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Updated: September 27, 2025
Snapping their whips and frantically urging the dogs, they fought through the snow-driven darkness and over the moving field of ice. Annadoah murmured wild and incoherent things in her delirium. They paced off half a mile. "Aulate!" Ootah suddenly called, panic-stricken. "Halt! halt!" Maisanguaq stopped the dogs.
Did they not kill one Otaq, who hated Sipsu? Did Sipsu not go unto the lower land of the dead did he not speak to those who freeze in the dark? Yea, did Sipsu not learn how the world is kept up, and the souls of nature are bound together? And hath he not the power to separate them, yea, as a man from his shadow?" "Thou evil-tongued wretch, well doth Maisanguaq believe thee!
At times they reached, in their frightful struggle, the very edge of the floe, and seemed about to tumble into the seething sea. Ootah felt Maisanguaq trying to force him into the watery abyss but he fought backward . . . time and time again . . . They constantly fell over the unconscious woman on the sledge. About them the darkness roared; they felt the heaving sea beneath them.
May the wrath of the spirits descend upon him!" Sipsu uttered short howls. Maisanguaq joined in the incantation, and re-echoed the blighting curses. May they end not! May he lie awake forever! May he never sleep! May his teeth chatter during the great dark!" Sipsu groaned. He worked himself into an ecstasy of torture. His form became a black whirling figure in the dim tent.
She made an irrelevant reply about the women who called upon the spirits and their terrible maledictions. With Maisanguaq ahead driving the dogs, they turned to the south. Annadoah sank helpless in Ootah's arms she could no longer walk. Ootah supported her. At times his feet slipped. He felt himself becoming dizzy. The beloved burden in his arms became unsupportably heavy.
He held his knotty hands motionless over the flame of his lamp. His nails were long and curled like sharp talons. As Maisanguaq saw him he could not repress a shudder. Sipsu was feared, and as correspondingly hated, by the tribe. They brought to him, it is true, offerings of musk ox meat and walrus blubber when members fell ill. But that was the urge of necessity.
On all sides the inky waves seethed up among the crevices of the sundering floes. To the south Ootah heard the breakers booming against the ice cliffs, which perilously barred the currents of the angry sea. The caps of the curling waves took on a pale white and appalling luminesence. "The faces of the dead!" cried Maisanguaq in superstitious terror.
He learned that two of his companions had gone to join Maisanguaq. The first party had safely reached the shore before the breaking away of the ice. The news of Ootah's arrival brought out the women. When they saw Annadoah they crowded about her, scolding. Ootah silenced the garrulous throng with a fierce command. They shrank away. "She came to me on the ice," he said.
To Ootah this was a good augury for when a maiden turns her back upon a suitor she thinks favorably of him. This is the custom. Ootah felt a new strength in his veins. He felt himself master of all the prey in the sea. At the entrance of the tent of Sipsu, the angakoq, or native magician, stood Maisanguaq, one of the rivals for the hand of Annadoah.
Maisanguaq, caught by the evil contagion, began to sway his body in rhythm to the weird dance. "May Ootah become a cripple! May he break his bones! May he lie helpless for years! May his shadow leave him! May he suffer with the greatest of all pains!"
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