That showed that the floe was being jammed home against the iron cliffs of Bylot 's Island , the land to the southward behind them . `` This has never been before , '' said Kotuko , staring stupidly . `` This is not the time . How can the floe break NOW ? '' `` Follow THAT ! '' the girl cried , pointing to the Thing half limping , half running distractedly before them . They followed , tugging at the hand-sleigh , while nearer and nearer came the roaring march of the ice . At last the fields round them cracked and starred in every direction , and the cracks opened and snapped like the teeth of wolves . But where the Thing rested , on a mound of old and scattered ice-blocks some fifty feet high , there was no motion . Kotuko leaped forward wildly , dragging the girl after him , and crawled to the bottom of the mound . The talking of the ice grew louder and louder round them , but the mound stayed fast , and , as the girl looked at him , he threw his right elbow upward and outward , making the Inuit sign for land in the shape of an island . And land it was that the eight-legged , limping Thing had led them to -- some granite-tipped , sand-beached islet off the coast , shod and sheathed and masked with ice so that no man could have told it from the floe , but at the bottom solid earth , and not shifting ice ! The smashing and rebound of the floes as they grounded and splintered marked the borders of it , and a friendly shoal ran out to the northward , and turned aside the rush of the heaviest ice , exactly as a ploughshare turns over loam . There was danger , of course , that some heavily squeezed ice-field might shoot up the beach , and plane off the top of the islet bodily ; but that did not trouble Kotuko and the girl when they made their snow-house and began to eat , and heard the ice hammer and skid along the beach . The Thing had disappeared , and Kotuko was talking excitedly about his power over spirits as he crouched round the lamp . In the middle of his wild sayings the girl began to laugh , and rock herself backward and forward . Behind her shoulder , crawling into the hut crawl by crawl , there were two heads , one yellow and one black , that belonged to two of the most sorrowful and ashamed dogs that ever you saw . Kotuko the dog was one , and the black leader was the other . Both were now fat , well-looking , and quite restored to their proper minds , but coupled to each other in an extraordinary fashion . When the black leader ran off , you remember , his harness was still on him .
He must have met Kotuko the dog , and played or fought with him , for his shoulder-loop had caught in the plaited copper wire of XXXXX 's collar , and had drawn tight , so that neither could get at the trace to gnaw it apart , but each was fastened sidelong to his neighbour 's neck .
Inuit Island Kotuko hand-sleigh ice-blocks islet loam right shoal snow-house