`` Ah ! '' said Kotuko , coiling up the lash , `` I have a little one over the lamp that will make a great many howlings . SARPOK ! Get in ! '' He crawled back over the huddled dogs , dusted the dry snow from his furs with the whalebone beater that Amoraq kept by the door , tapped the skin-lined roof of the house to shake off any icicles that might have fallen from the dome of snow above , and curled up on the bench . The dogs in the passage snored and whined in their sleep , the boy-baby in Amoraq 's deep fur hood kicked and choked and gurgled , and the mother of the newly-named puppy lay at Kotuko 's side , her eyes fixed on the bundle of sealskin , warm and safe above the broad yellow flame of the lamp . And all this happened far away to the north , beyond Labrador , beyond Hudson 's Strait , where the great tides heave the ice about , north of Melville Peninsula -- north even of the narrow Fury and Hecla Straits -- on the north shore of Baffin Land , where Bylot 's Island stands above the ice of Lancaster Sound like a pudding-bowl wrong side up . North of Lancaster Sound there is little we know anything about , except North Devon and Ellesmere Land ; but even there live a few scattered people , next door , as it were , to the very Pole . Kadlu was an Inuit , -- what you call an Esquimau , -- and his tribe , some thirty persons all told , belonged to the Tununirmiut -- `` the country lying at the back of something . '' In the maps that desolate coast is written Navy Board Inlet , but the Inuit name is best , because the country lies at the very back of everything in the world . For nine months of the year there is only ice and snow , and gale after gale , with a cold that no one can realise who has never seen the thermometer even at zero . For six months of those nine it is dark ; and that is what makes it so horrible . In the three months of the summer it only freezes every other day and every night , and then the snow begins to weep off on the southerly slopes , and a few ground-willows put out their woolly buds , a tiny stonecrop or so makes believe to blossom , beaches of fine gravel and rounded stones run down to the open sea , and polished boulders and streaked rocks lift up above the granulated snow . But all that is gone in a few weeks , and the wild winter locks down again on the land ; while at sea the ice tears up and down the offing , jamming and ramming , and splitting and hitting , and pounding and grounding , till it all freezes together , ten feet thick , from the land outward to deep water . In the winter Kadlu would follow the seal to the edge of this land-ice , and spear them as they came up to breathe at their blow-holes . The seal must have open water to live and catch fish in , and in the deep of winter the ice would sometimes run eighty miles without a break from the nearest shore . In the spring he and his people retreated from the floes to the rocky mainland , where they put up tents of skins , and snared the sea-birds , or speared the young seal basking on the beaches . Later , they would go south into Baffin Land after the reindeer , and to get their year 's store of salmon from the hundreds of streams and lakes of the interior ; coming back north in September or October for the musk-ox hunting and the regular winter sealery . This travelling was done with dog-sleighs , twenty and thirty miles a day , or sometimes down the coast in big skin `` woman-boats , '' when the dogs and the babies lay among the feet of the rowers , and the women sang songs as they glided from cape to cape over the glassy , cold waters . All the luxuries that the Tununirmiut knew came from the south -- driftwood for sleigh-runners , rod-iron for harpoon-tips , steel knives , tin kettles that cooked food much better than the old soap-stone affairs , flint and steel , and even matches , as well as coloured ribbons for the women 's hair , little cheap mirrors , and red cloth for the edging of deerskin dress-jackets .
XXXXX traded the rich , creamy , twisted narwhal horn and musk-ox teeth -LRB- these are just as valuable as pearls -RRB- to the Southern Inuit , and they , in turn , traded with the whalers and the missionary-posts of Exeter and Cumberland Sounds ; and so the chain went on , till a kettle picked up by a ship 's cook in the Bhendy Bazaar might end its days over a blubber-lamp somewhere on the cool side of the Arctic Circle .
Esquimau Inlet Kadlu dog-sleighs kettles night pudding-bowl soap-stone stonecrop woman-boats