ng into the bitter wind, night after night. When
they stopped howling the silence fell down again as solid and heavy as a
snowdrift against a door, and men could hear the beating of their blood
in the thin passages of the ear, and the thumping of their own hearts,
that sounded as loud as the noise of sorcerers' drums beaten across
the snow. One night Kotuko the dog, who had been unusually sullen in
harness, leaped up and pushed his head against Kotuko's knee. Kotuko
patted him, but the dog still pushed blindly forward, fawning. Then
Kadlu waked, and gripped the heavy wolf-like head, and stared into the
glassy eyes. The dog whimpered and shivered between Kadlu's knees. The
hair rose about his neck, and he growled as though a stranger were at
the door; then he barked joyously, and rolled on the ground, and bit at
Kotuko'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-harpoon. 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 of a musk-ox, and, barking and leaping and frisking,
passed out of sight. His trouble was not hydrophobia, but simple, plain
madness. The cold and the hunger, and, above all, the dark, had turned
his head; and when the terrible dog-sickness once shows itself in a
team, it spreads like wild-fire. Next hunting-day another dog sickened,
and was killed then and there by Kotuko as he bit and struggled among
the traces. Then the black second dog, who had been the leader in the
old days, suddenly gave tongue on an imaginary reindeer-track, 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 needed them for something
else, and 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 autumn, who prophesied all
sorts of horrible