t 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 polished boulders and
streaked rocks lift up above the granulated snow. But all that is gone
in a few weeks, and the wild winter locks down a