gain on the land; while
at sea the 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 seal to the edge of this land-ice,
and spear them as they came up to breathe at their blow-holes. The
seal must have open water to live and catch fish in, and in the deep of
winter the ice would sometimes run eighty miles without a break from the
nearest shore. In the spring he and his people retreated from the floes
to the rocky mainland, where they put up tents of skins, and snared the
sea-birds, or speared the young seal basking on the beaches. Later, they
would go south into Baffin Land after the reindeer, and to get their
year's store of salmon from the hundreds of streams and lakes of the
interior; coming back north in September or October for the musk-ox
hunting and the regular winter sealery. This travelling was done with
dog-sleighs, twenty and 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 rowers, and the women sang songs as they glided from cape to
cape over the glassy, cold waters. All the luxuries that the Tununirmiut
knew came from the south--driftwood for sleigh-runners, rod-iron for
harpoon-tips, steel knives, tin kettles that cooked food much better
than the old soap-stone affairs, flint and steel, and even matches, as
well as coloured 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 on, till a kettle picked up by a ship's
cook in the Bhendy Bazaar 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 the 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, fa