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All thy days shall be as the long night, and thy whole life shall be without any light of moon. But thy heart is warm and bright as the sun in the south, whence Olafaksoah came, and it makes the heart of Annadoah very warm. Poor . . . Little . . . Blind Spring Bunting!" Murmuring softly she rocked the little baby gently in her arms.
Moreover, she knew the women hated her; and that they had succeeded in making the men gradually bitter. "Olafaksoah! Olafaksoah!" she called tragically. Then she recalled with a start that Olafaksoah had summer headquarters some twenty miles to the south. It was a boxhouse, built on a promontory of the Greenland coast.
A number of the white men began dickering down the line with Arnaluk. "Load blubber one tin cup box black powder." Arnaluk shook his head. Olafaksoah cuffed him with his fist. The timid native did not have the courage to resent this brutality. "What d'ye want, you greedy savage two boxes matches!" "Two boxes matches one box shooting fire one tin cup."
Even as the ravens in their winter shelter dream of the summer sun, so my soul grows warm, in all my loneliness, in the memory of Olafaksoah." Ootah groaned with an access of misery. Frenziedly he caught her hands and pressed them. Annadoah struggled. His words beat hotly in her ears: "But I want thee. My blood burns at the thought of thee.
He heard Olafaksoah as he entered Annadoah's tent laughing heartily. The thought of Annadoah in the embrace of the big blond man, of her face pressed to his in the white men's strange kiss of abomination, aroused in Ootah a sense of violation, an instinctive repugnance akin to the horror a native feels for the dead.
Her lips framed an inaudible word: "Olafaksoah . . . Olafaksoah . . ." She opened her eyes. The smile faded. "Thou . . . ?" she said. "Yea, Annadoah, I have brought thee food," Ootah said. It was his last. "I hunger," she breathed. "It is very cold . . . I was in the south . . . where the sun is warm . . . it is very cold here." Eagerly he pressed her hands.
He dwelt for hours upon her stunning rejection, of how she clung to the white man; he visioned with heart corroding bitterness her days with Olafaksoah, and he burned with unnameable anguished pangs as he conjured her nights. Now, the violence of his grief exhausted, he invoked death. Expectant, fearful, with closed eyes, he waited.
When they demanded more biscuits, tobacco or matches than were offered, Olafaksoah bullied them with threats. Yet they hung about him, eager for the almost worthless barter, for the time being valuing a box of crackers and allotments of tea more than their substantial supply of walrus meat. Finally the leader paused before Ootah's loaded sledges. "What'll you take a gun, fire-powder?"
"Olafaksoah," she murmured again, with delight then, recalling herself, suddenly uttered a sharp cry of dismay as she opened her eyes. Ootah staggered to his feet. The utter tragedy of her devotion to the man who had deserted her, the utter hopelessness of his own deep passion blightingly, horribly forced itself upon him. "Annadoah! Annadoah!
With self-reproach she told of her old longing for Olafaksoah, the blond man from the south, whose grim, fierce face had cowed her, yet whose brutality had thrilled her, to whose beast-strength and to whose beast-passion all that was feminine in her had surrendered itself. But he had left her he said that he would come back in the spring. Now, she knew he would not come back and she did not care.
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