things.

Kotuko grieved more for the loss of his dog than anything else; for
though an Inuit eats enormously he also knows how 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
staggering back to the village faint and dizzy--he halted to lean
his back against a boulder 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 after him, squeaking and hissing on the
ice-slope.

That was enough for Kotuko. He had been brought up to believe that every
rock and boulder had its owner (its inua), who was generally a one-eyed
kind of a Woman-Thing called a tornaq, and that when a tornaq 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-propped rocks and boulders 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 his ears as he had heard it all day, and
he thought that was the tornaq of the stone speaking to him. Before 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-lighted hut.
"She said, 'I will be a guide.' She said, 'I will guide you to the good
seal-holes.' To-morrow I go out, 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 spirits of the stones], and they will bring us
food again," said 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 blubber and frozen seal-meat as they
could spare, she took the pulling-rope, and stepped out boldly at the
boy's side.