staring into each other's
eyes, and listening with every nerve. He ripped a thin sliver of
whalebone from the rim of a bird-snare that lay on the sleigh, and,
after straightening, set it upright in a little hole in the ice, firming
it down with his mitten. It was almost as delicately adjusted as a
compass-needle, and now instead of listening they watched. The thin rod
quivered a little--the least little jar in the world; then it vibrated
steadily for a few seconds, came to rest, and vibrated again, this time
nodding to another point of the compass.

"Too soon!" said Kotuko. "Some big floe has broken far away outside."

The girl pointed at the rod, and shook her head. "It is the big
breaking," she said. "Listen to the ground-ice. It knocks."

When they kneeled this time they heard the most curious muffled grunts
and knockings, apparently under their feet. Sometimes it sounded as
though a blind puppy were squeaking above the lamp; then as if a stone
were being ground on hard ice; and again, like muffled blows on a drum;
but all dragged out and made small, as though they travelled through a
little horn a weary distance away.

"We shall not go to Sedna lying down," said Kotuko. "It is the breaking.
The tornaq has cheated us. We shall die."

All this may sound absurd enough, but the two were face to face with
a very real danger. The three days' gale had driven the deep water of
Baffin's Bay southerly, and piled it on to the edge of the far-reaching
land-ice that stretches from Bylot's Island to the west. Also, the
strong current which sets east out of Lancaster Sound carried with it
mile upon mile of what they call pack-ice--rough ice that has not frozen
into fields; and this pack was bombarding the floe at the same time
that the swell and heave of the storm-worked sea was weakening and
undermining it. What Kotuko and the girl had been listening to were the
faint echoes of that fight thirty or forty miles away, and the little
tell-tale rod quivered to the shock of it.

Now, as the Inuit say, when the ice once wakes after its long winter
sleep, there is no knowing what may happen, for solid floe-ice changes
shape almost as quickly as a cloud. The gale was evidently a spring gale
sent out of time, and anything was possible.

Yet the two were happier in their minds than before. If the floe broke
up there would be no more waiting and suffering. Spirits, goblins, and
witch-people were moving about on the racking ice, and