`` I have not seen this before . What will he do ? '' said Kotuko . Kadlu shrugged one shoulder a little , and crossed the hut for his short stabbing-harpoon . The big dog looked at him , howled again , and slunk away down the passage , while the other dogs drew aside right and left to give him ample room . When he was out on the snow he barked furiously , as though on the trail of a musk-ox , and , barking and leaping and frisking , passed out of sight . His trouble was not hydrophobia , but simple , plain madness . The cold and the hunger , and , above all , the dark , had turned his head ; and when the terrible dog-sickness once shows itself in a team , it spreads like wild-fire . Next hunting-day another dog sickened , and was killed then and there by Kotuko as he bit and struggled among the traces . Then the black second dog , who had been the leader in the old days , suddenly gave tongue on an imaginary reindeer-track , and when they slipped him from the pitu he flew at the throat of an ice-cliff , and ran away as his leader had done , his harness on his back . After that no one would take the dogs out again . They needed them for something else , and the dogs knew it ; and though they were tied down and fed by hand , their eyes were full of despair and fear . To make things worse , the old women began to tell ghost-tales , and to say that they had met the spirits of the dead hunters lost that autumn , who prophesied all sorts of horrible things . Kotuko grieved more for the loss of his dog than anything else ; for though an Inuit eats enormously he also knows how to starve . But the hunger , the darkness , the cold , and the exposure told on his strength , and he began to hear voices inside his head , and to see people who were not there , out of the tail of his eye . One night -- he had unbuckled himself after ten hours ' waiting above a `` blind '' seal-hole , and was staggering back to the village faint and dizzy -- he halted to lean his back against a boulder which happened to be supported like a rocking-stone on a single jutting point of ice . His weight disturbed the balance of the thing , it rolled over ponderously , and as Kotuko sprang aside to avoid it , slid after him , squeaking and hissing on the ice-slope . That was enough for Kotuko . He had been brought up to believe that every rock and boulder had its owner -LRB- its inua -RRB- , who was generally a one-eyed kind of a Woman-Thing called a tornaq , and that when a tornaq meant to help a man she rolled after him inside her stone house , and asked him whether he would take her for a guardian spirit . -LRB- In summer thaws the ice-propped rocks and boulders roll and slip all over the face of the land , so you can easily see how the idea of live stones arose . -RRB-
Kotuko heard the blood beating in his ears as he had heard it all day , and he thought that was the XXXXX of the stone speaking to him .
Kadlu ghost-tales hours inua musk-ox night pitu reindeer-track seal-hole tornaq