consent to be his wife, yes, he knew that; but
Annadoah's love--that was another thing. Surely, he now realized, as
he strode along, that by simply giving her food he could not expect to
stir in her heart a response to that which throbbed in his. But why?
Singularly he never thought of the bravery of his seeking food on this
perilous adventure, an act which, had he known it, had indeed touched
the heart of the beautiful maiden.

With the quick atmospheric change of the arctic--a phenomenon common to
zones of extreme temperature--the wind steadily increased in velocity
and warmth. The shallow moon-shot clouds on the ice thickened and
swept softly under the two travellers' feet. Above their waists the
air was clear--they saw each other distinctly in the moonlight. Yet
their dogs, hidden in the low-lying vapor, were invisible. Great
masses of clouds slowly piled along the horizon and the moon was often
obscured. Then the two walked in a darkness so thick it seemed
palpable.

"Hark!" Ootah called, during one of these spells. "What is that?" A
shuddering sound split the air; the ice field on which they travelled
vibrated with an ominous jar. The echoes of splitting ice came like
distant explosions.

"Have we disturbed the spirits of the hills?" asked Koolotah, in a
whisper.

"No, no," answered Ootah, anxiously. "_Huk_! _Huk_!" He snapped his
whip and urged the dogs. They had not gone twenty paces when from the
interior heights of Greenland came a series of muffled explosions.
Undoubtedly the hill spirits had wakened, and, angry, were hurling
their terrible weapons.

They reached, in due course, the top of a mountain ridge down part of
the glassy slopes of which they had to make their way to the entrance
of the cleft in which the trail they had so laboriously hewn lay. The
gorge yawned blackly some five hundred feet below. In anticipation of
their return with loaded sledges, Ootah, on the last reach of their
upland climb, had chopped on the smooth snows of the mountainside a
narrow path that ran backward and forward in the fashion of a gently
inclining elongated spiral. The mountain sloped at an angle of eighty
degrees, but by descending cautiously along this circuitous trail a
safe descent was possible.

While Ootah and his companion stood on the peak, the moon passed behind
a veil of clouds and Ootah felt two soft wraith-like hands pass over
his face--cloud-hands which his simple mind believed we