He will bring us the seal again ! '' Their voices were soon swallowed up by the cold , empty dark , and Kotuko and the girl shouldered close together as they strained on the pulling-rope or humoured the sleigh through the ice in the direction of the Polar Sea . Kotuko insisted that the tornaq of the stone had told him to go north , and north they went under Tuktuqdjung the Reindeer -- those stars that we call the Great Bear . No European could have made five miles a day over the ice-rubbish and the sharp-edged drifts ; but those two knew exactly the turn of the wrist that coaxes a sleigh round a hummock , the jerk that nearly lifts it out of an ice-crack , and the exact strength that goes to the few quiet strokes of the spear-head that make a path possible when everything looks hopeless . The girl said nothing , but bowed her head , and the long wolverine-fur fringe of her ermine hood blew across her broad , dark face . The sky above them was an intense velvety black , changing to bands of Indian red on the horizon , where the great stars burned like street-lamps . From time to time a greenish wave of the Northern Lights would roll across the hollow of the high heavens , flick like a flag , and disappear ; or a meteor would crackle from darkness to darkness , trailing a shower of sparks behind . Then they could see the ridged and furrowed surface of the floe tipped and laced with strange colours -- red , copper , and bluish ; but in the ordinary starlight everything turned to one frost-bitten gray . The floe , as you will remember , had been battered and tormented by the autumn gales till it was one frozen earthquake . There were gullies and ravines , and holes like gravel-pits , cut in ice ; lumps and scattered pieces frozen down to the original floor of the floe ; blotches of old black ice that had been thrust under the floe in some gale and heaved up again ; roundish boulders of ice ; saw-like edges of ice carved by the snow that flies before the wind ; and sunken pits where thirty or forty acres lay below the level of the rest of the field . From a little distance you might have taken the lumps for seal or walrus , overturned sleighs or men on a hunting expedition , or even the great Ten-legged White Spirit-Bear himself ; but in spite of these fantastic shapes , all on the very edge of starting into life , there was neither sound nor the least faint echo of sound . And through this silence and through this waste , where the sudden lights flapped and went out again , the sleigh and the two that pulled it crawled like things in a nightmare -- a nightmare of the end of the world at the end of the world . When they were tired Kotuko would make what the hunters call a `` half-house , '' a very small snow hut , into which they would huddle with the travelling-lamp , and try to thaw out the frozen seal-meat . When they had slept , the march began again -- thirty miles a day to get ten miles northward . The girl was always very silent , but Kotuko muttered to himself and broke out into songs he had learned in the Singing-House -- summer songs , and reindeer and salmon songs -- all horribly out of place at that season . He would declare that he heard the tornaq growling to him , and would run wildly up a hummock , tossing his arms and speaking in loud , threatening tones . To tell the truth , Kotuko was very nearly crazy for the time being ; but the girl was sure that he was being guided by his guardian spirit , and that everything would come right . She was not surprised , therefore , when at the end of the fourth march Kotuko , whose eyes were burning like fire-balls in his head , told her that his tornaq was following them across the snow in the shape of a two-headed dog . The girl looked where Kotuko pointed , and something seemed to slip into a ravine . It was certainly not human , but everybody knew that the tornait preferred to appear in the shape of bear and seal , and such like .
It might have been the Ten-legged White XXXXX himself , or it might have been anything , for Kotuko and the girl were so starved that their eyes were untrustworthy .
Indian Reindeer Singing-House Spirit-Bear colours earthquake gravel-pits ice-crack right tornait