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 . 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 XXXXX 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 .
Amoraq Kotuko Tununirmiut breathing-hole foxes gales harpoon hours salmon-fishing seal-ice