e enough to take in the
hand-sleigh (never be separated from your meat), and while he was
shaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the key-stone of the
roof, he saw a Thing looking at him from a little cliff of ice half a
mile away. The air was hazy, and the Thing seemed to be forty feet long
and ten feet high, with twenty feet of tail and a shape that quivered
all along the outlines. The girl saw it too, but instead of crying aloud
with terror, said quietly, "That is Quiquern. What comes after?"

"He will speak to me," said Kotuko; but the snow-knife trembled in his
hand as he spoke, because however much a man may believe that he is a
friend of strange and ugly spirits, he seldom likes to be taken quite
at his word. Quiquern, too, is the phantom of a gigantic toothless
dog without any hair, who is supposed to live in the far North, and to
wander about the country just before things are going to happen. They
may be pleasant or unpleasant things, but not even the sorcerers care to
speak about Quiquern. He makes the dogs go mad. Like the Spirit-Bear, he
has several extra pairs of legs,--six or eight,--and this Thing jumping
up and down in the haze had more legs than any real dog needed. Kotuko
and the girl huddled into their hut quickly. Of course if Quiquern had
wanted them, he could have torn it to pieces above their heads, but the
sense of a foot-thick snow-wall between themselves and the wicked dark
was great comfort. The gale broke with a shriek of wind like the shriek
of a train, and for three days and three nights it held, never varying
one point, and never lulling even for a minute. They fed the stone lamp
between their knees, and nibbled at the half-warm seal-meat, and watched
the black soot gather on the roof for seventy-two long hours. The girl
counted up the food in the sleigh; there was not more than two days'
supply, and Kotuko looked over the iron heads and the deer-sinew
fastenings of his harpoon and his seal-lance and his bird-dart. There
was nothing else to do.

"We shall go to Sedna soon--very soon," the girl whispered. "In three
days we shall lie down and go. Will your tornaq do nothing? Sing her an
angekok's song to make her come here."

He began to sing in the high-pitched howl of the magic songs, and the
gale went down slowly. In the middle of his song the girl started, laid
her mittened hand and then her head to the ice floor of the hut. Kotuko
followed her example, and the two kneeled,