dwelling. As the furies were loosed outside her voice rose and fell
with the wailing grief and wrath of the wind. "Olafaksoah!
Olafaksoah!" But only the hoarse evil call of the black bird answered
during lulls in the storm. And Annadoah heard it, with a sinking of
her cold heart, as the voice of fate.
IV
"_'Do the gulls that freeze to death in winter fly in springtime?' she
asked, simply. . . 'The teeth of the wolves are in my heart' . . ._"
Desolate and alone, Annadoah walked along a crevice in the
land-adhering ice of the polar sea.
The prolonged grey evening of the arctic was resolving into the long
dark, and the Eskimo women, as is their custom at this time of the
year, had gathered along the last lane of open water--which writhed
like a sable snake over the ice--to celebrate that period of mourning
which precedes the dreadful night, and to give their last messages and
farewells to the unhappy and disconsolate souls of the drowned, who,
when the ice closed, should for many moons be imprisoned in the sea.
An unearthly twilight, not unlike that dim greenish luminescence which
filters through emerald panes in the high nave of a great cathedral,
lay upon the earth. The forms of the mourning women were strangely
magnified in the curious semi-luminance and, as their bodies moved to
and fro in the throes of their grief, they might have been, for all
they seemed, shadowy ghosts bemoaning their sins in some weird
purgatory of the dead.
In the northern sky a faint quivering streak of light, resembling the
reflection of far away lightning, played--the first herald of the
aurora. To the south a gash of reddish orange, like the tip of a
bloody-gleaming knife-blade, severed the thick purple clouds. There
was a faint reflected glimmer on the unfrozen southern sea.
Snow had fallen on the land, igloos had been built. Over the village
and against the frozen promontories loomed a majestic yet fearful
shadowy shape--that of a giant thing, swathed in purple, its arm
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