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Updated: May 19, 2025
Kotuko cut them free, and they fell into his arms, yellow and black together, trying to explain how they had got their senses back again. Kotuko ran a hand down their ribs, which were round and well clothed. "They have found food," he said, with a grin. "I do not think we shall go to Sedna so soon. My tornaq sent these. The sickness has left them."
"We shall not go to Sedna lying down," said Kotuko. "It is the breaking. The tornaq has cheated us. We shall die." All this may sound absurd enough, but the two were face to face with a very real danger. The three days' gale had driven the deep water of Baffin's Bay southerly, and piled it on to the edge of the far-reaching land-ice that stretches from Bylot's Island to the west.
Their voices were soon swallowed up by the cold, empty dark, and Kotuko and the girl shouldered close together as they strained on the pulling-rope or humoured the sleigh through the ice in the direction of the Polar Sea. Kotuko insisted that the tornaq of the stone had told him to go north, and north they went under Tuktuqdjung the Reindeer those stars that we call the Great Bear.
She was not surprised, therefore, when at the end of the fourth march Kotuko, whose eyes were burning like fire-balls in his head, told her that his tornaq was following them across the snow in the shape of a two-headed dog. The girl looked where Kotuko pointed, and something seemed to slip into a ravine.
The girl counted up the food in the sleigh; there was not more than two days' supply, and Kotuko looked over the iron heads and the deer-sinew fastenings of his harpoon and his seal-lance and his bird-dart. There was nothing else to do. "We shall go to Sedna soon very soon," the girl whispered. "In three days we shall lie down and go. Will your tornaq do nothing?
"She said to me, 'I jump down, I jump down from my place on the snow," cried Kotuko, with hollow eyes, leaning forward in the half-lighted hut. "She said, 'I will be a guide. She said, 'I will guide you to the good seal-holes. To-morrow I go out, and the tornaq will guide me." Then the angekok, the village sorcerer, came in, and Kotuko told him the tale a second time.
The two dogs sat between them, and whenever their names came in, they cocked an ear apiece and looked most thoroughly ashamed of themselves. A dog who has once gone mad and recovered, the Inuit say, is safe against all further attacks. "So the tornaq did not forget us," said Kotuko. "The storm blew, the ice broke, and the seal swam in behind the fish that were frightened by the storm.
The girl was always very silent, but Kotuko muttered to himself and broke out into songs he had learned in the Singing-House summer songs, and reindeer and salmon songs all horribly out of place at that season. He would declare that he heard the tornaq growling to him, and would run wildly up a hummock, tossing his arms and speaking in loud, threatening tones.
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