Even so , they might have managed to scrape through the winter on their stock of frozen salmon and stored blubber , and what the traps gave them , but in December one of their hunters came across a tupik -LRB- a skin-tent -RRB- of three women and a girl nearly dead , whose men had come down from the far North and been crushed in their little skin hunting-boats while they were out after the long-horned narwhal . Kadlu , of course , could only distribute the women among the huts of the winter village , for no Inuit dare refuse a meal to a stranger . He never knows when his own turn may come to beg . Amoraq took the girl , who was about fourteen , into her own house as a sort of servant . From the cut of her sharp-pointed hood , and the long diamond pattern of her white deer-skin leggings , they supposed she came from Ellesmere Land . She had never seen tin cooking-pots or wooden-shod sleighs before ; but Kotuko the boy and Kotuko the dog were rather fond of her . Then all the foxes went south , and even the wolverine , that growling , blunt-headed little thief of the snow , did not take the trouble to follow the line of empty traps that Kotuko set . The tribe lost a couple of their best hunters , who were badly crippled in a fight with a musk-ox , and this threw more work on the others . Kotuko went out , day after day , with a light hunting-sleigh and six or seven of the strongest dogs , looking till his eyes ached for some patch of clear ice where a seal might perhaps have scratched a breathing-hole . Kotuko the dog ranged far and wide , and in the dead stillness of the ice-fields Kotuko the boy could hear his half-choked whine of excitement , above a seal-hole three miles away , as plainly as though he were at his elbow . When the dog found a hole the boy would build himself a little , low snow wall to keep off the worst of the bitter wind , and there he would wait ten , twelve , twenty hours for the seal to come up to breathe , his eyes glued to the tiny mark he had made above the hole to guide the downward thrust of his harpoon , a little seal-skin mat under his feet , and his legs tied together in the tutareang -LRB- the buckle that the old hunters had talked about -RRB- . This helps to keep a man 's legs from twitching as he waits and waits and waits for the quick-eared seal to rise . Though there is no excitement in it , you can easily believe that the sitting still in the buckle with the thermometer perhaps forty degrees below zero is the hardest work an Inuit knows . When a seal was caught , Kotuko the dog would bound forward , his trace trailing behind him , and help to pull the body to the sleigh , where the tired and hungry dogs lay sullenly under the lee of the broken ice . A seal did not go very far , for each mouth in the little village had a right to be filled , and neither bone , hide , nor sinew was wasted . The dogs ' meat was taken for human use , and Amoraq fed the team with pieces of old summer skin-tents raked out from under the sleeping-bench , and they howled and howled again , and waked to howl hungrily . One could tell by the soap-stone lamps in the huts that famine was near . In good seasons , when blubber was plentiful , the light in the boat-shaped lamps would be two feet high -- cheerful , oily , and yellow . Now it was a bare six inches : Amoraq carefully pricked down the moss wick , when an unwatched flame brightened for a moment , and the eyes of all the family followed her hand . The horror of famine up there in the great cold is not so much dying , as dying in the dark .
All the XXXXX dread the dark that presses on them without a break for six months in each year ; and when the lamps are low in the houses the minds of people begin to be shaken and confused .
Inuit breathing-hole cooking-pots day harpoon hours right skin-tents sleigh wolverine