Ch. 11: Quiquern - Page 2

weakest 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 an inch or so of hair and hide.
Each beast growled, snapped, choked once over his portion,
and hurried back to the protection of the passage, while the boy
stood upon the 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 the dogs were harnessed; and to
him Kotuko gave a double allowance of meat as well as an extra
crack of the whip.

"Ah!" said Kotuko, coiling up the lash," I have a little
one over the lamp that will make a great many howlings. SARPOK!
Get in!"

He crawled back over the huddled dogs, dusted the dry snow from
his furs with the 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 heave the ice
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 little we know anything about, 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 Esquimau,--and his tribe,
some thirty persons all told, belonged to the Tununirmiut--"the
country lying at the back of something." In the maps that
desolate coast is written 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 and
snow, and gale after gale, with a cold that no one can realise
who has never seen the thermometer even at zero. For six months
of those nine it is dark; and that is what makes it so horrible.
In the three months of the summer it only freezes every other
day and every night, and then the snow begins to weep off on the
southerly slopes, and a few ground-willows put out their woolly
buds, a tiny stonecrop or so makes believe to blossom, beaches
of fine gravel and rounded stones run down to the open sea,
and