Each beast was called by name , the weakest first , and woe betide any dog that moved out of his turn ; for the tapering lash would shoot out like thonged lightning , and flick away an inch or so of hair and hide . Each beast growled , snapped , choked once over his portion , and hurried back to the protection of the passage , while the boy stood upon the snow under the blazing Northern Lights and dealt out justice . The last to be served was the big black leader of the team , who kept order when the dogs were harnessed ; and to him Kotuko gave a double allowance of meat as well as an extra crack of the whip . `` Ah ! '' said Kotuko , coiling up the lash , `` I have a little one over the lamp that will make a great many howlings . SARPOK ! Get in ! '' He crawled back over the huddled dogs , dusted the dry snow from his furs with the whalebone beater that Amoraq kept by the door , tapped the skin-lined roof of the house to shake off any icicles that might have fallen from the dome of snow above , and curled up on the bench . The dogs in the passage snored and whined in their sleep , the boy-baby in Amoraq 's deep fur hood kicked and choked and gurgled , and the mother of the newly-named puppy lay at Kotuko 's side , her eyes fixed on the bundle of sealskin , warm and safe above the broad yellow flame of the lamp . And all this happened far away to the north , beyond Labrador , beyond Hudson 's Strait , where the great tides heave the ice about , north of Melville Peninsula -- north even of the narrow Fury and Hecla Straits -- on the north shore of Baffin Land , where Bylot 's Island stands above the ice of Lancaster Sound like a pudding-bowl wrong side up . North of Lancaster Sound there is little we know anything about , except North Devon and Ellesmere Land ; but even there live a few scattered people , next door , as it were , to the very Pole . Kadlu was an Inuit , -- what you call an Esquimau , -- and his tribe , some thirty persons all told , belonged to the Tununirmiut -- `` the country lying at the back of something . '' In the maps that desolate coast is written Navy Board Inlet , but the Inuit name is best , because the country lies at the very back of everything in the world . For nine months of the year there is only ice and snow , and gale after gale , with a cold that no one can realise who has never seen the thermometer even at zero . For six months of those nine it is dark ; and that is what makes it so horrible . In the three months of the summer it only freezes every other day and every night , and then the snow begins to weep off on the southerly slopes , and a few ground-willows put out their woolly buds , a tiny stonecrop or so makes believe to blossom , beaches of fine gravel and rounded stones run down to the open sea , and polished boulders and streaked rocks lift up above the granulated snow . But all that is gone in a few weeks , and the wild winter locks down again on the land ; while at sea the ice tears up and down the offing , jamming and ramming , and splitting and hitting , and pounding and grounding , till it all freezes together , ten feet thick , from the land outward to deep water . In the winter Kadlu would follow the seal to the edge of this land-ice , and spear them as they came up to breathe at their blow-holes . The seal must have open water to live and catch fish in , and in the deep of winter the ice would sometimes run eighty miles without a break from the nearest shore . In the spring he and his people retreated from the floes to the rocky mainland , where they put up tents of skins , and snared the sea-birds , or speared the young seal basking on the beaches .
Later , they would go south into Baffin XXXXX after the reindeer , and to get their year 's store of salmon from the hundreds of streams and lakes of the interior ; coming back north in September or October for the musk-ox hunting and the regular winter sealery .
Devon Esquimau Island Land Peninsula Pole blow-holes choked icicles pudding-bowl