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 . Also , the strong current which sets east out of Lancaster Sound carried with it mile upon mile of what they call pack-ice -- rough ice that has not frozen into fields ; and this pack was bombarding the floe at the same time that the swell and heave of the storm-worked sea was weakening and undermining it . What Kotuko and the girl had been listening to were the faint echoes of that fight thirty or forty miles away , and the little tell-tale rod quivered to the shock of it . Now , as the Inuit say , when the ice once wakes after its long winter sleep , there is no knowing what may happen , for solid floe-ice changes shape almost as quickly as a cloud . The gale was evidently a spring gale sent out of time , and anything was possible . Yet the two were happier in their minds than before . If the floe broke up there would be no more waiting and suffering . Spirits , goblins , and witch-people were moving about on the racking ice , and they might find themselves stepping into Sedna 's country side by side with all sorts of wild Things , the flush of excitement still on them . When they left the hut after the gale , the noise on the horizon was steadily growing , and the tough ice moaned and buzzed all round them . `` It is still waiting , '' said Kotuko . On the top of a hummock sat or crouched the eight-legged Thing that they had seen three days before -- and it howled horribly . `` Let us follow , '' said the girl . `` It may know some way that does not lead to Sedna '' ; but she reeled from weakness as she took the pulling-rope . The Thing moved off slowly and clumsily across the ridges , heading always toward the westward and the land , and they followed , while the growling thunder at the edge of the floe rolled nearer and nearer . The floe 's lip was split and cracked in every direction for three or four miles inland , and great pans of ten-foot-thick ice , from a few yards to twenty acres square , were jolting and ducking and surging into one another , and into the yet unbroken floe , as the heavy swell took and shook and spouted between them . This battering-ram ice was , so to speak , the first army that the sea was flinging against the floe . The incessant crash and jar of these cakes almost drowned the ripping sound of sheets of pack-ice driven bodily under the floe as cards are hastily pushed under a tablecloth . Where the water was shallow these sheets would be piled one atop of the other till the bottommost touched mud fifty feet down , and the discoloured sea banked behind the muddy ice till the increasing pressure drove all forward again .
In addition to the floe and the XXXXX , the gale and the currents were bringing down true bergs , sailing mountains of ice , snapped off from the Greenland side of the water or the north shore of Melville Bay .
Baffin Inuit Island Kotuko Sedna bottommost days first pack-ice pulling-rope