`` My house is your house , '' said Kotuko ; `` but I think that we shall both go to Sedna together . '' Now Sedna is the Mistress of the Underworld , and the Inuit believe that every one who dies must spend a year in her horrible country before going to Quadliparmiut , the Happy Place , where it never freezes and the fat reindeer trot up when you call . Through the village people were shouting : `` The tornait have spoken to Kotuko . They will show him open ice . He will bring us the seal again ! '' Their voices were soon swallowed up by the cold , empty dark , and Kotuko and the girl shouldered close together as they strained on the pulling-rope or humoured the sleigh through the ice in the direction of the Polar Sea . Kotuko insisted that the tornaq of the stone had told him to go north , and north they went under Tuktuqdjung the Reindeer -- those stars that we call the Great Bear . No European could have made five miles a day over the ice-rubbish and the sharp-edged drifts ; but those two knew exactly the turn of the wrist that coaxes a sleigh round a hummock , the jerk that nearly lifts it out of an ice-crack , and the exact strength that goes to the few quiet strokes of the spear-head that make a path possible when everything looks hopeless . The girl said nothing , but bowed her head , and the long wolverine-fur fringe of her ermine hood blew across her broad , dark face . The sky above them was an intense velvety black , changing to bands of Indian red on the horizon , where the great stars burned like street-lamps . From time to time a greenish wave of the Northern Lights would roll across the hollow of the high heavens , flick like a flag , and disappear ; or a meteor would crackle from darkness to darkness , trailing a shower of sparks behind . Then they could see the ridged and furrowed surface of the floe tipped and laced with strange colours -- red , copper , and bluish ; but in the ordinary starlight everything turned to one frost-bitten gray . The floe , as you will remember , had been battered and tormented by the autumn gales till it was one frozen earthquake . There were gullies and ravines , and holes like gravel-pits , cut in ice ; lumps and scattered pieces frozen down to the original floor of the floe ; blotches of old black ice that had been thrust under the floe in some gale and heaved up again ; roundish boulders of ice ; saw-like edges of ice carved by the snow that flies before the wind ; and sunken pits where thirty or forty acres lay below the level of the rest of the field . From a little distance you might have taken the lumps for seal or walrus , overturned sleighs or men on a hunting expedition , or even the great Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear himself ; but in spite of these fantastic shapes , all on the very edge of starting into life , there was neither sound nor the least faint echo of sound . And through this silence and through this waste , where the sudden lights flapped and went out again , the sleigh and the two that pulled it crawled like things in a nightmare -- a nightmare of the end of the world at the end of the world . When they were tired Kotuko would make what the hunters call a `` half-house , '' a very small snow hut , into which they would huddle with the travelling-lamp , and try to thaw out the frozen seal-meat . When they had slept , the march began again -- thirty miles a day to get ten miles northward . The girl was always very silent , but Kotuko muttered to himself and broke out into songs he had learned in the Singing-House -- summer songs , and reindeer and salmon songs -- all horribly out of place at that season . He would declare that he heard the tornaq growling to him , and would run wildly up a hummock , tossing his arms and speaking in loud , threatening tones .
To tell the truth , XXXXX was very nearly crazy for the time being ; but the girl was sure that he was being guided by his guardian spirit , and that everything would come right .
Kotuko Lights Place blotches ermine sleighs spear-head tornait travelling-lamp wolverine-fur