the good
hunters go to-morrow and bring back the seal I have speared--twenty-five
seal buried in the ice. When we have eaten those we will all follow the
seal on the floe."

"What do YOU do?" said the sorcerer in the same sort of voice as he used
to Kadlu, richest of the Tununirmiut.

Kadlu looked at the girl from the North, and said quietly, "WE build a
house." He pointed to the north-west side of Kadlu's house, for that is
the side on which the married son or daughter always lives.

The girl turned her hands palm upward, with a little despairing shake
of her head. She was a foreigner, picked up starving, and could bring
nothing to the housekeeping.

Amoraq jumped from the bench where she sat, and began to sweep things
into the girl's lap--stone lamps, iron skin-scrapers, tin kettles,
deer-skins embroidered with musk-ox teeth, and real canvas-needles such
as sailors use--the finest dowry that has ever been given on the far
edge of the Arctic Circle, and the girl from the North bowed her head
down to the very floor.

"Also these!" said Kotuko, laughing and signing to the dogs, who thrust
their cold muzzles into the girl's face.

"Ah," said the angekok, with an important cough, as though he had been
thinking it all over. "As soon as Kotuko left the village I went to the
Singing-House and sang magic. I sang all the long nights, and called
upon the Spirit of the Reindeer. MY singing made the gale blow that
broke the ice and drew the two dogs toward Kotuko when the ice would
have crushed his bones. MY song drew the seal in behind the broken ice.
My body lay still in the quaggi, but my spirit ran about on the ice, and
guided Kotuko and the dogs in all the things they did. I did it."

Everybody was full and sleepy, so no one contradicted; and the angekok,
by virtue of his office, helped himself to yet another lump of boiled
meat, and lay down to sleep with the others in the warm, well-lighted,
oil-smelling home.

*****

Now Kotuko, who drew very well in the Inuit fashion, scratched pictures
of all these adventures on a long, flat piece of ivory with a hole at
one end. When he and the girl went north to Ellesmere Land in the year
of the Wonderful Open Winter, he left the picture-story with Kadlu, who
lost it in the shingle when his dog-sleigh broke down one summer on the
beach of Lake Netilling at Nikosiring, and there a Lake Inuit found
it next spring and sold it to a man at Imigen who was interpreter on a
Cumber