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 Amoraq 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 . One could tell by the soap-stone lamps in the huts that famine was near . In good seasons , when blubber was plentiful , the light in the boat-shaped lamps would be two feet high -- cheerful , oily , and yellow . Now it was a bare six inches : Amoraq carefully pricked down the moss wick , when an unwatched flame brightened for a moment , and the eyes of all the family followed her hand . The horror of famine up there in the great cold is not so much dying , as dying in the dark . All the Inuit dread the dark that presses on them without a break for six months in each year ; and when the lamps are low in the houses the minds of people begin to be shaken and confused . But worse was to come . The underfed dogs snapped and growled in the passages , glaring at the cold stars , and snuffing into the bitter wind , night after night . When they stopped howling the silence fell down again as solid and heavy as a snowdrift against a door , and men could hear the beating of their blood in the thin passages of the ear , and the thumping of their own hearts , that sounded as loud as the noise of sorcerers ' drums beaten across the snow .
One night Kotuko the dog , who had been unusually sullen in harness , leaped up and pushed his head against XXXXX 's knee .
Inuit Kotuko cooking-pots harpoon hours right sleighs sorcerers tutareang wolverine