Others , again , rose up bodily out of the water when they shoaled , twisted as though in pain , and fell solidly on their sides , while the sea threshed over their shoulders . This trampling and crowding and bending and buckling and arching of the ice into every possible shape was going on as far as the eye could reach all along the north line of the floe . From where Kotuko and the girl were , the confusion looked no more than an uneasy , rippling , crawling movement under the horizon ; but it came toward them each moment , and they could hear , far away to landward a heavy booming , as it might have been the boom of artillery through a fog . That showed that the floe was being jammed home against the iron cliffs of Bylot 's Island , the land to the southward behind them . `` This has never been before , '' said Kotuko , staring stupidly . `` This is not the time . How can the floe break NOW ? '' `` Follow THAT ! '' the girl cried , pointing to the Thing half limping , half running distractedly before them . They followed , tugging at the hand-sleigh , while nearer and nearer came the roaring march of the ice . At last the fields round them cracked and starred in every direction , and the cracks opened and snapped like the teeth of wolves . But where the Thing rested , on a mound of old and scattered ice-blocks some fifty feet high , there was no motion . Kotuko leaped forward wildly , dragging the girl after him , and crawled to the bottom of the mound . The talking of the ice grew louder and louder round them , but the mound stayed fast , and , as the girl looked at him , he threw his right elbow upward and outward , making the Inuit sign for land in the shape of an island . And land it was that the eight-legged , limping Thing had led them to -- some granite-tipped , sand-beached islet off the coast , shod and sheathed and masked with ice so that no man could have told it from the floe , but at the bottom solid earth , and not shifting ice ! The smashing and rebound of the floes as they grounded and splintered marked the borders of it , and a friendly shoal ran out to the northward , and turned aside the rush of the heaviest ice , exactly as a ploughshare turns over loam . There was danger , of course , that some heavily squeezed ice-field might shoot up the beach , and plane off the top of the islet bodily ; but that did not trouble Kotuko and the girl when they made their snow-house and began to eat , and heard the ice hammer and skid along the beach . The Thing had disappeared , and Kotuko was talking excitedly about his power over spirits as he crouched round the lamp . In the middle of his wild sayings the girl began to laugh , and rock herself backward and forward . Behind her shoulder , crawling into the hut crawl by crawl , there were two heads , one yellow and one black , that belonged to two of the most sorrowful and ashamed dogs that ever you saw .
XXXXX the dog was one , and the black leader was the other .
Inuit Island Kotuko hand-sleigh ice-blocks islet loam right shoal snow-house