prevent themselves from falling into a coma, they rocked their bodies
like things only half alive.
The black days and black nights slowly, tediously, achingly passed.
One day was like another--one night seemed to mark no progress of time.
Only the children, to whom parents gave the last bits of food, showed
some animation. They played listlessly with one another. For toys
they had crude carvings of soapstone--tiny soapstone lamps and pots
with which they made pitiful mimicry of cooking. The little girls
played with crude dolls just as do little girls in more southern
lands--but they were grotesque effigies, made of skin roughly sewn
together. The boys found brief zest in a game which was played by
sticking ivory points in a piece of bone, hanging from the roof of the
igloo, and which was perforated with holes. Finally, as the night wore
on, the children lost interest in their games, and with aching
stomachs, lay silent by the fires. Starvation steadily claimed its
toll. Death, slowly, surely, laid its grim and terrible hands upon
that pitiful fringe of earth's humanity on the desolate star-litten
roof of the world. One by one a stark body would be carried from an
igloo into the black, bitter cold silence without and buried under
blocks of snow. And above, intense and incandescent, the Pole
Star--that unerring time mark of God's inevitable and unerring
laws--burned like an all-seeing, sentient and pitiless eye of fire in
the heavens.
Annadoah lay upon her couch of furs. Her face was thin, and white as
the snows without. The flame in her stone lamp was about to flicker
into extinction.
Ootah, entering the igloo, sprang quickly to her side. Her breath came
very faintly. He seized her hands. He breathed on her face. He
opened her ahttee and rubbed her little breasts. He felt something
very strange, and wonderful, stirring within him. And with it a
ghastly fear that the thing he loved was dying.
Into the lamp he placed the last meagre bits of remaining blubber.
Then he again set to chafing the tender little hands. Cold and hunger
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