"Your house is my house," she said, as the little bone-shod sleigh
squeaked and bumped behind them in the awful Arctic night.

"My house is your house," said Kotuko; "but I think that we shall both
go to Sedna together."

Now Sedna is the Mistress of the Underworld, and the Inuit believe that
every one who dies must spend a year in her horrible country before
going to Quadliparmiut, the Happy Place, where it never freezes and the
fat reindeer trot up when you call.

Through the village people were shouting: "The tornait have spoken to
Kotuko. They will show him open ice. He will bring us the seal again!"
Their voices were soon swallowed up by the cold, empty dark, and
Kotuko and the girl shouldered close together as they strained on the
pulling-rope or humoured the sleigh through the ice in the direction of
the Polar Sea. Kotuko insisted that the tornaq of the stone had told him
to go north, and north they went under Tuktuqdjung the Reindeer--those
stars that we call the Great Bear.

No European could have made five miles a day over the ice-rubbish and
the sharp-edged drifts; but those two knew exactly the turn of the wrist
that coaxes a sleigh round a hummock, the jerk that nearly lifts it
out of an ice-crack, and the exact strength that goes to the few quiet
strokes of the spear-head that make a path possible when everything
looks hopeless.

The girl said nothing, but bowed her head, and the long wolverine-fur
fringe of her ermine hood blew across her broad, dark face. The sky
above them was an intense velvety black, changing to bands of Indian
red on the horizon, where the great stars burned like street-lamps. From
time to time a greenish wave of the Northern Lights would roll across
the hollow of the high heavens, flick like a flag, and disappear; or
a meteor would crackle from darkness to darkness, trailing a shower of
sparks behind. Then they could see the ridged and furrowed surface of
the floe tipped and laced with strange colours--red, copper, and bluish;
but in the ordinary starlight everything turned to one frost-bitten
gray. The floe, as you will remember, had been battered and tormented by
the autumn gales till it was one frozen earthquake. There were gullies
and ravines, and holes like gravel-pits, cut in ice; lumps and scattered
pieces frozen down to the original floor of the floe; blotches of old
black ice that had been thrust under the floe in some gale and heaved
up again; roundish boulders of