown back upon—-what? The kidneys, nothing else. When the skin does not throw off the waste of the body by perspiration, the kidneys must do it, and too oftén they cannot stand the sudden strain. You know, if you are well read and in touch with the times, that there is but one cure for any kidney diffi- culty, but one means of preserving the kidneys in health, and that is Warner's Safe Cure. So wonderful have been its results, so much has it accomplished, that physicians, scientists and the best informed peo- ple, both men and women, through- out the world have admitted it. If you are suffering from any form of chill, pains in the muscles, lack of appetite, headache, or the many ills which come at this special season, you should not delay a moment, and you are foolish if you continue to suffer when you can so readily ob- tain relief. 026 with a little despairing shake of her head. She was a foreigner, picked up starving, and she could bring nothing to the house- keeping. Amoraq jumped from the bench where she sat and began to sweep things into the girl’s lap—stone lamps, iron skin scrapers, Un kettles, deerskins embroidered with musk ox teeth, and real canvas needles such as sailors use—the finest dowry that has ever been given on the far edge of the Arc- tic circle, and the girl from the north bowed her head down to the very floor. “Also these,” said Kotuko, laughing and singing to the dogs, who thrust their cold muzzles into the girl's face. “Ah,” said the angekok,with an important cough, as though he had been thinking it all over. “As soon as Kotuko left the vil- lage I went to the singing house and sang magic; I sang all the long nights and called upon the spirits of the reindeer. My sing- ing made the gale blow that broke the ice and drew the two dogs toward Kotuko when the ice would have crushed his bones. My song drew the seal in behind the broken ice. My body lay still in the quaggi, but my spirit ran about on the ice and guided Kotuko and the dogs in all the things they did. I did it.” Everybody was very full and sleepy, so no one contradicted; and the angekok help- ed himself to yet another lump of. boiled meat and lay down to sleep with the oth- ers, in the warm, well-lighted, oil-smelling house. oe © 2© © © © © «© Now Kotuko. who drew very well in the Inuit way, scratched pictures of all these adventures on a long flat piece of ivory with a hole at one end. When he and the girl went north to Ellesmere land in the year of the wonderful open winter, he left the picture story with Kadlu, who fost it in the shingle when his dog sleigh broke down one summer on the beach of Lake Netelling at Nikesiring, and there a lake Inuit found it next spring and sold it to a man at Imigen, who was interpreter on a Cumberland sound whaler, and he sold it to Hans Olsen, who was sailor on board a big steamer chat took tourists to the North Cape in Norway. When the tourists’ sea- son was over the steamer ran between Lon- don and Australia, stopping at Ceylon, and there Olsen sold the ivory to an Angalese jeweler who sold imitation cat’s eye sap- phires. I found it under some rubbish in his house at Cq@ombo, and with Hans’ help I translated it from one end to the other. (The End.) en Is Life Worth Living? Yes, yes, we say, our lives are worth All that they cost, whate’er befall, And if the round, unresting earth And these voor, mortal days were all, Faced all the tine by pain and death, "Tis worth our while to draw our breath, If only once we saw the sun March, like a god, across the sky, And only once, when day was done, We watched the fires of sunset die, These hints of other worlds would be Worth all the years to you and me, But once to see the stars at night, And once the roses by the door; To see but once the oceans smite With awfu. strength the quiv’ring shore— These, these alone would make our breath Werth ell the pangs of birth and death, Is life worth living? Dearest eyes, ‘That look to otrs in weal and woe, How would ye flash in pained surprise If false to you we answered **No’ By all that we can know or guess ‘Of earth or heaven, we answer—Yes, ELLEN M. H. GATES, ros Reformed. From the Cinctanati Gazette. The well-dressed gentleman called at the door of the house of the kind-hearted lady. “Two years ago,” began the well-dressed gentleman, “I came to your door as a poor tramp. It is to you that I owe my reforma- tion.” “Me?” said the well-dressed lady. “Yes. Perhaps you have forgotten it, but you gave me a piece of steak. I bit at It. A few more attempts aroused in me vhe slumbering spirit of determination, and I resolved to conquer that steak or die. In three days I conquered it, and the spirit of determination before mentioned had got such a start that it has kept right on, and I want to thank you—” But the kind-hearted lady had slammed the door. She resolved to never aid another tramp, but the next one that comes along will get the usual warm welcome. ——_——e+—____ Putting a Friend on His Feet. From the Brooklyn Eagle. Zigsby—"I have put a friend of mine on his feet three times in the last two years.” Perksby—“That’s nothing. I put a friend of mine on his feet fourteen times last FOR CURES §GROFULA, - BLOOD POISOK. S mE CURES CANCER, ECZEMA, TETTER BLOOD