The people must die . An Inuit does not think of these chances till he is forced to . Kadlu , Kotuko , Amoraq , and the boy-baby who kicked about in Amoraq 's fur hood and chewed pieces of blubber all day , were as happy together as any family in the world . They came of a very gentle race -- an Inuit seldom loses his temper , and almost never strikes a child -- who did not know exactly what telling a real lie meant , still less how to steal . They were content to spear their living out of the heart of the bitter , hopeless cold ; to smile oily smiles , and tell queer ghost and fairy tales of evenings , and eat till they could eat no more , and sing the endless woman 's song : `` Amna aya , aya amna , ah ! ah ! '' through the long lamp-lighted days as they mended their clothes and their hunting-gear . But one terrible winter everything betrayed them . The Tununirmiut returned from the yearly salmon-fishing , and made their houses on the early ice to the north of Bylot 's Island , ready to go after the seal as soon as the sea froze . But it was an early and savage autumn . All through September there were continuous gales that broke up the smooth seal-ice when it was only four or five feet thick , and forced it inland , and piled a great barrier , some twenty miles broad , of lumped and ragged and needly ice , over which it was impossible to draw the dog-sleighs . The edge of the floe off which the seal were used to fish in winter lay perhaps twenty miles beyond this barrier , and out of reach of the Tununirmiut . 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 .
XXXXX 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 .
Ellesmere Kadlu Kotuko amna days evenings gales musk-ox skin-tent sleighs