vast red glare, and that was the light of the sunken sun.
It was more like hearing him yawn in his sleep than seeing him rise, and
the glare lasted for only a few minutes, but it marked the turn of the
year. Nothing, they felt, could alter that.

Kotuko found the dogs fighting over a fresh-killed seal who was
following the fish that a gale always disturbs. He was the first of some
twenty or thirty seal that landed on the island in the course of the
day, and till the sea froze hard there were hundreds of keen black heads
rejoicing in the shallow free water and floating about with the floating
ice.

It was good to eat seal-liver again; to fill the lamps recklessly with
blubber, and watch the flame blaze three feet in the air; but as soon
as the new sea-ice bore, Kotuko and the girl loaded the hand-sleigh, and
made the two dogs pull as they had never pulled in their lives, for they
feared what might have happened in their village. The weather was as
pitiless as usual; but it is easier to draw a sleigh loaded with good
food than to hunt starving. They left five-and-twenty seal carcasses
buried in the ice of the beach, all ready for use, and hurried back to
their people. The dogs showed them the way as soon as Kotuko told them
what was expected, and though there was no sign of a landmark, in two
days they were giving tongue outside Kadlu's house. Only three dogs
answered them; the others had been eaten, and the houses were all dark.
But when Kotuko shouted, "Ojo!" (boiled meat), weak voices replied, and
when he called the muster of the village name by name, very distinctly,
there were no gaps in it.

An hour later the lamps blazed in Kadlu's house; snow-water was heating;
the pots were beginning to simmer, and the snow was dripping from the
roof, as Amoraq made ready a meal for all the village, and the boy-baby
in the hood chewed at a strip of rich nutty blubber, and the hunters
slowly and methodically filled themselves to the very brim with
seal-meat. Kotuko and the girl told their tale. The two dogs sat between
them, and whenever their names came in, they cocked an ear apiece and
looked most thoroughly ashamed of themselves. A dog who has once gone
mad and recovered, the Inuit say, is safe against all further attacks.

"So the tornaq did not forget us," said Kotuko. "The storm blew, the ice
broke, and the seal swam in behind the fish that were frightened by the
storm. Now the new seal-holes are not two days distant. Let