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 tornaq of the stone speaking to him . Before he reached home he was quite certain that he had held a long conversation with her , and as all his people believed that this was quite possible , no one contradicted him . `` She said to me , ' I jump down , I jump down from my place on the snow , ' '' cried Kotuko , with hollow eyes , leaning forward in the half-lighted hut . `` She said , ' I will be a guide . ' She said , ' I will guide you to the good seal-holes . ' To-morrow I go out , and the tornaq will guide me . ''
Then the angekok , the village sorcerer , came in , and XXXXX told him the tale a second time .
Inuit Kotuko day days ghost-tales ice-cliff inua pitu reindeer-track wild-fire