The Second Jungle Book
shaping the last irregular block of ice that makes the key-stone of the
roof, he saw a Thing looking at him from a little cliff of ice half a
mile away. The air was hazy, and the Thing seemed to be forty feet long
and ten feet high, with twenty feet of tail and a shape that quivered
all along the outlines. The girl saw it too, but instead of crying aloud
with terror, said quietly, “That is Quiquern. What comes after?”
“He will speak to me,” said Kotuko; but the snow-knife trembled in his
hand as he spoke, because however much a man may believe that he is a
friend of strange and ugly spirits, he seldom likes to be taken quite
at his word. Quiquern, too, is the phantom of a gigantic toothless
dog without any hair, who is supposed to live in the far North, and to
wander about the country just before things are going to happen. They
may be pleasant or unpleasant things, but not even the sorcerers care to
speak about Quiquern. He makes the dogs go mad. Like the Spirit-Bear, he
has several extra pairs of legs,--six or eight,--and this Thing jumping
up and down in the haze had more legs than any real dog needed. Kotuko
and the girl huddled into their hut quickly. Of course if Quiquern had
wanted them, he could have torn it to pieces above their heads, but the
sense of a foot-thick snow-wall between themselves and the wicked dark
was great comfort. The gale broke with a shriek of wind like the shriek
of a train, and for three days and three nights it held, never varying
one point, and never lulling even for a minute. They fed the stone lamp
between their knees, and nibbled at the half-warm seal-meat, and watched
the black soot gather on the roof for seventy-two long hours. The girl
counted up the food in the sleigh; there was not more than two days’
supply, and Kotuko looked over the iron heads and the deer-sinew
fastenings of his harpoon and his seal-lance and his bird-dart. There
was nothing else to do.
“We shall go to Sedna soon--very soon,” the girl whispered. “In three
days we shall lie down and go. Will your tornaq do nothing? Sing her an
angekok’s song to make her come here.”
He began to sing in the high-pitched howl of the magic songs, and the
gale went down slowly. In the middle of his song the girl started, laid
her mittened hand and then her head to the ice floor of the hut. Kotuko
followed her example, and the two kneeled, staring into each other’s
eyes, and listening with every nerve. He ripped a thin sliver of
whalebone from the rim of a bird-snare that lay on the sleigh, and,
after straightening, set it upright in a little hole in the ice, firming
it down with his mitten. It was almost as delicately adjusted as a
compass-needle, and now instead of listening they watched. The thin rod
quivered a little--the least little jar in the world; then it vibrated
steadily for a few seconds, came to rest, and vibrated again, this time
nodding to another point of the compass.
“Too soon!” said Kotuko. “Some big floe has broken far away outside.”
The girl pointed at the rod, and shook her head. “It is the big
breaking,” she said. “Listen to the ground-ice. It knocks.”
When they kneeled this time they heard the most curious muffled grunts
and knockings, apparently under their feet. Sometimes it sounded as
though a blind puppy were squeaking above the lamp; then as if a stone
were being ground on hard ice; and again, like muffled blows on a drum;
but all dragged out and made small, as though they travelled through a
little horn a weary distance away.
“We shall not go to Sedna lying down,” said Kotuko. “It is the breaking.
The tornaq has cheated us. We shall die.”
All this may sound absurd enough, but the two were face to face with
a very real danger. The three days’ gale had driven the deep water of
Baffin’s Bay southerly, and piled it on to the edge of the far-reaching
land-ice that stretches from Bylot’s Island to the west. Also, the
strong current which sets east out of Lancaster Sound carried with it
mile upon mile of what they call pack-ice--rough ice that has not frozen
into fields; and this pack was bombarding the floe at the same time
that the swell and heave of the storm-worked sea was weakening and
undermining it. What Kotuko and the girl had been listening to were the
faint echoes of that fight thirty or forty miles away, and the little
tell-tale rod quivered to the shock of it.
Now, as the Inuit say, when the ice once wakes after its long winter
sleep, there is no knowing what may happen, for solid floe-ice changes
shape almost as quickly as a cloud. The gale was evidently a spring gale
sent out of time, and anything was possible.
Yet the two were happier in their minds than before. If the floe broke
up there would be no more waiting and suffering. Spirits, goblins, and
witch-people were moving about on the racking ice, and they might find
themselves stepping into Sedna’s country side by side with all sorts of
wild Things, the flush of excitement still on them. When they left the
hut after the gale, the noise on the horizon was steadily growing, and
the tough ice moaned and buzzed all round them.
“It is still waiting,” said Kotuko.
On the top of a hummock sat or crouched the eight-legged Thing that they
had seen three days before--and it howled horribly.
“Let us follow,” said the girl. “It may know some way that does not lead
to Sedna”; but she reeled from weakness as she took the pulling-rope.
The Thing moved off slowly and clumsily across the ridges, heading
always toward the westward and the land, and they followed, while the
growling thunder at the edge of the floe rolled nearer and nearer. The
floe’s lip was split and cracked in every direction for three or four
miles inland, and great pans of ten-foot-thick ice, from a few yards
to twenty acres square, were jolting and ducking and surging into one
another, and into the yet unbroken floe, as the heavy swell took and
shook and spouted between them. This battering-ram ice was, so to speak,
the first army that the sea was flinging against the floe. The incessant
crash and jar of these cakes almost drowned the ripping sound of sheets
of pack-ice driven bodily under the floe as cards are hastily pushed
under a tablecloth. Where the water was shallow these sheets would be
piled one atop of the other till the bottommost touched mud fifty feet
down, and the discoloured sea banked behind the muddy ice till the
increasing pressure drove all forward again. In addition to the floe and
the pack-ice, the gale and the currents were bringing down true bergs,
sailing mountains of ice, snapped off from the Greenland side of the
water or the north shore of Melville Bay. They pounded in solemnly,
the waves breaking white round them, and advanced on the floe like an
old-time fleet under full sail. A berg that seemed ready to carry the
world before it would ground helplessly in deep water, reel over, and
wallow in a lather of foam and mud and flying frozen spray, while a much
smaller and lower one would rip and ride into the flat floe, flinging
tons of ice on either side, and cutting a track half a mile long before
it was stopped. Some fell like swords, shearing a raw-edged canal;
and others splintered into a shower of blocks, weighing scores of tons
apiece, that whirled and skirted among the hummocks. 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. Kotuko the dog was one,
and the black leader was the other. Both were now fat, well-looking, and
quite restored to their proper minds, but coupled to each other in an
extraordinary fashion. When the black leader ran off, you remember, his
harness was still on him. He must have met Kotuko the dog, and played or
fought with him, for his shoulder-loop had caught in the plaited copper
wire of Kotuko’s collar, and had drawn tight, so that neither could get
at the trace to gnaw it apart, but each was fastened sidelong to
his neighbour’s neck. That, with the freedom of hunting on their own
account, must have helped to cure their madness. They were very sober.
The girl pushed the two shamefaced creatures towards Kotuko, and,
sobbing with laughter, cried, “That is Quiquern, who led us to safe
ground. Look at his eight legs and double head!”
Kotuko cut them free, and they fell into his arms, yellow and black
together, trying to explain how they had got their senses back again.
Kotuko ran a hand down their ribs, which were round and well clothed.
“They have found food,” he said, with a grin. “I do not think we shall
go to Sedna so soon. My tornaq sent these. The sickness has left them.”
As soon as they had greeted Kotuko, these two, who had been forced to
sleep and eat and hunt together for the past few weeks, flew at each
other’s throat, and there was a beautiful battle in the snow-house.
“Empty dogs do not fight,” Kotuko said. “They have found the seal. Let
us sleep. We shall find food.”
When they waked there was open water on the north beach of the island,
and all the loosened ice had been driven landward. The first sound of