adoah if he
wills with his feet! Io-oh-h!"

She moaned this in a curious sing-song sort of chant. Over the ice the
voices of the other women rose, and each, to her departed relatives and
friends who had died in the sea, told about the important incidents of
the year and the misgivings for the winter, in a varying crooning song.

Annadoah passed Tongiguaq, who jumped and danced in a frenzy of grief.
Tongiguaq had lost three children; two had been drowned, and a new-born
baby, three months before, was born maimed. According to the custom of
the people, a fatherless defective child is doomed to death. So
rigorous is their struggle to survive, so limited the means of
existence, that a tribe cannot bear the burden of a single unnecessary
life. So in keeping with this Lycurgean law, worked out by instinct
after the stern experience of ages, a rope had been twisted about the
neck of Tongiguaq's baby and it had been cast into the sea.

All this the weeping woman told in her chant to the departed. When she
saw Annadoah approaching, she paused.

"Here cometh the she-wolf that hath devoured the food of our tribe,"
she wailed, intense bitterness in her voice. "Yea, by her cajolery she
persuaded our men to give unto the traders from the south our precious
food. And now we starve! Yea, she hath robbed us. She is as the
breath of winter, as the blackness of the night."

Along the line of wailing women Tongiguaq's reproach was suddenly taken
up. As Annadoah walked by them they did a strange thing. The natives
fear their dead--they never even mention their names. For possessed of
great power are the dead, and they can wreak, as befits their moods,
unlimited good or ill. Believing they could persuade the dead to array
themselves against Annadoah, the women took up Tongiguaq's denunciation
and reviled Annadoah in their weird chant to the departed. Annadoah
wrung her hands and wept. Bitter and jealous because the white chief
had selected her during his stay, their bosoms full of the harbored ill
will and envy of years because she had been the most desired by the
young men of the tribes, the women now invoked curses upon the deserted
and unprotected girl through the medium of the incorporeal powers.

The dread of it filled poor Annadoah's heart. She quailed at the
bitter execrations called upon her head. Instinctively her hand
reached through the opening of her _ahttee_ and she clutched at a piece
of old half-decayed