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The Wife Traders

Stendal, as he pushed off from the rusty-plated coaster and bobbed landward on the blue-green ground swell, felt that he was on the threshold of a new world. On his left a white whale looped through the waves. On his right a seal popped up a sleek wet head, regarded him for a moment and disappeared again. In front of him loomed a berg, monumental as a cathedral, with the deeper green of the sea waves lapping at the paler green of its rounded flanks.

That minareted mountain of ice seemed to take the soul out of the sunlight, leaving it ghostly and thin, like something filtered through the ribs of a skeleton summer. It threw a chill over the dark masses of tide-washed rock, scarred and rounded by ice-grind, that marked the outer fringe of the Inlet. And beyond the Inlet lay the shoreline of Ungava, low and gloomy and desolate where the flattened hills rose mistily above the treeless barrens of the talus-slope.

Stendal, as he buttoned up his overcoat, felt suddenly lost and lonely. It seemed like the end of the world, some final and forlorn outpost where human effort thinned down to emptiness. It was no place for a white man. He was even glad for a reminder of life when a flock of eiders whirred up from between the black-rocked islands. He was equally glad when he made out a scattering of huts and topeks where a river debouched sullenly over a network of boulder-channels to the sea. Along the narrow beach he saw a sprawl of overturned canoes and kayaks, backed by the bone-gray timbers of a smoke-frame and a decrepit flake or two for drying fish.

Those structures, skeleton-like and lonely-looking, impressed the newcomer as decrepit inheritances from another age. Along with the uncovered framework of a barbara made of well-bleached whale ribs, and a couple of meetchwops, they tended to give a graveyard melancholy to the straggling village-end. They made Stendal think of prehistoric monsters which had died on their feet and remained there in sullen defiance of time. He was further depressed, as he stared landward, by the absence of color in all that littoral landscape. It looked wan and wasted, as though countless centuries of violence had bleached the life out of it. And the universal grayness of things gave him the feeling of being in a land of ghosts.

Yet there was life enough, once the dinghy keel grated on the beach gravel and his gear was tumbled ashore. A chorus of husky howls, high-pitched and quavering, proclaimed his arrival. A wrinkled old Innuit emerged from a smoke-stained topek and stood regarding him. A slant-eyed child or two peered shyly from hut doors. An Eskimo woman, clad in an incongruous mixture of calico and wolfskin, quartered back from the river-pool, carrying a bundle of washing in her arms.

“Chimo,” shouted Stendal, remembering the Innuit word of greeting.

“Chimo,” answered the old man, moving slowly forward. He was followed, in time, by a gathering of women and children, round-eyed and curious. They brought with them a fetor of fish-oil and seal.

“Where is the home of Kablunak Winslow?” asked Stendal, remembering his instructions. The upturned faces of the children went blank, but the old man, as Stendal repeated his question, pushed a little closer.

“You want white man?” he asked, kicking aside a husky-pup that was nosing about the luggage pile. Stendal breathed easier at the sound of that pidgin-English.

“Yes, I want the white man,” proclaimed the newcomer. He was glad, as he stared at the ragged band, that he had brought enough trade candy and trinkets to enrich their poverty.

But the old Innuit shook his head.

“White man no here,” he announced. And Stendal’s heart went down like a lift in its shaft. It would be several weeks, he remembered, before his coaster could swing in to Iviuk Inlet again.

“Where is he?” demanded Stendal.

The old Innuit pointed toward the low-lying hills beyond the talus-slope.

“Him go with him woman, to hunt bear mebbe.”

Stendal sat down on one of his duffle bags.

“When will he be back?”

“Him back one sleep more.”

Stendal pondered this. That, he assumed, meant tomorrow. He breathed easier again. But there was a barb of perplexity in his relief.

“You say him got woman here?” he questioned, doing his best to seem casual.

The old Innuit gravely nodded his head.

“Him got Husky woman,” he acceded. “Good woman.”

Stendal managed to maintain his air of indifference. But he knew, in his own heart, that his mission would not be as simple as it had seemed.

“What is her name?” he asked as the circle of Asiatic-looking faces continued to study him. “What you call her?”

“Tooloona,” answered the old man whose face was like dried and wrinkled leather. He pointed toward a bend in the river, where the ground was higher. “That him house.”

Stendal studied the house. It stood a trifle apart from the beach village and seemed more solidly built than its neighbors. It stood at the center of a neatly fenced rectangle where the sparse green of turnip-tops and rhubarb showed against the umber of carefully tilled soil. Beside it was a storage-shed and fur-loft, flanked by a smokehouse and a net-reel and a pyramid of spindly firewood cut into stove-lengths. It impressed the frowning Stendal as having an air of competence and courage. He even lost a little of his earlier feeling of homelessness.

“I’ll wait in the Kablunak’s house,” he proclaimed, “until he comes back.”

“Him good house,” concurred the old man. He turned, with a note of authority, and talked in his native tongue to the Eskimo women about him. Their answering clatter ended in a mass attack on the luggage pile. Half a dozen of the younger women swung the heavy bags up on their shoulders and started off for the house between the juniper palings. Stendal, watching them, was startled by the ease with which they carried their burdens. They impressed him as oddly child-minded, with their lighthearted chatter that made him think of the noise about a marten house.

“Me good friend of Kablunak Winslow,” he explained to the old man, who answered to the name of Ootah. “Tomorrow, maybe, I have tea and tobaccomik for your people.”

The seamed old face took on a smile of craftiness.

“Gin and rum him good for old Ootah,” he mildly suggested.

“Well, we’ll look into that,” said the smiling white man as the lithe-bodied Eskimo girls came swarming back for the rest of their load.

There was to be no trouble, he saw, about his taking possession of the absent Kablunak’s home. And he realized, once he had stepped in through the door and inspected the deal-paneled interior, that the shack was solacingly ready for occupancy. It was as orderly as a military barracks. If Winslow had gone native, he concluded as he glanced from the curtained window that framed a casement of glass to the Russian-iron stove that held a burnished kettle and skillet, he had done it with a weather-eye open for a white man’s comfort. But even real window-glass and a two-hole stove couldn’t bring a final answer to Stendal’s perplexity. He was, he remembered, a good thousand miles away from what the world regarded as civilization.

It was the old Innuit, hesitating in the doorway, who brought Stendal back to the present.

“You want woman stay with you?” he casually inquired.

Stendal found himself both startled and annoyed by that question.

“Why should I want a woman?” he demanded.

He could see the Innuit’s flaccid old lips widen in a grin. And the white man’s anger took on a sharper edge as he watched a small-bodied Eskimo girl shuffle lightly in across the floor. She carried with her two pails of water, fresh from the river. There was something pigeon-like in both her walk and her full-breasted figure. The skin of her neck and shoulders, where her dickey-hood was thrown back, was as smooth as pebbled kid and no browner than Virginia tobacco. Her hair, he noticed, was thick-coiled and as black as a crow’s wing. It was so black that it made her slightly flattened brow seem almost cream-colored in the modified light of the one-windowed shack. She looked young and vital enough, in her rough and abraded clothing, but about her he detected an unmistakable odor of seal-oil.

“Um Noonaga,” explained the old Innuit, with a head-nod toward the pigeon-like figure. “Noonaga good girl.”

Stendal’s wave of resentment mounted higher as he regarded the young woman in the abraded dickey-hood. A cooing note in her voice, as she exchanged a few words with the decrepit old head-man, made the newcomer still again think of a pigeon. She was more mature, he realized, than he had first suspected. But she stood quite passive, neither shy nor bold, staring down at the floor-boards.

“You take um?” questioned old Ootah. And that was the sort of thing, Stendal remembered, that he had traveled into the North to combat.

“I don’t want your woman,” he cried out with altogether unnecessary roughness. But both the mild bewilderment of the old man and the deepened color of the Eskimo girl’s face did not altogether escape him. “I can look after myself,” he somewhat lamely appended, “until my friend comes back.”

This did not seem to satisfy Ootah.

“Mebbe him no like that,” he objected.

“Perhaps not,” proclaimed the white man. “But I don’t have to follow his example just because I’m sleeping under his roof.”

That proclamation, however, was lost on the leather-faced old native whose thick and tremulous finger was directed toward the cook-stove.

“Mebbe you want girl make fire,” he stubbornly suggested.

“I’ll make my own fire,” Stendal promptly announced, reminding himself that clashes such as these were bound to occur where two civilizations ground together like float-ice.

“You know how sleep on Eskimo bed?” was Ootah’s next question.

Stendal noticed, for the first time, that instead of the expected wall-bunks the room-end was taken up with a native sleeping-platform, raised a few inches above the level of the floor-boards. It looked more oriental than polar, covered as it was with the skins of wild animals and further padded with twin mattresses of feather-stuffed fawnskin. Above these, at top and bottom, were cotton-covered pillows and Hudson Bay four-pointers. It looked comfortable enough. It looked, on the whole, a trifle too comfortable. The note of barbaric luxury that it struck, at the moment, was distinctly repugnant to the man from the South.

“I’ll get along,” he acrimoniously announced.

Ootah, still troubled, blinked up at him with bear-like eyes. The Innuit girl, manifestly crestfallen, moved slowly toward the door, where the round of her shoulder shone almost white in the strong side-light. And if, at that withdrawal, Stendal stood teased by some dim sense of deprivation, he refused to dignify it as a disappointment.

“Eskimo always bring what stranger want,” the old man was explaining. “You tell me mebbe what you want.”

Stendal looked at him with the same distaste with which he had more than once viewed the postcard-peddlers of Cairo.

“I want to be alone,” all but shouted the white man. And as he swung shut the shack door he remembered that he had indeed traveled far in the last few weeks. He also remembered, as he moved about in the silence of the many-odored cabin, that it was a long time since he had cooked a meal for himself. But even his clumsiness at that task, he felt, and even the ghostly sense of loneliness that stayed with him as he ate his solitary meal stood a sort of crown on the brow of good intentions.

Stendal, when he had finished that solitary meal, stared frowningly about the home of his lost friend. He was reluctant, as an intruder in that home, to pry into the secrets of its owner. But the task before him, plainly enough, was not to be an easy one. Before he could save Winslow he must understand him, just as a doctor must diagnose a case before deciding on a course of treatment. He had a mission to perform and it was his duty to make it a successful one. And the timidities and hesitations of an urban center where even the door-mats were chained to the householder’s steps could have no place in this sub-Arctic country where keys and locks were unknown.

He was lucky, he finally decided, to have this introductory look behind the scenes. And his circle of investigation widened as he slowly assessed his surroundings. He fell to studying the shack and its contents as deliberately as an Egyptologist might study the tomb of a Pharaoh. For between those walls, he assured himself, might yet be unearthed some reason for Winslow’s flight from civilization.

The shack itself, he saw, did not materially differ from the cabin of the ordinary frontiersman, except for the unusual number of books on the plain board shelves above the sleeping-stage and the metallurgical instruments and ore samples mixed up with spring traps and pipes and fishing-gear on the work table in the corner. On the window sill, where the light left it doubly prominent, was a polar bear carved from a walrus-tusk. Beside it rested a pair of Swiss binoculars. On a handmade chair covered with interlaced bands of rawhide rested a box of chromium-plated tools. On the floor, serving as rugs, were the skins of wolf and fox and bear. It was the smell of these, the intruder decided, that contributed a persistent note of savagery to the room.

Yet the cooking utensils, he observed, were modern enough. And if smoked salmon and caribou-tongues swung from the cross-beams of the grub-pantry there was an unexpected showing of canned comestibles on the crowded shelves behind them. The thoughtful-eyed investigator, in fact, found the grouping of incongruities sustained when he discovered an Eskimo seal-oil lamp between a chessboard and a nickel alarm-clock, while next to two magazine-rifles in the gun-rack rested a heavy-bladed Innuit harpoon. Two pairs of snowshoes, one large and one small, hung high on the wall. Beneath them were mukluks and moccasins, also mated up, large and small, reiterating some ghostly note of uxorious intimacy.

Stendal’s frown deepened as he studied them. They made a record, he realized, of a man and woman together, together on the trail by day and together under a narrow roof by night. For beside a chintz-draped washstand, on which he found a shaving-kit and a cake of scented soap, hung garments that were unmistakably feminine, a heavily beaded jacket of stroud edged with fur, a kooletah fringed with silver fox, an ahtee childishly adorned with rows of altogether unnecessary glass buttons, an armless slip of fawnskin that diffused an odor of Jockey-Club scent still strong enough to triumph over the universal smell of green furs and lamp-oil.

He wondered, as he stood staring at them, why they should impress him as pathetic, as though they denoted the forlorn valor of a primitive mind intent on some meager consolation of the ornamental. Yet the stitching in these garments, he saw, was almost incredibly fine. And on a stool, ingeniously constructed of polished bone, he found a basket of woven sweet-grass that held not only a sewing outfit and skeins of darning wool but also a coil of watap and a bobbin of walrus-ivory for the mending of fish nets.

Stendal, still thoughtful-eyed as he filled and lighted his pipe, sank into a fur-draped armchair and studied the room as a whole. On one arm of his chair he saw, for the first time, a pair of stroud trousers fringed with white fox and with stripes down the outer seams. They were so small, he found when he held them up before him, that they might have belonged to a half-grown youth. But the Eskimo woman, he remembered, wore garments like that, garments that foreshortened the figure and seemed to leave it sexless. And it was the unmistakably feminine things that tended both to bewilder and dispirit the meditative intruder. They impressed him as inexplicably primitive. And in doing so they seemed to define the extent of Owen Winslow’s degradation at the same time that they failed to explain the reasons for his relapse.

For the renegade, when his friend came to think of it, had possessed about everything that man could ask for. He had wealth and security; he had the respect of his fellows and, little as he may have deserved it, he had the devotion of a singularly beautiful woman. Yet he had left that woman for a short-legged Innuit who obviously smelled of fish-oil and waddled about in stroud fringed with fox-fur.

Stendal, as he folded the stroud trousers and tossed them to the back of the sleeping-stage, thought of Celina Winslow’s legs. He thought of them as long and columnar, fastidiously sheathed in silk, austerely widening from ankle to hip, suggestive more of lightness than of strength. He thought of them as he had seen them descending a cascading wide stairway, giving height and dignity to the calmly poised figure that drapery could leave so mysterious. Then he thought of them as he had once seen them on a Florida beach, smooth-skinned and rounded and Artemis-like in the frugality with which the flesh overlaid the narrow bones of the thoroughbred. And they still were mysterious. They were legs, like any other woman’s, structures of bone and sinew supporting the complicated machinery of life where a blood-pumping heart was housed between its neatly curved ribs. But to Stendal they always suggested delicacy, a delicacy touched with brittleness. They refused to be carnal. They were a thing of beauty in themselves, as much a thing of beauty as would be a column fallen from the Arch of Titus, consoling the eye with their loveliness at the same time that they confused the heart with a hint of their human vulnerability.

But she was not, Stendal remembered, as vulnerable as he had imagined. She had seemed, he recalled, almost disappointingly cool during that epochal last talk of theirs in her deep-shadowed drawing room above the murmur of Park Avenue. There was even a touch of the regal in her serenity, a queenly remoteness that left her doubly desirable because she remained doubly inaccessible. Yet Stendal had always declined to call her cold. He preferred to think of her as not yet entirely awakened, as the possessor of latencies still waiting to be elicited. She was, in a way, as fine and finished as porcelain, a porcelain that too rough handling might make perilous.

On that memorable afternoon he had, as was his custom, stooped over her hand and kissed it. And kissing Celina’s hand was a rite which he found not unpleasant to perpetuate. He had been kissing that hand, he remembered, for quite a number of years. It seemed the one thing called for, in that twilight zone of the unsuccessful suitor who has seen his solar impetuosities thinned down to the lunar fidelities of unselfish friendship. It may not have been all he asked for, but it was, he felt, all that Celina would accede to him. And she, in turn, had her adequate responses for any such reversion to the romantic. If there was grace in the way in which she surrendered the accosted hand there was also graciousness in the gravity with which she accepted a somewhat Old-World tribute to her undiminished appeal. On more than one occasion, Stendal remembered, she had even pointed her appreciation by calling him her knight.

But her coolness, he felt, was sometimes defensive. For that afternoon, above her tea things, an undertone of excitement had brought a hint of warmth to her luster, for all her calmness, not unlike delicate china played on delicately by firelight.

“What’s happened?” he asked, conscious that that smoothed serenity of hers could still hold its customary power of robbing him of his own peace of mind. She could still, at her own imperial whim, quicken his heart-beats. And she was not altogether ignorant of that fact, apparently, as she looked up at her faithful friend.

“Owen’s alive,” she said quite simply.

“What makes you think that?” Stendal asked, long since persuaded that her humiliation demanded the dignifying touch of extreme tragedy. Only death, he felt, should take a man from such a mate.

“I don’t think it,” answered the wistful Penelope who had gleaned echoes of her Ulysses, “I know it.”

Stendal had the feeling of a carefully fabricated hope receding from him, receding as tangibly as a departing liner headed for far-off ports. And equally disturbing was the hovering glow of triumph in Celina’s usually barricaded eyes. She had always, he feared, stood ready to forgive the wanderer, hard as it was to excuse a husband who drops out of life as abruptly as a flower-pot drops off a window ledge. And it would be like her, Stendal also feared, to forgive that absented mate for his final affront of still being in the land of the living.

“How do you know it?” questioned her faithful retainer.

Celina’s hand was quite steady as she poured tea into the two shell-like cups of Sèvres. Her courage, he realized, could be as strong as her womanly pride.

“Owen’s alive and up in Labrador,” she repeated, not without a note of perplexity in her voice. “I’ve just had proof of it.”

“What proof?” asked Stendal, conscious that the hands fluttering above the tea things were as delicate as the china they made precious.

“You remember how Walter Hildreth went up among the Eskimos last winter, to get his films of a walrus hunt?” Celina reminded her caller.

Stendal had a vague memory of some such venture. But Labrador, to a world-traveler who had twice crossed the Kalahari Desert without public comment, tended to fall under the heading of domestic adventure.

“Well, Walter’s back,” Celina continued. “And he’s brought some wonderful motion-pictures with him.”

“What’s that got to do with Owen?” exacted her still skeptical friend.

“Owen,” Celina quietly proclaimed, “is in one of those pictures. We’ve seen him. There’s not a shadow of doubt about it. He’s in what Walter calls his Iviuk Aggie. He says that means Big Walrus Killing.”

“Posing as a walrus?” asked the other, clinging to his momentary frivolity as a drunken man clings to a lamp-post.

“No,” answered Celina, disregarding all flippancy. “Owen’s there, right in with a group of natives, shouting and tugging and pulling on one of the harpoon-lines as they try to keep the walrus from getting out to sea. He’s bigger than the others. And——”

“You mean the walrus?” interrupted Stendal, resentful of the quietness with which his secret garden of hope was being denuded.

“No, I mean Owen,” Celina continued. “And two or three times he turned his face directly toward the camera. No, Richard darling, I still don’t mean the walrus. I mean Owen. He’s there, dressed like a native and looking like a native and obviously living like a native.”

It took time for Stendal not only to digest this statement but also to absorb its implications.

“But you say he let Hildreth photograph him?”

Celina moved her head from side to side in meditative negation. And if Stendal was conscious of her unhappiness, he was even more conscious of her effort to hide it. For defeat could never ride easily on the Flying Victory poise of Celina’s shoulders.

“He didn’t know, apparently, that he was being photographed. You see, Walter crept up on them, when they were in the thick of the fight, and he got his pictures before they found out he was there. He had no idea, of course, who Owen was. Walter took him, he says, for a white hunter from one of the trading-posts. And he refused to give up the films.”

This too took considerable thought.

“You mean that Owen didn’t want that picture carried away? He didn’t want his old world tipped off on how he’d walked out on it?”

Celina’s gaze remained a resolute one.

“He was rather set on smashing the camera. He acted, Walter said, a good deal like a crazy man. It was only by trickery, in the end, that Walter got away. But Archie Erskine saw the film, at the Explorers’ Club smoker, and came straight to me.”

Richard Stendal sat wondering why news so relieving should come with so little sense of relief. It seemed to take the dignity out of things.

“Hildreth may be right,” he finally asserted.

“Right about what?” questioned Celina.

“About Owen being crazy,” was Stendal’s answer as he stared around the soft-shadowed room with its mingled aromas of hothouse flowers and cinnamon toast. “If he’s left everything he had, that way, to live in a God-forsaken country with a lot of verminous Innuits, it means he’s slipped a cog somewhere. It means he’s mentally irresponsible.”

There was qualified thanks, for that, in Celina’s qualified smile.

“But he also left me,” she compelled herself to say.

“And you’re not going to give him up?”

“I’m not going to give him up,” responded Celina. “I know Owen, I think, a little better than the rest of you do.” She sat back, for all her pride, inscrutably humble. “There’s a bigness about Owen that I’m bound to respect.”

“Even when he does something unpardonably cruel?” demanded Stendal.

“Cruel, perhaps,” she conceded, “but not unpardonably so. For I’m beginning to realize that he must have been terribly unhappy before he did what he did.”

“Unhappy?” gasped her defender. “Didn’t he have you?”

“That is kind of you, Richard,” was the quiet-toned answer. “But it doesn’t solve my problem. And it doesn’t correct my mistake.”

“What mistake?”

“That is something between Owen and me.”

Stendal was conscious of a door being shut between them. She was too proud, he felt, to let him walk lightly through her chamber of poverty. Yet in the eyes of the world she was anything but poor. It was even comforting to know, at such a time, that she had wealth of her own. But Stendal, a moment later, found himself wondering if all those worldly goods could in any way have stood at the root of her vanished mate’s unrest. Winslow, on more than one occasion, had impressed him as a man still rebelliously fighting for elbow-room. And the egoist who flails about for his imaginary freedoms usually hurts himself as much as he hurts others.

“We all get our dose of unhappiness,” announced Stendal as he put down his teacup, “but we don’t all run away from it.”

“Owen is different,” asserted the victim of his cruelty. And Stendal found her quiet smile almost an exasperating one. Winslow, he remembered, belonged to that mysterious breed of man who could elicit, without rhyme or reason, the romantic interest of women. But why such absconders could still hold the allegiance of women was beyond his understanding.

“I’m glad you think so,” he said without enthusiasm, trying to tell himself that he was logical enough to admit the defeat of logic when it confronted him.

“Of course you are,” acknowledged Celina. “For those film pictures of Walter’s really brought me a second message. They told me, of course, that Owen was still alive. But they told me something else. They pointed out the path of duty. For when that poor tortured walrus was struggling and threshing about on the end of his harpoon line it was his mate who came back to him. I could see how she plunged into the surf beside him and did what she could to help him fight his way to freedom. She even locked her tusks with his and tugged and struggled to drag him away. She forgot herself in the sufferings of her husband. She faced a dozen harpoons in her blind efforts to save him. And I must do the same.”

Stendal, in the stress of the moment, stood up, obscurely grateful for even that costly vindication of a character on which he had early and late banked his faith. He had once told her that she seemed to protect some inner richness with an altogether deceiving air of austerity, just as the Caribbean clerics once saved their altar gold from Morgan and his fellow buccaneers by covering that over-precious metal with an impoverishing coat of whitewash.

“But what can you do?” he asked, wintrily happy in the thought that a common unhappiness was bringing them a little closer together.

Celina, as she gave him her hand, also gave him her eyes. She had the power, he realized, of making such gifts take on the coloring of a benediction.

“I want you to go up there and find Owen,” she told him.

“Me?” queried Stendal, emerging from the mists of the emotional.

“You are my friend, Richard,” she reminded him. “And you’re also free. You’re used to the far-off corners of the world. And a man can go where a woman can’t.”

Stendal, standing beside her, was disturbed to find the consciousness of her beauty eclipsed by a consciousness of fantastically widening difficulties.

“An outsider,” he ventured, “can’t do much in a case like this.”

“You’re not an outsider, Richard,” she reminded him. And her smile, for all its sadness, was a rewarding one. “I’d rather it would be you than anybody else.”

“But what can I do?” asked Stendal.

Celina very slowly and very gently withdrew the hand which her knight, in his preoccupation, had retained.

“I want you to find Owen,” she answered in that full and golden voice which had opened so many doors for her, “and bring him back to me.”

Stendal, making ready for bed, stopped short in the act of winding his watch. To wind watches, in a place like this, struck him as a waste of time. There was, in fact, no such thing as time as he had once reckoned it. The clocks of his old world, he remembered, were marking the birth of a new day. It was midnight there. But here, in the polar quietness, the prolonging light of what one ought to call yesterday was almost strong enough to read by. From the open shack door he could see the pale green water of the Bay, deepening in color as it met the rose and orange line of the West. He could see the stranded berg in the Inlet, ghostly white in the qualified light that made even the sleeping village of topeks as lifeless as the clustered cairns of a burying-ground.

The natives, he recalled as he turned back to his sleeping-stage, had not bothered him much. They had, in fact, left him rather disappointingly alone. And he, in some way, had failed to live up to their expectations. But that, he contended as he crawled into bed, could be taken care of later on. In any part of the world one had to have companionship of some sort or another. There would not, apparently, be much to choose from. But he was traveler enough to know that it took time to fit into a new environment.

The sleeping-stage, in spite of the mingled animal odors that assailed him, was more comfortable than he had expected. There was an almost luxurious softness about the double mattresses that rested, in turn, on the cushioning white pelt of a polar bear. Even the pillows, he discovered, were stuffed with the down of wild geese or eider. And that padded warmth brought an unexpected sense of well-being to the tired body of the white man. He forgot both his isolation and his floating impression of being an invader of other people’s privacy. And he fell asleep listening to the murmur of the river rapids.

He slept both deep and long. He slept until he was wakened by a commingling chorus of shouts and dog howls, a chorus that grew louder and then abruptly ceased again. It sent Stendal scrambling into his clothes, resentful of that mounting sense of embarrassment which made him feel like a poacher in forbidden waters. For that village tumult, he assumed, marked the return of the bear hunters. He was an unbidden guest there, he remembered, and he was likely to prove an unwelcome one. And he preferred, all things considered, that his first meeting with Owen Winslow should be in the open. When a man has fouled his nest and you are sent to drag him out of it, your course is not made easier by your occupancy of that nest.

Stendal was more excited than he expected to be. He went out, still struggling with the countless buttons of urbanized clothing, to the little gateway in the juniper palings. Coming toward him, along the ice-torn and wind-worn beach-slope, he could see a long-legged man, a long-legged white man followed by a much shorter Eskimo woman.

And that white man was most unmistakably Winslow.

It was clearly Winslow, for all the wolfskin parka and stroud leggings and mukluks of sealskin that made him look so much like a native. The thing that impressed Stendal, and also vaguely depressed him, was the size of that approaching figure. Winslow looked larger and rougher than ever before, with a touch of defiance in his swinging stride. He towered above the Eskimo woman in the back-thrown dickey-hood, who walked a trifle behind him with a quicker and shorter step that translated itself into an announcement of feminine dependence. But that more compact-bodied trail-mate, instead of suggesting servility, struck a note of quiet competency. The two figures, for some reason, made Stendal think of a heavy liner with a harbor-tug on its quarter.

But that homecoming hunter declined to speak until he was within a dozen paces of the other man. He had been warned, apparently, of the unwelcome visitation.

“Hello, Stendal,” he said.

It was neither hostile nor hearty. It was more an announcement of suspended judgment overlaid with indifference.

“Hello, Winslow,” answered the other. The tone of that response was companionable enough, in a way, but it too remained entirely noncommittal. They were close together, by this time, but they did not shake hands. It was Winslow’s face that broke into a smile, a restricted and sardonic smile, as they stood assessing each other. The Eskimo woman, Stendal observed, had become both as motionless and as impassive as a statue. The only thing that seemed alive were her eyes, which, from under dusky brows and still duskier lashes, studied the strange figure confronting her.

“How’d you get here?” asked the man in the wolfskin parka. He turned to his trail-mate, at Stendal’s hesitation, and thrust his rifle into her hands. She took it, without a word, and quartered almost timidly past Stendal, who felt better when her noiseless quick steps had taken her in through the open shack door.

“I was sent to find you,” proclaimed the newcomer, conscious that nothing was to be gained by equivocation.

Winslow’s face hardened.

“Who sent you?” he demanded.

Stendal had no intention of being intimidated.

“Celina, of course,” he answered, with a barely perceptible squaring of his shoulders. He could see where a bit of offal, flung from a near-by hutch door, brought a dozen lean huskies snarling and fighting for their breakfast.

Winslow looked at the fighting huskies between the bleached clumps of walrus-bone. Then he looked at the smoke-stained topeks and the green-watered Inlet where the wavies played and preened and where the sea-swallows circled about in the morning sunlight.

“I was afraid of this,” he said with his eyes still off on space.

Stendal, even while he realized there were reservations to be respected, resented that studied remoteness, just as he resented the contempt behind it.

“Did you expect,” he challenged, “to hide out in a hole like this forever?”

Winslow’s eye, grown opaque, turned back to a study of his home and then to a study of his visitor. He shrugged his wide shoulders. But even his reviving smile failed to bridge some ghostly moat of remoteness between the two men.

“We can’t talk that out here,” he curtly proclaimed. His laugh was slightly raucous. “We’ll have time enough for that, before the month is over.” He looked seaward again. “Was it the Nauscopie that dropped you off here yesterday?”

“No, it was the Baffin Belle, out of Churchill. And she should be back here in sixteen or seventeen days.”

Winslow’s smile became a commiserative one.

“They may have told you that. But they never know, in these waters. It all depends, you see, on the ice.”

Stendal found something chilling in that assertion. He remembered that he had come a long way from his well-ordered world of time-tables and punctual departures. He also remembered that he and the refugee beside him were two solitary white men in a wilderness of aliens. He felt a little sorry for Winslow. He felt a little sorry for himself. And in doing so he experienced a sudden hunger to get closer to one of his kind. The iron, when he spoke, had gone out of his voice.

“Winslow, why in God’s name did you ever come here?”

The man who had dropped out of life untied the thongs of his wolfskin parka. But he preferred to let the question go unanswered.

“We’ll try to make you comfortable until the Baffin Belle swings back. And you may like Iviuk Inlet a little better when you get to know it.”

“God forbid,” said the solemn-eyed Stendal.

They were, by this time, moving constrainedly toward the open shack door. Through the fly-screen, in the deeper shadow, Stendal could make out the Eskimo woman circling noiselessly about the dish-laden table. His task, he could see, was not to be an easy one.

“You came pretty well heeled,” observed Winslow as he smiled over the barricade of duffel-bags.

The man from Outside showed a trace of color.

“They told me I’d better bring trade things for the natives,” he explained.

The other’s eye became ruminative.

“What they called savages,” he remarked, “can still be people.”

Stendal felt the thrust in that.

“The disturbing thing, to me, is that so many people can be savages,” he retorted.

But Winslow, apparently, stood beyond the lash of his scorn. And scorn, the newcomer concluded, could open few doors.

“You know, of course, that I didn’t come here of my own free will,” ventured Stendal as he seated himself in the walrus-bottomed chair which his host moved back for him.

That more intimate note was not without its effect on Winslow. About his eyes, for a moment or two, lurked a hound-like look of pathos. But he abruptly seated himself, at Stendal’s overpointed stare, and looked over his shoulder toward his busy shack-mate.

“Let’s see what Tooloona can do for us,” he said with a roughness which impressed itself on his visitor as slightly forced. “For people have to eat, whether they’re white or yellow.”

The Eskimo woman, as though in dog-like response to the sound of her name, came and stood motionless behind her master’s chair. This, Stendal thought, was to precede some form of introduction. But Winslow showed no intention of thus dignifying the occasion.

“I think our friend would cotton to cloudberry jam and galettes,” he casually announced. “But let’s begin with salmon steak and bacon.” The master of the house turned back to his guest. “You see, we don’t live on whale-blubber and eat on our haunches. Tooloona doesn’t even take bites out of her toilet soap. She uses it when she bathes. And she bathes quite frequently.”

Stendal disliked both the discussion of a woman’s bathing and the bantering tone in which it was given.

“She’s also very proud of her thermometer there on the door-frame, which she calls a weather-stick. And she’s the only woman around Iviuk Inlet who knows how to use a can-opener. And she’ll probably beat you at either checkers or chess, if you eventually engage in a game with her.”

Tooloona, at the repeated mention of her name, showed the white of an eye as she receded into the smoke-laden background. It reminded Stendal of the pallid tarsal-tuft of a deer withdrawing through woodland shadows. He suspected that she was afraid of him, for all her quietness.

“I s’pose,” Winslow was saying, “you’re already acquainted with this shack of mine. What d’you think of it?”

Stendal, consoled by the aroma of cooking food, acknowledged that it looked very comfortable.

“I built this house out of ship timbers when my boat went to pieces in the ice, spring before last, and she’s built to stand for a thousand years.”

Winslow, as he spoke, stretched out his great legs and his shack-mate knelt before him, without a word, and drew off his heavy mukluks. In their place, over the neatly darned socks of gray wool, she adjusted a pair of slippers, extremely worn and stained with grease.

Stendal did not comment on the durability of the house. For his attention, at the moment, was again directed toward Tooloona. She was younger, he realized, than he had first thought her. And she was not revolting to the eye. She was small-bodied and smooth-skinned, with almost an air of sleekness in her economical quick movements. Her dusky eyes, he could see, were wide apart and quite without guile, even if in them he sensed, or thought he sensed, a spirit of hostility. Yet it was her air of cloudy gentleness that most perplexed him. For the oblique dark brows that hooded her eyes gave to their duskiness an expression of meditation, of brooding remoteness, that was not without its suggestion of mystery. She might be more, he was ready to concede, than the hard-muscled little animal he considered her. She seemed as passive and docile as a well-trained bird-dog but at the same time there was a hint of slumberous and inexhaustible vitality about her.

“We’ll eat together, Tooloona,” commanded Winslow, motioning for a third place to be laid at the table. And Stendal, during that meal, found himself more interested in the Innuit girl than in the surprisingly good food that was placed before him. She did not, as he had expected, eat with her hands. Nor did she, as he had half-feared, chew her master’s food for him. Her table-manners, in fact, proved less gross than those of Winslow, whose paraded roughness, the visitor began to suspect, was largely protective. But Tooloona, in her silence, was not without a dignity all her own. The possession of a white mate apparently gave her a standing in the community.

“Tooloona,” said Winslow, “is very proud of her dishes. And next month she’s to have a bread-mixer.”

Stendal looked at Tooloona’s hands, which were small and well-formed. She had, he also saw, the close-marshaled white teeth of the carnivorous primitive that she was. And her lips, so arrestingly red in coloring, could be both mobile and childlike when they forgot their sullenness. But about her, he felt, was something delusive. She made him think of a doll, because of her diminutiveness. She also had the smooth and velvet-skinned roundness of the Arctic fat-eater. Yet under all that rounded smoothness was a suggestion of structural strength and compactness. And under all her quietness was a persistent promise of vigor and eagerness. She was, in her inarticulate and barbaric way, singularly alive. That vitality was expressed in her thick black hair, which had a metallic luster that tended to make one forget its coarseness, though that luster, Stendal was to discover later, hinged largely on the meticulous care with which melted lard was rubbed into it.

She would, he acknowledged as he watched her movements between table and stove, be tireless. And always adept. And perhaps never quite tamed. In her, he felt, would always be a streak of tribal wildness, like that in the hard-tendoned polo ponies which Winslow, in the old days, used to bring down from the Alberta foothills.

But he resented her silences, which could be interpreted only as a criticism of his presence there. He found himself also resenting her power to hold his attention. Yet even as he felt that she was merely a minor and unpleasant factor in the situation he was compelled to acknowledge that her presence there in some way gave color to a background which would otherwise be intolerably drab. Life, whether it ran rough or smooth, could not go on without women. And they were still estimated, apparently, by the law of supply and demand.

“Your Tooloona is a good cook,” Stendal admitted at the end of a meal which, satisfying as it may have been to the body, proved phantasmally discomforting to the spirit. It typified a condition which promised to make his future course a more difficult one.

“She’s mistress of more than a frying-pan,” averred Winslow, without looking up. He continued to stare down at his slipper-clad feet until Tooloona, after a second glance at her camp-mate, quietly obliterated herself. She slipped away like a shadow, leaving the two men sitting constrainedly face to face at the cleared table.

The man from Outside, as he waited for his host to speak, produced pipe and tobacco pouch. Winslow, a moment later, reached for his own blackened briar.

“Try some of this,” said Stendal, with a fraternal offer of his pouch. But the other shook his head.

“No, thanks. It seems too scented.” He cut trade tobacco from a plug, rubbed it in the hollow of his great hand, and slowly filled his pipe-bowl. “I’ve grown to like the stronger plug.”

Stendal, whose mind went back to Celina beside her tea table, was prompted to cry out: “You would!” But he shut his teeth on that indiscretion. The road before him was hard enough as it was. And his host, who obviously sat waiting for him to begin, was not making it any easier for him.

Winslow, a trifle defiantly, tilted back in his chair and lifted his feet to the table-edge. Stendal stared through the open door at two whisky-jacks hopping about for meat scraps.

“It’s quite a garden you’ve got out there,” the newcomer observed as his glance went on to the valorous plot of green. “I didn’t know you could grow vegetables this close to the Pole.”

Winslow laughed his restricted laugh.

“That’s my white man’s confession of inferiority. Yes, I grew those potatoes you’ve just been eating. Last year, of course. I’d also turnips and kale and green peas. You see, I’m not native enough to get my vitamins out of walrus and fish-oil. These people are considerably ahead of us, along that line. Tooloona, for example, can thrive on a diet that would turn my civilized stomach inside out. She’s an incomparably better animal than I am.”

“But still practically an animal,” proclaimed Stendal, jockeying for his opening.

“Perhaps not so much as you imagine,” Winslow retorted as he regarded the neatly woven babiche on the empty chair-back. “They’re incredibly competent, these Innuit women. And their sewing and cooking is the smallest part of it. They have minds of their own. Some of their fancies, in fact, make pretty good poetry. When the stars come out, at dusk, Tooloona says it’s the Dead lighting their oil-lamps for the Long Night.”

“She speaks English?” questioned the newcomer.

“I’m teaching her,” admitted Winslow, with a show of deepened color on his wind-darkened face. “Last winter I tried to tell her something about our white man’s faith, about the Bible we were brought up on. Some of it, of course, she just couldn’t get. The Lamb of God, for example, was outside her world. So to suit local conditions I had to translate it into the Seal-Pup of God. And that meant something.”

It was Stendal’s face that grew perceptibly harder.

“Have they any inkling of the Ten Commandments?” he curtly inquired.

Winslow sat silent a moment. His silence even seemed a deliberated effort at patience.

“They’re remarkably honest,” he finally said. “They’re also fair-minded and charitable. But they have to live, of course, according to their own lights.”

“Without, of course, bothering much about our moral code?”

“Our moral code?” questioned the other.

“Such as the Seventh Commandment,” prompted Celina’s emissary.

The silence, this time, was both more prolonged and more punitive than before.

“They have, naturally, their own code,” Winslow acknowledged with a grim sort of tolerance. “It isn’t the same as ours, but it seems to work tolerably well.”

“But can you succeed in mixing the two codes?” challenged Stendal. And the other’s deepened frown seemed a confession that the challenge had not been lost on him.

“It isn’t a matter of succeeding,” he said with his wintry smile. “It’s a matter of facing the inevitable, of surviving in some way.” He sat more rigidly in his chair, with his face quite solemn. “When I outfitted that St. John’s schooner and belted her with greenheart I felt like a man who’d finally broken out of jail.”

“Jail?” remonstrated the other.

“I’d been brought up in the West, remember, and pretty close to the soil. I’d ridden range, as a boy, and camped in the Sierras. And I never had elbow-room in that anthill of yours.”

“Your Long Island house was considerably larger than this,” his visitor mildly reminded him.

“I’d always had a hankering,” Winslow continued in his stubborn evenness, “to cruise along these northern coasts. And when I broke away and got my boat, I felt that I could breathe again. But my greenheart wasn’t strong enough. And when the ice crushed up my schooner, out there beyond those saddlebacks, I was definitely anchored here. For the winter, at least. And the winter in this latitude is a long time.”

His gaze, as his huge frame stiffened against the thongs of walrus-hide that laced the chair-back, became abstracted.

“A lot can happen in a sub-arctic winter,” Winslow went on in his dull and deep-timbred voice. “A lot, I mean, to a white man when he’s utterly alone.”

“So that’s why you went Gauguin on us?” Stendal found the courage to suggest.

Winslow’s gloomy eyes regarded the other for a meditative moment or two.

“You can call it that, if you like. But I had to do what I did. I had to do it, or go mad.” He sat looking at his brown and roughened hands. “But you wouldn’t understand. You don’t even know anything about this country. And you don’t know anything about women.”

Stendal’s resentment of that charge perceptibly sharpened his voice.

“But I do know,” he retorted, “that you happen to have a wife in New York.”

Winslow’s gesture was like a listless handsweep across the slate of Time.

“That was before I passed on to another world,” he half-wearily announced. “The page is closed on all that. And I’ve got about everything I want here.”

It was Stendal’s turn to stiffen in his chair.

“Good God, Winslow, you don’t mean that you’re going to stay here all the rest of your days?”

The other man’s laugh was rough but not unkindly.

“Were you expecting me to pack up and climb aboard the Baffin Belle? And go back to that tame robin life with a woman who imagines she graces existence just by existing?”

“Which, after all, is something,” suggested Stendal as his gaze, through the doorway, rested on three garrulous native girls bent low over a bearskin which they scraped at with stone knives.

“It’s not enough for me,” maintained the runaway. “Not now. And that’s the curse of your country. It’s too damn full of women who take everything and give nothing. And you sit back and call it civilization.”

“We respect our women,” Stendal announced with what dignity he could command.

“All right. Go on respecting them. But keep ’em away from me. I’ve had enough of them. I’m through with that sort of thing.”

“And through with your wife?”

Winslow, as that harpoon struck home, turned and regarded his friend the enemy.

“Why don’t you take her?” he was brutal enough to demand.

“I wish to God I could,” was the thought that flashed through the other man’s mind. But he closed his lips on that indiscretion, though his voice, when he did speak, was a trifle unsteady.

“You seem to have lived a little too long among the wife traders.”

That charge, however, failed to bring the expected reaction. The man who had gone native merely sat smiling at a doeskin slip hanging above the barbaric-looking sleeping-stage.

“Every man,” he carelessly affirmed, “has to work out his own salvation.”

“Salvation?” scoffed Stendal.

Winslow’s deep eyes considered his guest.

“Don’t be smug,” he quietly reproved. “You won’t believe it, of course, but I’m at last beginning to find out what life’s about. And there’s no poverty like that of a man who has to live with a rich wife. It makes you hate her. And it makes you hate yourself.”

Stendal’s final wave of indignation carried him up out of his chair.

“I believe you are crazy,” he proclaimed.

Winslow’s laugh was sardonic.

“Then go back and tell Celina that,” he solemnly suggested. “That’ll at least save the lady’s face. And face was something Celina never neglected. Yes, simply say I’m crazy.”

Stendal’s indignant steps took him to the door, where he stopped short, his eyes on a group of beach huskies fighting over fish entrails.

“I believe you are,” he lugubriously repeated.

“Then make her believe it,” was Winslow’s discouragingly quiet suggestion.

Stendal, for more reasons than one, was not sorry when Winslow suggested that his guest would feel more comfortable sleeping in a wall-tent, which a stalwart youth called Askim promptly put up just inside the juniper palings. The tent was a new one, of canvas, and was made passably comfortable by a folding cot and a polar bearskin that covered the willow mat which in turn covered the bare earth.

“Um good topek,” said Askim with a flash of his white teeth.

And Stendal agreed with him. For the tent seemed to provide a happy escape from privacies too peremptorily invaded. And the newcomer, thus removed, felt both a lessened strain on his dignity and a lessened threat of seeming to condone relationships which impressed him as basically wrong.

For the more he thought of Winslow’s predicament the more tragic seemed that renegade’s fall. He was, Stendal tried to argue with himself, merely the empty husk of a man, a weakling who had lost touch with life and let his real manhood slip away from him. He had, in the phrase of the North, gone back to the blanket.

Yet there were qualifications, Stendal was forced to admit, to that claim. And there were times when he found it hard to think of Winslow as a sick man, as an invalid needing care and help. His host, on occasions, could seem much too satisfied with life to merit open sympathy. He was, as the acknowledged leader of the settlement, a big frog in a little puddle. And the newcomer suspected him of being as proud of his power as Tooloona was of her cotton sheets, the washing of which, apparently, was a weekly ceremony watched over by many envious eyes.

“Um big hunter,” Askim had proclaimed. And Winslow, obviously, had lost none of his enterprise. He seemed healthy and hard-muscled. He not only went about unconsumed by regret, but he also, in some obscure way, seemed to justify the earlier claim that he was getting out of life a response that had never before been given him.

Yet it was, Stendal continued to feel, all wrong. For could any such squaw-man’s existence, he demanded of himself, be accepted as life? It plainly implied some blind spot in one’s make-up, some half-dead condition of mind or soul. Such things happened often enough, he knew, in the enervating Tropics, where the disintegrating influences of heat and loneliness could finally break down a strong man’s resistance. But it was different in the North, the grim North, where the fight for food and shelter remained a ceaseless one, where the margin of safety promptly narrowed under the feet of the slacker. It seemed the wrong stage for any such surrender. And even the calls of the flesh, Stendal felt, should be less ardent under those iron skies.

Yet the flesh had its calls, he remembered as he studied Tooloona, sitting in such sphinx-like silence at her table-end. He noticed more and more the creaminess of her skin and the redness of her almost heavy mouth. She was, indubitably, the good animal which Winslow had called her. But the man who had chosen her as a camp-mate was more than a blubber-eating Eskimo, more than a lone-fire Indian. He had walked the proudest avenues of an ever-aspiring civilization; he had shared the bed of a proud and delicate-bodied woman. And there was humiliation in seeing him thus degraded, narcotized into a sort of death in life.

It was one’s duty, Stendal decided, to waken him out of it. It was a white man’s debt to the white race. It might, in a way, be more comfortable to leave him as he was. But it would also be more cowardly. Men could be reclaimed. Cures had been effected and made final, in cases like that. And a mission, Stendal remembered, had been entrusted to him.

But the problem was not a simple one. Stendal’s ardor, during the next day or two, was chilled by the repeated discovery of his fellow countryman’s inaccessibility. His big-shouldered host was companionable enough, when they came together at meal-time, but about him remained a barricade as definite as the palings around his little northern garden. And Stendal, as he idled about the village, harvested an accruing impression of being excluded from the heart of things. He even detected about Winslow, when the latter made ready for a two-day salmon-fishing trip with Tooloona, a robust cheerfulness that did not ride well with a life of sin.

“You’ll have to amuse yourself here for a couple of days,” announced his host. “Tooloona and I have fish to get.”

“Don’t let me interfere with your regular plan of life,” the man from Outside proclaimed.

For just a moment the barricade went down.

“Wasn’t that what you came here for?” challenged the grim-eyed Winslow.

Stendal’s thin face was stained with a flush.

“I don’t pretend to be a miracle worker,” he was prompted to retort.

“Then we know where we stand,” said the long-legged man in the outlandish-looking mukluks. And he went striding off across the talus-slope with his small-bodied mate at his side. Tooloona’s boots of dyed sealskin, wide at the tops, made her quick steps seem like the waddle of a child. But the load that she carried on her fur-clad shoulders would have proved a burden for the most stalwart of men.

Stendal, left to his own devices, wandered appraisingly about the settlement, avoiding as best he could the wolfish-looking dogs that fought for scraps under the fish-flakes or sunned themselves on hut-roofs. The vitality of the northern air, ozonic and sharp, was like a whip-lash to his idle body. He accumulated the impression, as he studied the high arching sky of pulsing azure, of a life to which he was foreign going implacably on. It was late, he suspected, for the migration of birds. But he could see wild-fowl still heading north, some in dusky and ever-changing clouds and others in ordered phalanxes, battling their way up to their brooding grounds, eiders and wavies, blue geese and whistlers, now and then even a swan with outstretched neck and the sunlight gleaming white on its wide-spread wings. But on and on they flew, crowding up to the sloughs and tarns of the Arctic silence which their mating-calls would so soon make voluble.

It gave him a sense of life clamoring for perpetuation. And that picture of the living so blindly set on escaping obliteration remained with him even as he stood watching an old man crouched behind a hardhead carving foolish little figures out of walrus-ivory.

It repeated itself as he wandered on to where the brown-handed women were weaving babiche and working on sealskins. He watched them as they gnawed soft, between their strong white teeth, the sewing edges of the stiffened hides. Their clothing, in many cases, was ragged and patched, but in every curve and contour of their crouching bodies he found vitality asserting itself.

It disturbed him a little to find that he preferred watching the younger women, whose sinewed bare shoulders shone like dusky marble in the sunlight. He made out the girl Noonaga among them, intent on her task of slitting and smoking fish. She smiled at him shyly and quite without rancor. But it piqued him to discover that the natives’ lighthearted talk ceased like a bird-chorus on each occasion when he came to the edge of a group. So he finally gave his attention to the romping and cub-like children. He remembered, as he watched them playing at archery with bows fashioned from a whale’s rib, that his duffel-bags held wealth enough to make them happy for a month, once they had learned to know and respect him.

Then, tired of smells, he ventured farther along the open beach and regarded the huddled village from a distance. He told himself that it was an empty, unremunerative place for a white man. The inhabitants impressed him as a ragged, rootless lot. Even the smell of them was an affront to a civilized nose. And the tragedy of their fate, he decided, reposed in the fact that they all remained so child-minded. The poor devils were satisfied with their lot. Yet their intelligence, outside their woodcraft knowledge, was obviously that of a ten-year-old child. They didn’t know what they were missing, any more than Winslow knew what he was missing.

The idle white man was startled to see the youth known as Askim running down the talus-slope, shouting “Culelulewak!” as he went. And the peace promptly went out of the village. For a whale, Stendal learned, had wandered into the shallower waters of the Inlet.

That discovery sent a flurry of excitement through every hut and topek in the settlement. Even the women and children took up the shrill cry of “Culelulewak!” as spears and harpoons were assembled, as kayaks were catamaraned and as a bevy of battered old canoes were launched.

Stendal, staring seaward from a shore-rock, could see the oddly assorted craft creep out over the green water until they were merely bobbing black specks on the groundswell. They reminded him, as they divided and waited and maneuvered about their indolently heaving quarry, of alert-bodied water-insects clustered about a bit of half-submerged offal. But they seemed to know their business. He could hear their cries, thinned by distance, when the harpoons finally struck home. He could see them converge and work in unison as the ropes of plaited hide ran out and the floundering and lashing race of exhaustion got under way. It seemed to last for a long time. But he could see peace descend on their commotion as they clustered still closer about a floating dark mass, now inert, and united their lines for the slow tow homeward.

It was a long haul and a laborious one. But it was a procession of triumph, made vocal by the singing voices and the shouts of the hide-clad women scattered along the beach. Even the children, succumbing to that general infection of excitement, danced and waved with delight. And Stendal realized, once the grounded and slow-heaving mass was invaded by the busy blubber-knives, that this windfall meant unexpected fuel and food to the Innuits. It was their harvest time. The vineyard of the sea had given them a good crop and their hearts were light. When Noonaga hurried past him, holding a flitch of raw whale-meat to her mouth, he felt a wave of revulsion at the thought that teeth so pearl-like could chew on food so repulsive. But her smile, as she went by with her tidbit, was one of rapt-eyed happiness. And as Stendal stood telling himself that one had to understand a people before one could fathom their tastes old Ootah solemnly informed the white stranger that there would be a mask-dance that night.

“What is a mask-dance?” asked Stendal.

“You come see him,” suggested Ootah, not without his pride in the esoteric.

But Stendal had no intention of wasting time on village orgies. He had no wish, he told himself, to sit in on the tribal antics and inhale the body-odors of excited pagans. He had seen that sort of thing in other countries. And it had always ended in the depressing conviction that civilization should keep its doors shut on its past.

But the twilight loneliness of the little coast village, emptied of its usual evening groups, brought hesitation to the solitary white man. His feeling, in the face of the obvious preparations about him, was not unlike that of a small boy shut up at home on circus day. It made him seem more than ever an outsider. He was conscious of missing something, something of obvious importance to the people scurrying from topek to topek all around him. And a newborn resolution to understand those people a little better, to look at life from their standpoint, to study them at both their work and their play, eventually prompted him to change his mind. He decided to see what he could of Innuit ritual.

He was late, however, in arriving at the hut which had been cleared for the mask-dance. He could hear, even before stooping down to creep in through the low doorway, much shouting and stamping and periodic bursts of laughter. In that laughter he found something fortifying. It struck him as artless and childlike, with little of the sybaritic in its careless-noted choruses. It seemed so innocent and abandoned, as he invaded their odorous cave of closely packed bodies, that he felt less of an intruder as he blinked about him. And no one seemed to notice him as he pushed his way in through the crowded quadrangle of bare and shining shoulders. The only person who reacted to his presence was the girl Noonaga, who smiled briefly and moved a little to one side, as though making space for him on the fringe of her folded ahtee. But Stendal, for reasons of his own, crossed to the farther wall, along which the men of the village were lined up. And even before he had seated himself the girl’s eyes had wandered back to the two grotesque figures going through their grotesque movements at the center of the hut.

Stendal failed to understand the drama which these two masked figures were enacting. It was, apparently, conflict over a woman who crouched half-naked at their feet. But it came to an unexpected end when the taller of the two contestants suddenly drew a knife and sank it into the protuberant breast of his enemy.

That thrust, Stendal saw, was followed by a sudden and startling gush of red blood through the pierced kooletah. The white man’s heart missed a beat as he watched the crimson flood, cascading downward, stain the clothing of the masked figure and darken the floor where he swayed. The shouts and laughter rose to a frenzy. And Stendal, swallowing hard, waited for the man to fall.

But the figure in the mask remained on its feet. And the white man breathed easier when he discovered that the darkening gore came from a concealed animal bladder which had been filled, for the occasion, with fresh-drawn seal-blood.

While the stage was being cleared for the next act Stendal looked more deliberately about at his surroundings. The four walls of the building, he saw, were crowded with rapt-eyed men and women, leaving the center of the hut floor clear, not unlike the dancing floor of a night-club. The inadequate whale-oil lamps filled the air with a thin haze of smoke. This haze, he found, not only made the shadows unexpectedly interesting but added a touch of mystery to the serried bare shoulders and the dark-crowned heads. He liked especially the women in that half-light. Even the fetor of close-packed humanity, after the desolation of the outer village, was not altogether repellent. It at least solaced one with its thin sense of companionship.

But his attention went back to the masked performer, a newcomer at the center of the room. The mask, he felt, was the most important feature of the gesticulating figure in its shaggy kooletah and worn skin boots. For masks in some way remained the symbol of things that were occult and terrifying. Primitive man had elaborated them for his tangled purposes of worship and ceremonial. Modern man had even adapted them to the subtler ends of the dance and the theater. The mask could depersonalize its wearer. It could carry a suggestion of anything from the inhuman to the superhuman. It could be either an instrument of terror or a short-cut to the ludicrous. And the Eskimo still understood its significance.

For the mask on the dancer confronting Stendal seemed a combination of both the occult and the humorous. It was of black sealskin, tufted with whiskers of white dog-fur. Imposed on it were white sealskin eyeballs crowned with shaggy eyebrows of husky-hide. The gaping mouth was represented by a double row of serrated skin-strips as white as the staring eyeballs. It looked monstrous and solemn and misshapen. And its wearer, hopping and gyrating about in his skin boots, assumed postures that were equally monstrous.

The white man could not entirely follow the dramatic pantomime, but he could see shivers of delight, followed by periodic bursts of laughter, pass through the intent-eyed onlookers. Stendal realized just how essentially pagan in content it was when he discovered that the Innuit mirth hinged largely on the movements of a ludicrously exaggerated phallus, made of coiled rags and controlled by leather thongs hidden under the performer’s dickey-hood. And the aboriginal nature of the ritual seemed confirmed when the performance, ending in a grotesque pretense at defecation, brought a prolonged storm of applause from the assembled men and women.

Stendal did not join in that applause. He sat depressed by a feeling that too many doors had been opened on a faraway past, a past that were best forgotten.

Yet as he sat there he felt strangely transplanted to the childhood of the world. For the grotesqueries of the masked figure was followed by a general dance, bringing a sense of climax to the proceedings. Men and women, bare to the waist, danced together in two ragged lines, filling the air with the exhalations of their sebaceous glands. They crooned as they flexed and shuffled, accentuating the torso-movements until they became more and more aphrodisiac in character. They seemed lost in a world of their own, a twilight world of twilight desire. The dust thickened and the sweat stood out on the gyrating white shoulders. The women, even more than the men, took on a sort of camp-meeting frenzy, obviously drunk with the ever-accelerating movement and song.

When they reached the point of exhaustion they separated into sexes, dropping back along the opposing walls, where, in the blue-gray air, white-shouldered males confronted white-shouldered females. They divided into two huddled lines, oddly expectant, still crooning under their breath. There seemed something seminal, to the watching Stendal, in the smell of the heavy air. His eye avoided the rounded white breasts of the women. He steadied himself with the thought, as he studied the waiting faces, that they were still something between animal and child, without reticence and without shame. And that conviction left him oddly poised in the abyss of time. He had a renewed feeling of being hurled back unnumbered centuries into the childhood of the race.

He was conscious of a heightened expectancy as old Ootah handed the stock of a broken sledge-whip to the still dancing masked shaman. But Stendal, who had looked for some sadistic exhibition of flesh-flailing, was surprised to see the masked figure hand the whip-stock on to one of the crooning braves, who passed along the line of waiting women, and touched one of them lightly on the shoulder with the whip-butt. She smiled responsively and twice stroked the bare shoulder-flesh of the man, who handed the whip to still another brave as his arm went possessively about the woman of his choice. The crowd, with a cry that seemed half envy and half approval, drew back from the doorway, leaving a path along which the abruptly mated couple retreated and vanished.

It was not until the maneuver had been repeated a dozen times and a dozen smiling couples had disappeared from sight that Stendal realized the orgiastic nature of the ceremony. Partners for the night, apparently, were being dealt out like cards from a deck. He was, he remembered, in the land of the wife traders. He had heard echoes of such things, but he had never entirely believed them. And now, in a way, he was part of them.

He sat disturbed by the thought that he was accepting it all so quietly. It was, clearly enough, contrary to his established ideals of conduct. It was both socially and biologically wrong. It was even basically revolting. Yet it failed to revolt him as it ought. He questioned his right, in fact, to judge these people by his white man’s standards. There was something disarming, he conceded, in the pagan candor of it all. They were, apparently, making an effort to bring some forlorn color and rapture into their tragically restricted lives. They took what they wanted, without shame or subterfuge.

When the shaman offered Stendal the whip-stock the white man drew back, shaking his head from side to side. He saw, from the wave of disapproval that went over the watching faces, that he had disappointed both the men and the women who remained in the dance-hut. He noticed the crestfallen look that crept into the eyes of the girl Noonaga, whose rounded shoulders were a gardenia-white in the dim light. He was glad when he saw the whip taken up by a dusky-skinned brave beside him. Yet he was equally glad when he perceived the Innuit pass by the slender-bodied Noonaga and touch the breast of a plumper and darker woman, who, after twice stroking his flesh, disappeared with him in the outer darkness.

Stendal knew he didn’t belong there. But it was the duty of the traveler, he maintained, to suspend judgment before the unexpected. He had seen enough out-of-the-way corners of the world to realize that local conditions usually accounted for local eccentricities. And if this was the custom of the country, it had survived because it had filled some biological need of its rock-bound background. It was more naive than the “bundling” of the earlier New Englander, but it perhaps served, in its cruder form, the same social ends. It provided the unmated male with a chance to decide on the mate of his eventual choice. The appetites of that male, in any race, remained about the same. These people still preferred to eat their meat raw. And just as they were unable to bury their dead, in that rock-ribbed country, so they considered it unnecessary to bury their primal impulses of the body. They left them in the open, covered by a little cairn of ceremonial.

And it was not for the outsider to say whether it was right or wrong. Such things, he supposed, were still a matter of geography. And they deserved any passing happiness that they could wring from the passing moment. The enormity of the thing was apparent only when it was placed side by side with the dissembling mores of his own modern world. And he was no longer, he reminded himself as he stared through the smoke-misted air, in that age-old world of hesitations and inhibitions. The clock of Time had been turned back to the age of bronze and the arrow of stone.

It left him strangely detached and uncertain of himself. He was a little disturbed, too, by his want of horror for what was manifestly horrible. But one got used to things. And one couldn’t expect too much of people who still mixed ptarmigan-dung with their dinner meat or feasted on the half-digested moss from the stomach of a slaughtered caribou. But they seemed to thrive on it. For as he glanced across the hut at the crooning Noonaga he saw that her shoulders were well-rounded. Her slightly parted lips, he also noticed, were moist and amazingly red, as red as fresh seal-blood, proclaiming the vitality of the swaying and close-sinewed body that seemed, as he gazed at it, so vulnerable and so defenseless in its childish surrender to desires beyond its control.

He nursed an impulse to move closer to her and question her about this strange rite of abandonment. The couples who had mated for the night, departing pair by pair from the crooning circle, had left only a handful of women in the hut, one of them gaunt and pock-marked, another gross and oleaginous. They were without the air of mystery, Stendal felt, that hung over the now silenced and waiting Noonaga, whose head drooped a little as the masked shaman spoke to her in her native tongue.

What he said Stendal had no means of knowing. But when he looked up he saw the whip-stock being held out in front of him. He shrank back from it, once more shaking his head from side to side.

“You mus’ take woman,” old Ootah said from the shadowy gloom of a hut-corner.

Stendal’s glance went back to Noonaga, as though looking for some help from her in his predicament. But the seal-brown eyes under the dusky brows regarded him with a look of reproof touched with longing. That gaze, as artless as a child’s, discomfited the white man with a sense of inadequacy, as though a challenge had been flung down to his manhood and this thing called civilization had left him too white-livered to accept it.

“You like woman,” he heard old Ootah altogether unnecessarily proclaiming from his hut-corner.

Stendal, with a quickening pulse, stared at the milky-breasted Noonaga. Her shadowed and seal-brown eyes, he saw, were still studying his face. “Take me,” they said, as plain as the spoken words.

But the white man shrank back from the waiting whip-stock. The uncouth old Ootah, in his way, was right. Every man liked a woman. It was, Stendal remembered as he still again gazed through the smoke-mist at Noonaga’s rounded and milk-white shoulders, the sign and confirmation of his manhood. And in Rome, he told himself as a tingling wave of recklessness eddied through his body, one did as the Romans do. But he was not a child of the tundra. He had been trained to foresee consequences. And it would be easier for them all, he felt, if he were able to talk with the artlessly smiling Noonaga. His generation, he remembered, had a fondness for talking about its emotions. It toyed with love, after a fashion of its own, in its plays and stories and pictures. It seemed to find pleasure in embroidering the expression of the emotion that was more subtle than the emotion itself. Perhaps, in the end, his fellow moderns let something filter away from the fundamental relation of man with woman.

For Noonaga, he could see, was young and ardent. She was not without what men might call beauty. She was also free, as free as the Arctic hares that loped about the tundra rocks. She cried out for fulfillment. And she was unafraid of anything that life might do to her.

Stendal, wiping a dew of moisture from his forehead, told himself that courage, in the end, always ought to justify itself. Yet even as he took the whip-stock and rose to his feet he made an effort to persuade himself that it was a form of intoxication, that they had clouded his brain with their barbarities. All the blood in his body seemed to withdraw from his hands and feet and crowd to his heart as he crossed the hut floor and touched the waiting Noonaga on the shoulder.

He could feel her hand, thrust in under his collar, twice caress the flesh of his neck. She leaned against him so heavily that he had to support her by placing an arm about her bare waist. His fingers could feel her small ribs, curved and slender like a kitten’s. The sound that escaped her lips was a purring sound, not unlike that of a cat which has found its cream.

She was leading him, he discovered, toward the door, where she waited, in dutiful silence, for him to creep through first. But once they were out in the pallid northern darkness she seemed more sure of herself. Her movement was frankly possessive as she locked her arms about him, drawing his face down so that she could press her own soft-skinned face against his cheek.

Stendal lifted her chin, and, in the etherealizing twilight, tried to study her features. The one thing he was conscious of was her lips, which looked dark against the wide oval of her face.

She seemed surprised and uncertain what to do when he stooped down and kissed her on the mouth, after the manner of the white man. But it was plainly not repugnant to her.

She drew back from his repeated kiss, however, and led him by the hand across the uneven shore-rocks. The topeks were very quiet. From one, in the distance, Stendal caught the sound of muffled laughter. In another he saw where a seal-oil lamp was put out, leaving the topek an abrupt cone of darkness. He felt, as he stopped to stare about the sleeping village, once more fantastically detached from time. Along the lonely rim of the North he could see a faint playing of the Lights, fluttering auras of green and opal and rose. Out in the Inlet he could see the stranded iceberg, its rounded gables glittering in the faintly misted starlight. He could smell the night-wind, sharp with the tang of seawater, shot through with the sullen and ever-present odor of seal and fish-oil, and still again tangled up with the creosotic aroma of tanned skins. And from the ghostly-white bare shoulders beside him he could detect a less definite odor of warm and pulsing flesh, the faintly pebbled and acrid flesh of the seal-eater. It startled him a little to discover that this odor was no longer repugnant to him.

That brought him to a stop. He could hear the Innuit woman’s small sound of desire, half wail and half coo, as he stood beside her in the shadow of a swaying topek door. And he realized, as he placed his hand on the crow-black hair of the head resting against his shoulder, that life and love was a simple thing to her and her kind. She knew nothing of that outer tribe who housed themselves in igloos of stone and steel and complicated their lives with the taboos and obligations that grew out of a need to protect both their property and their progeny. Her childlike body, crowding in against his because of the cold, knew only its today. It had no yesterdays and no tomorrows. And still again the upturned face in the starlight was saying, as plain as words, “Take me.”

But Stendal, at the moment, was thinking of his friend Owen Winslow. And the thought of Winslow sent a quick and curdling chill through his body. It was because of their appetites that men went down to destruction. It brought back to him something he had heard aboard the Baffin Belle, the Eskimo way of killing wolves by tying sinew about pointed strips of baleen bent together and buried in chunks of meat. The wolves, in their hunger, swallowed this meat whole. But, once swallowed, the acids of the stomach dissolved the sinew. And that released the sharp-pointed whale-bone, which straightened out and punctured the intestines, eventually producing death. And in much the same way men, in their blind appeasing of the hungers of the body, were mortally wounded by the instruments of their delight.

Stendal, breathing deep, moved a little away from the crow-black head against his body. The cold night air, keen as a razor blade on his face, tended to steady and sober him. He stood abruptly back, watching the Lights. And as he watched he seemed to feel something solid under his feet again. He caught at the continuity of life as a drowning man catches at a raft-edge. He was, he remembered, a stranger there. He was an outsider from another world, a world that lay beyond the equally lonely rim of the South where there were no Lights. He seemed to find his place in time again. The village of topeks all about him became ghostly and unimportant. He squared his shoulders and drew a still deeper breath. It was almost a breath of deliverance.

“What is it?” he asked in a hardened voice. For he could see where Noonaga, kneeling in her topek doorway, was reaching out with her bare arm for him. She was, he realized, quite shameless. She even locked her two hands about his knees, pressing her bowed head against his rough trouser-leg. He could not understand what she was saying. But her posture was one of such utter humility that it made it hard for him to be as stern as he had intended.

He stooped and loosened the arms that had linked themselves about his knees. The bewildered small face of the Innuit girl looked oddly white in the starlight. But even whiter, beyond the distant palings of juniper-slabs, stood the wall-tent that marked his remembered sleeping-place.

“You are a nice girl,” he heard himself saying, “but this is about as far as we can go.”

Noonaga called out to him, almost shrilly, as he backed resolutely away. He felt safer when he was beyond the reach of the arms that looked ivory-white in the uncertain light. And once more he filled his lungs with a deeper breath.

“This isn’t what I came North for,” he said, more to himself than to the girl who remained kneeling in the topek door as he turned and walked away in the misted starlight.

Winslow, on his return with his salmon-catch, gave little attention to his guest. But that guest could see the long-legged white man striding back and forth on the beach-slope and talking to the assembled Innuits in no uncertain terms. And even when the harangue was over Winslow absented himself from the hut between the palings for the rest of the day, apparently to give his anger time to burn itself out.

“What’s the matter with you?” demanded Stendal, oppressed by the grim silence in which the other had eaten his supper.

“Do you need to ask me that?” retorted Winslow. “You know as well as I do that these people had one of their pot-latches last night. And that’s something I’ve been trying to stop.” He waited until the silent and veiled-eyed Tooloona had left the table. “Did you take part in it?”

“I was a spectator,” acknowledged Stendal, “but not a participant.”

“They don’t pull that stuff,” proclaimed the other, “when I’m around. They wouldn’t dare. It’s that old pagan, Ootah, who steers them back to that sort of thing. He stands for the old order. I can make some impression on the younger folks. But Ootah is too set in his ways.”

“Can you expect to get far,” asked Stendal, “with savages who still rub noses together and trade wives?”

“I’ve stopped that sort of thing,” Winslow proclaimed with a sharp gesture of disapproval. “There’s no wife trading around here. And I don’t allow married women at a mask-dance. And there are a few other things I’m not going to allow.”

“You have quite a job on your hands,” observed the other. The dryness of his tone caused Winslow to sit silent for a moment or two. His hands were clenched when he looked up.

“For two hundred years,” he said with an emphasizing fist-thump on the table-end, “the white man gave the Eskimo the rottenest kind of a deal. He cruised along these northern coasts, taking their furs at a tenth of their value, corrupting the men with their alcohol and tainting the women with their lewdness.”

“It takes two to play at that game,” Stendal reminded him.

“What game?”

“The game that seems to go on wherever sailors get shore leave.”

“Perhaps it does,” acknowledged Winslow, “but there’s nothing noble about introducing debauchery into honest and simple-minded settlements. Even today, in the coast-towns where the white men put in, they speak of an Eskimo girl as being ‘schooner trained.’ That means she’s been the plaything of a band of sex-starved sailors, unclean of mind and debased in outlook. And it’s only because she’s so exceptionally vital that she survived such treatment. She’s remained immune, in some way, even to their diseases. I don’t know what the physiology of the thing is. But it’s more than diet and environment and racial background. It’s more than the rigor of the North that naturally weeds out the incompetents. It’s even more than the fact that her manner of life remains biologically sound. It’s just because she is what she is.”

“Well, what is she?” demanded Stendal. He was wondering, as he spoke, why the image of Noonaga refused to remove itself from his memory.

“In some ways,” was Winslow’s deliberated answer, “she’s the finest specimen of sheer womanhood this old world has to offer us. Look at her teeth! I never knew what perfect teeth were until I saw an Eskimo woman. Look at her, if you like, as an engine, how she can keep going without ever getting tired and keep going on fuel that would kill us whites in a month. And don’t forget that she can reproduce without pain and suckle her offspring two or three years if she has to and stand cold and hardship and remain lighthearted through her months of polar darkness. She’s never selfish and you’ll never find her complaining.”

“Couldn’t we say as much for the husky she-dog?” questioned Stendal with his slightly asperous laugh. And Winslow, for a moment or two, sat coldly studying his pallid-faced companion.

“We can’t afford to sneer at the husky dog,” he finally observed. “He too is a marvelous piece of machinery. He does what no other animal can do, pulling his five hundred pounds of freight day after day, on half a frozen fish, and sleeping in a sub-zero snow-bank at night. And he too asks damned little for his services. But the Innuit woman is more than an animal. She’s the only woman in the world who can take sealskin and sew it together with a waterproof seam. But she has a good deal more than manual dexterity. She’s both honest and understanding. She has a quick sense of humor and she can be a good companion. And, outside a tribal custom that has been grossly exaggerated, she can be both loyal and loving.”

Stendal’s smile remained a restricted one.

“After what I saw last night,” acknowledged the man from Outside, “I could never claim her to be without the gift of affection.”

“Don’t judge her by that,” barked Winslow. “That’s as unfair as judging your own town by its New Year’s orgy in Times Square. But since we’re on the subject I’ll concede that she has her own ars erotica. That’s imposed on her, I suppose, by her environment. She has to be warmer-blooded, in a country like this, just as she has to wear warmer clothing. You can write it down to Nature’s plan for keeping the race going. Where the soil is thin there must be no mistake about planting the seed. I’m not medical man enough to know how true it is that the Innuit vulva is more prominent and prehensile than the white woman’s. I don’t even think it’s important. And we’re healthier and happier when our thoughts don’t linger too long below the waist-line. I’d rather direct my thinking to their philosophic courage and their trick of not thinking when the occasion calls for it. They say ‘Kooyanna ayornamut,’ which amounts to saying ‘Why bother, since it can’t be helped?’ ”

“Which they must say,” observed Stendal, “quite frequently.”

“But you can’t hope to understand them,” contended the other, “until you understand their background. Where we’d say ‘Good-by,’ for example, you’ll find them saying ‘Apor niak-inatit.’ That, oddly enough, happens to mean ‘Don’t bump your head.’ But that bit of local politeness wouldn’t mean a great deal to you unless you happened to remember that the hut or igloo or meetchwop in which they’re living always has, for local reasons, an exceptionally low doorway.”

Stendal glanced out along the disorderly and topek-littered shore-slope.

“And exceptionally limited bathing facilities,” he promptly appended.

Winslow’s movement was one of patience maintained at a cost.

“They don’t bathe as we bathe,” he conceded, “yet they aren’t actually unclean. They have a body odor all their own, because of their diet, I suppose, but once you get to like ’em you like the smell of them. And they are so gentle and happy and open-hearted you can’t help liking them. You can’t help envying them. They even make me sit up and wonder, sometimes, why we should regard ourselves as a superior race.”

“Then why,” asked Stendal, “are you trying to reform them?”

“I’m not trying to reform them,” was Winslow’s prompt retort. “I may have had the impulse, when I first came up here, to make them over in my own lordly white man’s way. But it wasn’t long before I realized anything like that would be foolish. They couldn’t, of course, ever be industrialized. But I am trying to widen their margin of safety, to build up their reserves and improve their trading conditions and make them surer of their catch of polar bear and fox and baleen. I’m keeping alcohol out of the colony and teaching them the meaning of fly-nets and tinware and tools. I’ve a few of them, who are clever at carving walrus-ivory, making tooghak animal figures for which there should be a real market. And I’m even teaching them how to play baseball. But I’ve no delusions about being a second Grenfell up here. I’ve no intention of changing either their faith or their folkways. I’m trying to find out, in fact, what they’ve got in their make-up that’s missing in mine. For I’m beginning to see that they’re as good as I am. In many ways they’re a damned sight better.”

“Better at what?” demanded Stendal. It was only natural, he remembered, for any such refugee from the white man’s world to bolster up his case by arguments against the life he had left behind him.

“At getting their human share of happiness out of existence,” was Winslow’s low-toned reply. “Our civilization, you may recall, hasn’t been such a howling success this last fifteen or twenty years.”

“Perhaps not,” retorted the other. “But it’s good enough for me.”

“I suppose so,” said Winslow as his melancholy brown eye bathed his visitor in a stare of appraisal faintly touched with derision.

But Stendal remained immune to both the stare and the special pleading.

“We may, I acknowledge, have been a bit groggy from our World War knock-out. But we haven’t taken the count. And out of all that ferment we’ll work our way to better and finer things.”

Winslow’s laugh was quietly contemptuous.

“When it does,” he proclaimed, “I’ll come back to it. But just at present I prefer this simpler and saner life where you don’t get lost in the machinery of living.”

The accumulating suspicion that Winslow, instead of running away from a woman, had run away from a social order, did not add to his guest’s happiness.

“But you can’t, of course, escape the fact that you’re a deserter,” Stendal quietly averred.

Winslow’s rubicund face widened with one of its careless laughs.

“You can call it that if you like,” he allowed. “But don’t overlook how the rat that swims away from the sinking ship has a right to his hunger for survival.”

“What was the sinking ship?” demanded Stendal.

“Life as I was living it,” was the other’s unexpectedly passionate protest. “You still can’t see it, but it was hell on earth. And I got tired of going through the motions. I had to chuck it or go screwy.”

Stendal refused to feel sorry for the rough-clad and desolation-crowned figure confronting him. He was there for a purpose and that purpose was not to be forgotten.

“And you solved your problem by joining up with a lot of lousy blubber-eaters?”

Winslow’s narrowed eye rested on the intruder.

“There’s not a louse in this settlement,” he quietly announced, “unless it came with you.” Then, conscious of Stendal’s deepened color, he lapsed into silence, slumped back in his walrus-hide chair. “I’ve no delusions about these people,” he resumed in a tone of achieved tolerance. “And their tastes don’t always coincide with mine. I still can’t cotton to the cylinders of frozen marrow they crack out of caribou-legs. Yet to the Eskimo, of course, they’re a delicacy. I don’t like the bud and grass salad they dig half-digested and smoking out of a deer’s stomach and mix with metchek-oil and down as eagerly as a white man downs his broccoli. I’ve even seen them gouge out a frozen caribou eye and enjoy nibbling on it. But that’s not so important. The thing to remember is that these people are still people. They’re not either more noble or ignoble, in the long run, than our own self-satisfied race. We like to call them happy and carefree children. But they’re not children. They’re desperate men and women, at heart, doing the best they can within their limitations and wanting to survive as much as you or I do. And in doing it they remain both incredibly lighthearted and incredibly hardy. You’ve got to have valor, in a country like this. And around here, you may be sure, the weaklings are soon weeded out.”

“You mean the physical weaklings?”

Winslow was conscious of the implication.

“And also the moral ones,” he quietly asserted. “Their code is simple, but it’s rigorous enough to keep things going. As I’ve already said, they don’t lie; they don’t steal; they’re never jealous. And they respect one another’s rights.”

“But not their women,” ventured Stendal with his acidulated smile.

“Why do you say that?” demanded his host.

“Because I happened to sit in on that mask-dance last night. And it was about as bacchanalian a thing as I’ve ever encountered.”

Winslow’s face grew grim.

“That should never have happened,” he averred. He sat for a silent moment, frowning down at the sleeping-stage. “But didn’t you have a judge out in Denver who preached loud and long for trial marriages for your white race?”

“He was never taken very seriously,” said the emissary from the South. “And the sanctity of marriage still persists in the country of your origin.”

Winslow obviously refused to be goaded into anger.

“The mating habits of the Innuit differ considerably from ours,” he went on with a paraded effort at deliberation, “but they have their own mores and their own tribal taboos. And they pretty well keep to them. A wife, it’s true, can be bought here. And a wife, if the arrangement doesn’t prove satisfactory, can be exchanged. But much the same thing takes place in your white man’s world, as I remember it, only the process is considerably more complicated.”

“A good woman, I suppose, costs even more than a good sleigh-dog?”

Winslow could afford to smile at the note of acid in the other’s voice.

“I bought Tooloona for six blankets,” he announced with provocative matter-of-factness. “For six blankets and a satchel-phonograph and seventeen rather badly worn records.”

“Permanently?” asked Stendal in an effort to match casualness with casualness.

“Time alone can answer that.”

“Did you buy her from the tribe?” asked Stendal, making no effort to conceal his lip-curl of scorn.

“No, I bought her from Askim,” was the indifferent-noted reply.

It plainly impressed the newcomer as an altogether unsavory bit of business.

“What,” he interrogated, “does Askim say about it?”

“What can he say?” was Winslow’s counter-interrogation. “Askim is a good hunter. He gets a fair catch of white fox every winter. But I was the Angarooka who could give her ten rings and a cook-stove and real glass in her window instead of just bladder panes.”

Stendal suspected his companion of a pretense toward materialism not entirely justified by the facts.

“And Askim is willing to accept that situation?”

“An Eskimo,” answered Winslow, “usually sticks to his bargain. He probably knows that Tooloona was too good for him. But I’ve promised him an outboard motor, next spring, if he behaves himself.”

Stendal sat considering this.

“And what will happen,” he questioned, “if he doesn’t behave himself?”

His companion’s powerful shoulders lifted in a shrug of indifference.

“I keep my eye on things,” he casually proclaimed.

But Stendal’s perplexity was not to be shrugged aside. It was involved with instincts too deep-seated to be lightly silenced.

“And this woman you bought for six blankets, does she regard herself as your wife?”

“She is my wife, according to the law of the land.”

Stendal’s resentment, for all his air of impassivity, was slowly approaching the boiling-point.

“Where does that leave Celina?” he demanded.

Winslow, after one abrupt body-movement, steadied himself with an effort.

“Celina’s world is not my world,” he quietly proclaimed.

“But in the eyes of the law you’re still her husband.”

“Whose law?”

It was Stendal’s turn to consider a challenge.

“Well, how about the law of the Dominion under whose protection you still live? Suppose a Royal Mounted patrol were sent up here? Would they put their stamp of approval on what is so plainly an adulterous relationship?”

Winslow laughed as he cut his plug and refilled his pipe.

“They don’t seem to bother us much,” he casually announced. “Even the missionaries leave us pretty much to ourselves.” His smile, dying away, left him with a more granitic jaw-line. “And it’s the missionaries, I’ve noticed, who usually make life more difficult for these people.”

“And you place me, I take it, in that category?” inquired the indignant Stendal.

“I know you came here on a mission,” replied Winslow. “And I also know you won’t succeed any more than the other missionaries do.”

Stendal accepted the blow. But with a pertinacity all his own he refused to be downed by it. His smile, as he viewed the man who had so blindly and selfishly fought for his freedom, was a wintry one.

“It’s all right to get elbow-room,” he conceded. “But why knock people right and left to do it?”

“Who,” demanded Winslow, “has been knocked right and left?”

“How about Celina?” was Stendal’s equally prompt counter-question. And the huge-bodied man confronting him sat silent so long that Stendal assumed his opponent was not so impervious to attack as he pretended.

But Winslow’s voice, when he spoke, was unexpectedly quiet.

“I’ve no quarrel with Celina. She’s a wonderful woman, in many ways.”

“She is,” proclaimed Stendal.

“She’s a fine woman,” pursued the other, his voice becoming more ruminative. “Perhaps she’s just a little too fine.”

“Certainly too fine,” retorted Stendal, “for what you confronted her with.”

Winslow’s gaze, as it swept slowly back to his guest, held a touch of weariness that was both definite and dismissive.

“Perhaps,” he suggested, “we’ll get along better by remaining urbane.”

When Stendal wakened late, after a none too restful night, he found the little Innuit settlement already astir. The natives were busy down on the beach, cutting up the last of their whale-meat. He could hear the shouts of the men and the singing and laughter of the women as they worked. And plainly in command of them, as they splashed about in the sunlit shallows, was Winslow. He stood knee-deep in the beach-water, rugged and rubicund, looking oddly king-like in the midst of the shorter-bodied Eskimos.

Stendal resented that touch of the imperial almost as much as he resented the childish lightheartedness of the natives who contributed to it. A lost soul, he contended, had no right to any such majestical indifference to his fate. Winslow, without knowing it, was a sick man, a sick man who must in some way be saved. He was a victim of his environment. And to turn away from him in his predicament would be, in the final count, about as selfish as turning away from a man in the throes of delirium. He had to be rescued, even in the face of his own unreasonableness. He had to be saved, not only for his own sake, but also for Celina’s.

Yet what, Stendal asked himself, would Celina get out of any such rescue? What woman who claimed to be any better than an animal would be satisfied with the soiled and tattered remnants of a man’s life? And what, when one came to think of it, would even a duly repentant Winslow have to offer a woman who already had so much?

These questions were repeated, an hour or two later, when he saw the village dogs turned loose on what remained of the whale carcass. Life, he concluded as he watched the smeared muzzles so hungrily tearing at a mass of useless guts and offal, was still largely a matter of appetite. It was the Laodiceans who seemed to lose out. The important thing, apparently, was to want something and want it prodigiously. For it was only out of the tangled morass of wanting that the final swamp-orchid of joy emerged and bloomed.

But Celina’s emissary began to see that the once clear path of duty could be obstructed by the blowdowns and deadfalls of difficulty. For Winslow, absorbed in his tasks of the day, wasted no time on his idle and restless guest. In his comings and goings about the village he ignored the hovering white man, who was made no happier by the promptness with which Noonaga sheered away at his repeated approach. And even when the two men came together for their evening meal Winslow surrounded himself with a cuttlefish cloud of preoccupation. He sat in silence, with his abstracted eye on Tooloona as he ate.

Stendal, when the meal was ended, looked frowningly about the shack.

“I should think,” he finally ventured, “you’d have a radio and keep in touch with the world.”

“I’ve a world of my own here,” retorted Winslow. “And one’s enough.”

Stendal stared at the man so shut up in his shell.

“It impresses me as rather a restricted one.”

“Of course it does,” averred his big-bodied host. “And it always will to the outsider. And I imagine you’ll insist on remaining an outsider.”

Stendal, conscious of the wall of frustration surrounding him, found a sharpness creeping into his voice.

“To such an extent,” he retorted, “that if I could radio for a plane I’d go back tomorrow.”

Winslow remained silent a moment.

“It’s always more difficult,” he quietly acknowledged, “when you decline to participate. You’re refusing, of course, to accept these friends of mine. And that, naturally, will never get you far.”

“You don’t expect me to put on mukluks and mate up with one of their women, do you?” Stendal demanded with altogether unnecessary heat.

Winslow’s laugh was brief and slightly contemptuous.

“You might do worse,” he proclaimed.

“I prefer remaining civilized,” retorted Stendal.

Winslow laughed.

“Don’t run away with the idea you’ve got a patent on civilization. It’s only, after all, a way of getting along. And I happen to get along with Tooloona, up here, for much the same reason that I get along best with wolverine fur as a fringe for my parka-hood.”

“I don’t follow you,” said Stendal.

“Of course you don’t. But if you were a little more of an old-timer you’d know that wolverine skin gives us the only fur that never catches and holds the hoarfrost around your face. It doesn’t freeze there. It has more oil in it, I suppose, than other fur. But the important thing is that it leaves me free.”

“Free for what?” exacted Stendal. And still again he was confronted by the other’s careless-noted laughter.

“Free to throw away my freedom where it’ll hurt least,” was the altogether unsatisfactory reply.

Stendal experienced a pang of homelessness. He felt, of a sudden, very much alone in the world. His brooding gaze turned from the smoke of the topek fires to the slate-green Inlet where the glaciated saddlebacks stood black against the lowering sun.

“It’s just about this time, back in New York,” he finally observed, “that the express elevators will be filling up and the evening papers will be out and the Avenue buses and the ferry-boats will be carrying the city crowds homeward.”

“What about it?” inquired the other, declining to be infected by his fellow exile’s emotion.

“Nothing much. But I always had a liking for that tumbling and happy ebb-tide of toilers, of men and women turning homeward on a million wheels. And men and women I can know and understand.”

Winslow lighted his pipeful of trade-plug and put his great feet up on a chair-back.

“You’re welcome to ’em,” he asserted. “You can have it all—concrete and clatter and dust and carbon-monoxide. And stinking subways and street-crowds and scorched pavements and ash-cans and three-cent extras full of the latest gang-murder!” Stendal could afford to smile at the violence of that attack on the city of his birth.

“New York,” he said with a chasteningly quiet deliberation, “always impressed me as especially beautiful at sunset.”

“Before the garbage-trucks get around?” inquired the scoffer.

“It has a loveliness all its own,” persisted the sad-eyed exile. “Especially of a summer evening like this, when the canyons of the streets quiet down and the shadows turn blue around the base of the skyscrapers and the river water starts to reflect the ferry-lights and the tip of the Empire State is still silver in the last of the sunlight. I’ve a liking for the crowds and the drone of traffic along the Avenue and the rumble of the L-trains and the way the streetlamps come out in the twilight along Murray Hill. I’ve a fondness for even the floating dust that mellows the line of the house-fronts and softens everything in a cloud of gold. It’s a white man’s world. And I always feel, there, that I’m at the center of things.”

“At the center of a sink-hole,” was Winslow’s unexpectedly passionate retort. “Where a lot of self-deluded neurotics are only playing at life.”

“They at least play at it successfully.”

The morose light in Winslow’s eye slowly burned itself away.

“A good deal depends on what you call success,” he said with a new quietness in his voice. “I had my whirl in that maelstrom. And I prefer the quieter life.”

“For how long?” Stendal doggedly inquired.

That question, however, remained unanswered. For Tooloona stepped in through the door, as silent as a shadow. She came carrying two pails of spring water, which she placed on the shelf behind the stove. She glanced at the dish-laden table, beside which the two men still sat, and quietly put wood on the fire. Then, reaching for her sewing-basket, she retired to a stool in the farther corner of the shack.

Stendal, looking across his shoulder, studied her as she sat bent over the stroud leggings on which she was stitching. The thing that first impressed him was her calmness. She seemed, in the modified light, as impersonal as a statue. Yet about her, he also saw, was an air of mystery. There was even beauty, of a kind, in the contours of the triangulated face with its dusky crown of close-plaited hair. Her lips, he noticed, were almost a watermelon red. And the skin of her rounded shoulders seemed satin-like in its smoothness.

She was, he suddenly realized, very much a woman. And as such she was not without her importance in his predicament. Her appeal, he felt, depended on the aura of undiffused vitality that brooded above the deft-motioned and compact body. It was, in any land or latitude, the gift of youth. And time, he told himself, would work its changes there. That red-lipped youthfulness would eventually slip away from her. She would lose her roundness and grow wrinkled. And her camp-mate, as the winters hardened about him, would lapse more and more back to the native level of life. He would be a broken and embittered man, for all his claims at contentment, cabined in a malodorous shack with a blubber-eating partner who might scrape hides for his mukluks and smoke fish for his body but could proffer no food for his soul.

“She’s worth understanding,” Winslow abruptly announced out of the silence. And Stendal flushed a little at finding that his thoughts had been so closely read.

“What do you mean by that?” he parried.

“I mean,” retorted Winslow, “that Tooloona may be an Innuit, but she’s still a human being. And up to the present you’ve refused to accept her as such.”

The charge, Stendal knew, was not without its background of truth.

“What do you expect me to do?” he asked, remembering, as he gazed out over the darkening Inlet, how absurdly he had placed himself at their mercy.

“Forget that you are a slumming party of one,” suggested Winslow as he rose dismissively to his feet.

And Stendal, taking that hint from his host, found himself giving more time and attention to the watchful-eyed Tooloona. His forced yet friendly smile of greeting, the next morning, brought her questioning dark eyes up to his face. But she remained disappointingly silent as she went about her duties of the day. And when he discovered that the task of studying her was not so distasteful as he had expected he argued with himself that her appeal lay largely in their isolation. It was a long time, he remembered, since he had seen a white woman.

Yet she wasn’t, he also discovered, without her vanities. She was very proud of her stove, the only one in the settlement, and that pride expressed itself in the frequency with which she blackleaded and polished its metal front. She was equally proud of the canvas canoe and the double-barreled duck-gun which her trail-mate had given her, to the end that their days in the open might be more companionable.

And the white stranger under her roof already knew of her pride in her white man’s toilet soap, for with this she had openly and ingenuously essayed to bathe her bare torso, only to be curtly stopped by Winslow, who just as curtly announced that such exposures were against the code of the Kablunak’s world.

Tooloona, Stendal also discovered later in the day, was much puzzled by his monogrammed pajamas and underwear, of mixed silk and wool, which she gathered up and washed out for him. If she was partly rewarded for her labors, as those strange garments swayed on her clothes-line between shack-corner and smokehouse, by the cluster of fur-clad villagers who leaned over the palings to inspect them, Stendal felt that something more tangible was due her.

So he made an effort to break the ice by hauling one of his duffel-bags into the open. From the depth of the bag he smilingly handed out to his hostess a carton of trade beads and half a dozen heavy bracelets of German silver.

“These are for you,” he said with an effort at casualness.

Instead of refusing them, as he had half-feared, Tooloona accepted them with the demureness of a tongue-tied child. But her hooded eyes continued to study his face.

“You like?” he questioned, disturbed by the steadiness of her gaze.

“Very much,” she answered in unexpectedly distinct English. And the white man, as he heard her, knew the embarrassment of a combatant who has underestimated his opponent. Since his arrival there, he remembered, he had spoken scarcely a dozen words to her. He had accepted her, in her preoccupied coming and going about the shack, as something shadow-like and almost sexless. But in her oblique dark eyes, he began to see, lurked some knowledge beyond his reckoning. And it was mostly the smallness of her body, he concluded, that had deluded him into accepting her as a child-minded plaything. For some newer note of maturity about her now left him a little suspicious of her artlessness.

“You speak a bit of English, I see.”

“One speaks him with one’s husband,” she answered with the utmost dignity.

“Can you read?” asked Stendal, awakening to the fact that she might prove considerably less tractable than he had expected. He was conscious, as he studied her, of the contours of womanhood which her slip of fawnskin could not conceal.

“A little,” she said with her cryptic smile.

He wondered, as he turned back to his duffel-bag, if his study of her had been a too pointed one. He sensed, for the first time, some promise of allegiance in her make-up. Her devotion, he suspected, might be like the devotion of a dog. It was her blind and unreasoning loyalty to Winslow, he also suspected, that served to bolster up the battered pride of his lost friend. And the only approach to her, he felt, would be through her affections.

“I’ve seen what you can do with a needle,” he told her. “So you may have some use for this.”

He handed her a sewing-kit in a lacquered box of Chinese red stenciled with jade-green flowers. He felt a little ashamed of its cheapness.

But Tooloona’s gaze, as she lifted the lid and looked down at the spools of bright-colored thread, the assorted steel needles, the blue and pink thimbles, the skeins of vividly dyed yarns, became almost a rapturous one.

“It is very nice,” she said with her pigeon-like coo of appreciation. She was doing her best, apparently, to control herself. But the mounded breasts under the fawnskin slip, Stendal observed, were rising and falling more rapidly.

“And I have some good nucky in here for you,” he continued. He reminded himself, as he groped through his bag for one of his boxes of time-hardened chocolates, that she was still a walrus-eating child of the wilderness. His smile was benevolent as he took the top from the box and held it out to her. “Try them,” he prompted.

They had told him, before he ventured into the North, that the Innuit had an inordinate fondness for sugar. But the native beside him, for some reason, drew back from the proffered chocolate-drop. He assumed her hesitation to be based on the fact that the trade candy to which she was accustomed was always bright-colored.

“It’s better than it looks,” he paternally explained. And, to reassure her, he lifted one of the dun-coated chocolate-drops to his own mouth, then held another out to her.

She took it, rather timidly, turned it hesitatingly over in her hand and finally placed it in her mouth. He noticed the vital redness of her lips as she stood motionless, arrested by the unexpected sweetness of the slowly dissolving confection. He also noticed, as she closed her eyes in a silence that impressed him as naively voluptuous, how dark the tangle of her eyelashes lay along the slightly brown cheek, through which the red showed like lamplight through parchment.

He stood watching her, feeling surer of himself. He waited, fortified with an entirely new sense of power, until she came out of her trance. Her narrowed eyes, he noticed, fixed themselves on the box in his hand. Maturity seemed to fall away from her as she moved closer, moistening her vivid red lips with her tongue.

“Peeruwalluk pumwa,” she murmured, pointing down at the chocolates.

“They’re all yours,” he said, surrendering the box.

She took the chocolates, without speaking, and walked out to the edge of the trodden dooryard, where she seated herself on her heels, in an oddly childlike attitude, and slowly and abstractedly continued to devour the candies. A hungry camp-husky, he recalled, ate its flitch of fish-meat in much the same manner.

It brought home to the watching man the essential emptiness of her life. It struck him as pathetic that a pound of flavored sugar could ever prove so transporting. A handful of sweetmeats, apparently, could send her to heaven. And appetite, he remembered, was the bait on the hook of Destiny.

He crossed to her side and sat down beside her. She did not raise her eyes, but the quick Innuit smile that relaxed her lips left him less afraid of her. His impulse, when he reached out a hand to stroke her bared shoulder, was largely a paternal one. But that shoulder, for all its definiteness of contour, was unexpectedly smooth-skinned and yielding. It reminded him of stroking the fur of a small animal, with the soft pelt giving off a ghostly magnetic current that flowed in through his body and made him regret the tenuousness of the contact.

He withdrew his hand, abruptly, and moved a little away from the dusky and down-bent head.

She sat motionless, apparently waiting for him to speak. But he found it hard to begin.

“Why don’t you like me?” he finally asked.

The hooded eyes studied him for a moment of silence.

“I do not know you,” she answered with unexpected dignity.

“But I’m a friend of Kablunak Winslow, and that should make me a friend of yours.”

“What my husband say, I do,” was her elliptical reply.

“Your husband?” questioned Stendal.

“My man,” answered Tooloona with a tremor of pride. And that seemed to simplify the matter.

Yet there were certain things about her relationship with her white master that puzzled Stendal. She apparently accepted her position of housewife as both authentic and permanent. She depended, it was equally obvious, very little on her own people. She was both docile and devoted, an untiring companion out on the trail and an efficient worker at the home base. Her entire happiness, in fact, seemed to derive from her ability to make Winslow happy. But, so far as Stendal could remember, no signs of affection ever passed between the two.

“The Kablunak has asked me to be kinder to you,” Stendal said as he observed how the columnar smooth neck merged into the creamier smoothness of Tooloona’s shoulders. The faint but persistent odor of seal-oil that hung about her, he discovered, was no longer repellent to him. He was, he told himself, getting used to it. And he was glad, as the day wore away, that the narrow portal of speech had been opened between them.

When Winslow swung homeward, late in the afternoon, he even found his guest dutifully holding a sleeping-bag while the Innuit girl stuffed it with duck-feathers.

“You and Tooloona seem to be hitting it off a little better,” he ventured with a smile that could only be accepted as sardonic.

“I respect her efficiency,” acknowledged Stendal.

Winslow laughed.

“You don’t know anything about her efficiency,” he maintained. “When her sled went through the ice up on the Attagagli, six months ago, she brought out our equipment by making a new one. And she made it out of the carcasses of two frozen salmon.”

“It sounds very clever.”

“Clever? It’s more than that. If you’d been up there, in her shoes, you’d have died in two days.” The squaw-man’s gaze became abstracted. “And she’s got more than efficiency. She risked her life, two months before that, to get me off an ice-floe out there in the Bay. And when we were bushed in the hills, last summer, she fed herself on rock-moss, without my knowing it, so I’d have grub enough to get out alive.”

“Did you feel you merited such devotion?” inquired the interloper who could wring no consolation from that recountal of heroism.

“Tooloona happens to believe in me,” averred the other.

“More than six blankets’ worth?” demanded Stendal, remembering that any such complicating aureole above the slender-bodied Innuit was not making brighter the path of his purpose. For in the final issue, he also remembered, she was little more than a long-circuited home-wrecker.

Stendal, in his determination to understand his surroundings a little better, asked for whale-meat for breakfast. He attacked it resolutely, nettled by Tooloona’s smile as she placed it before him.

“It might be worse,” he conceded when he had finished the last of his acrid and coarse-grained portion. Yet Noonaga, he remembered, had eaten it raw.

And the thought of Noonaga took him first to his duffel-bags and then out to the village of topeks, where the children played on the beach sand and their garrulous elders busied themselves smoking fish on the slope behind them.

To each of the children he gave a portion of trade candy. Then to each of the women he gave a celluloid comb. When he came to Noonaga, who refused to look up at him, he knew his first moment of hesitation.

“Can’t we be friends?” he asked, standing close over her.

“I make um friends,” prompted old Ootah, squatted against a near-by meetchwop. “I make um friends for two-three bottles of ship’s rum.”

But Stendal asked for no such intercession.

“You show me how to paddle kayak,” he said to the silent girl, “and I give you plenty good nucky.”

He assumed, from her passiveness, that she had not understood him. So into her lap he poured a pound of his colored candy. Beside it, as she still sat motionless, he dropped a package of chewing-gum and a string of glass beads. To these he added his own pearl-handled penknife, and, remembering he had a handful of silver coins in his pocket, he dropped the tinkling disks of metal in between the girl’s wide-spread knees. He waited for her to speak, teased by a vague impression that he had vast amends to make to her.

Noonaga looked up at him and laughed, laughed as abruptly as an awakened child might. Then she stored her treasures away in the paunch of her threadbare kooletah, saving out only the gum, which she chewed and swallowed as she shyly joined Stendal beside one of the beached kayaks.

There was much laughter from the natives as the Kablunak from the South splashed and tumbled about in the offshore shallows. He saved himself from going over, once, by clinging to the monitorial Noonaga, who lifted him bodily from the narrow craft and carried him to dry land. It disturbed him a little to discover that the clasp of those firm-sinewed young arms was anything but unpleasant. But Noonaga, gathering up her discarded kooletah, scurried away laughing and lost herself in the huddle of topeks.

Stendal, on his way back to the shack between the palings, climbed to the top of a shore-rock and stared out over the Inlet where the gulls and sea-swallows were weaving through the sunlight. The air, he observed, was exceptionally clear. The caverned flanks of the grounded iceberg, where the sun hit it, stood out so white that it made the eyes ache. Behind it the rolling green of the open Bay deepened in tone as it receded into the distance. Far out in the midst of that gloomy green he could see the irregular ribbons of drift-ice, where diamond-like floes and growlers, moving southward, glittered in the summer sun and threw up into the sky that more pallid yellow reflection known as “ice-blink.”

It was, he conceded, a land of contradictions. It confronted you with scraps of winter in the very lap of summer. It seemed empty to the casual eye, and yet it remained crowded with animal life, from the wild-fowl along its waterways to the million-noted mosquito-clouds that brooded above its swales, from the salmon hordes that spawned in its rivers to the lemmings that swarmed over its rocks.

For there was, Stendal felt as he sniffed at the unfamiliar tang of the air, something different about the North. There was, when one came to know it, something mysterious and at the same time something glamorous about it. What it was, he could not define. But men, he had been told, kept going back to it. They went back to it, he assumed, because it was unconquered and unconquerable. And being unmastered, it would remain mysterious.

Even Winslow’s shack, as he approached it, took on an air of valor, as though challenging the desolation of the tundra over which it brooded. It was merely an outpost, a lonely outpost on the fringe of that same unconquerable North. And to live in such a place and under such circumstances hinted at consolations which he could not apprehend.

He stopped short, frowning over that problem, as he threw back the flap of the wall-tent. He stood arrested by an animal-like sound that took him, still frowning, to the open shack door.

There he saw Winslow and his Eskimo mate tumbling about like zoo cubs on the fur-covered floor. Tooloona, without her kooletah, was bare-armed and bare-shouldered. The idle white man had discarded both his mukluks and his parka. His hair fell over his eyes, making him look strangely paleolithic, blending with the skins of wild animals along which he lay stretched. And it seemed fit and natural that he should growl as he sprang for his brown-fleshed mate. The next moment they were playing and rolling about the skin-covered floor, as lighthearted as children. They tumbled and writhed and withdrew, flushed and disheveled and cretaceous in posture.

But even as he watched, Stendal could see that play grow more boisterous. They wrestled and twisted together with throaty noises of laughter. Then all laughter went out of the encounter. It took on a note of fierceness, reminding the arrested Stendal of a tiger and a tigress romping abandonedly about a bone-littered cave floor. But the smaller brown body was proving itself unexpectedly agile. Its woman’s strength was, plainly enough, not equal to that of the hard-muscled man. Yet his power to master her seemed questionable. For she had a snake-like litheness that made her wide-shouldered cave-mate seem, by comparison, slow and cumbersome. Again and again she was able to elude his long arms and writhe free from his ursine clasps. Her breath came in cooing gasps and her throaty little cries seemed almost cries of terror. But her lips were smiling as she panted against her mate’s ribs, only to slip seal-like away and close in on him from another quarter. And when Winslow, imprisoning her in his great arms, gruntingly buried his face in the brown hollow between the softly curving shoulder and the still softer neck, she lay abruptly back, passive and silent, her small breasts pumping up and down like tired wings.

It impressed the embarrassed Stendal as so animal-like that he decided to go quietly back to his wall-tent. But Winslow, in his panting interlude of quietness, became conscious of the hesitating shadow just beyond the open door.

The leonine growl he was essaying died down in his throat. The neolithic playfulness went out of his sprawling body. It seemed an unnaturally big body, for some reason, as he gathered himself together and rose to his feet. And an unexpected flush dyed his already dark cheek as he studied Stendal with a saturnine eye.

“Could you imagine Celina doing that?” he challenged as he stooped to straighten out a rug. His laugh was curtly defiant.

“I could not,” answered Stendal with all the dignity at his command.

Winslow’s face remained resentful.

“When she wanted the great open spaces, as I remember it, she usually went and studied the little brook in the Chinese Garden at the Ritz.”

Stendal found it necessary to control his feelings. But his voice, when he spoke, was slightly tremulous.

“I’d prefer the Ritz,” he announced, “to an igloo that stunk of seal-oil.”

Winslow sat down and pulled on his mukluks. He was able to smile, for all the somber fire in his eyes.

“We won’t fight over that,” he announced. He stood up and wriggled into his parka, which gave a dignifying solidity to his tall figure. “Remembering how short your stay is going to be, we mustn’t fight over anything. It isn’t the Innuit way.” His voice, as he turned to the bare-armed woman hovering about the stove, became more roughly defiant. “And now it’s about time to eat. There’s an appetite we can satisfy without being buried in shame.”

The sting in the implication did not escape Stendal.

“But even the animals of the wild,” he retorted, “seem to prefer privacy for their rutting season.”

Winslow’s smoldering eye rested on his guest.

“A little honest animality,” he proclaimed, “would be good for what ails you.”

“Provided,” snapped his thin-faced friend, “I didn’t fall a victim to satyriasis.”

“You wouldn’t,” was the contemptuous retort.

Their meal, when they sat down to it, was not a successful one. Tooloona was silent and watchful. Winslow was silent and thoughtful. Stendal was silent and resentful. It was all, the latter concluded, as rudimentary as the mating up of two caribou. It was a reversion to the bestial, without the overtones of the upper primates, without dignity or chivalry or any shred of tenderness. It was the old losing contest between sacred and profane love. And he tried to tell himself that Winslow, under such circumstances, could not be the man he had once been. Just where or how that deteriorative process would finally manifest itself he did not venture to proclaim. But it was like a disease, eating silently at the root of life. And the peace of mind of any such squaw-man was most assuredly coming at a price. Even in his absurd satisfaction with a basically unsatisfactory situation there was every promise of tragedy. One couldn’t, maintained Stendal, turn the clock of the world back twenty centuries and keep one’s balance. It was bound to do something to one’s Better Nature.

The master of the house wheeled his chair about, at the end of the meal, and inspected his none too comfortable guest.

“I’m afraid we’re crowding you a little too close,” he said with all the earlier bitterness gone from his voice.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that this settlement of ours is a small one,” was the quiet-noted reply. “And this shack of ours is still smaller. So I’m going to give you a little more elbow-room. I’m going back in the hills for a while. And my work will keep me there, I’m afraid, until after the return trip of the Baffin Belle.”

Stendal’s first feeling was that his host was running away from him, that he was afraid of the issue with which his unasked guest was confronting him. But any such retreat, on second thought, did not jibe with the lordly indifference of the wide-shouldered renegade in the Eskimo parka.

“I’m not afraid to be alone here,” announced Stendal, refusing to hear the hounds of desolation that whimpered in his heart.

“That,” proclaimed Winslow, “would not be in accordance with Innuit hospitality.”

Stendal’s thin face hardened.

“I’m not asking for Innuit hospitality. But I naturally expected a white man to be treated like a white man.”

Winslow, who had crossed to the doorway, turned back and confronted his guest.

“I didn’t ask you to come here,” he said. “And I’m not asking you to go away. But when you are here,” he went on with an increasing note of passion, “you’re not going to interfere with me and my way of life.”

“What are you afraid of?” demanded Stendal.

“Not of anything you can do,” was the prompt retort.

“Then why are you hiding away in the hills?”

Winslow crossed to the gun-rack, from which he took down his rifle. The pretended preoccupation with which he looked over the firearm gave him a chance to compose himself.

“I’ve some stripping and drifting to do up on the Attagagli,” he explained with clearly achieved calmness. “And this is a good time to do it.”

It was Tooloona who spoke next, her voice sounding oddly bird-like through the silence.

“You go alone?” she asked.

“No, I’ll take Askim and Mawri with me,” answered the Kablunak as he buckled a bandolier of cartridges about his waist. “You tell Askim to count out twenty sticks of dynamite.” He tossed an abraded blanket-roll across the narrow room. “Then get my things ready for the trail.”

“For how long?” asked Tooloona.

Winslow’s gaze locked with that of his guest.

“Until the Baffin Belle pulls out again,” was the deliberate reply.

Stendal’s smile was a frosted one.

“Thank you for the implication,” he said with purely mock deference. “You have, obviously, lived for a considerable length of time with savages.”

Winslow’s control seemed to slip away from him.

“You needn’t sneer at me and my savagery,” he cried. “And you needn’t sneer at the people I’m living with. They’re more honest-minded than you are, or I wouldn’t leave you at their mercy.”

“Am I at their mercy?” challenged Stendal.

“More than you imagine,” was the curt reply. The wide-shouldered figure, blocking the doorway, turned and regarded the Innuit woman bent over the blanket-roll. “And when I’m out on the trail, you must see that our guest is made comfortable here.”

Tooloona stood silent as he disappeared from sight. She remained equally silent when, a moment later, his wide shoulders once more shadowed the narrow doorway. He stood looking at his small and valorous garden.

“It’s going to freeze tonight,” he said in a surprisingly passionless voice. “That means you’d better cut any flowers that are left. It’s their last day. And get in what you can from the garden.”

Stendal, watching him as he trudged off in the pale northern sunlight, wondered if some similar philosophy of desperation did not attach to the wider garden of his friend’s blighted life. It was a case of cut everything. It was man’s final recklessness in the face of frost, foolishly intent on living deep when he knew that living must be brief.

Stendal’s sense of desertion did not stay with him long. He was even conscious, as his earlier mood of resentment wore away, of a feeling of tension removed. And he found himself unexpectedly comfortable under the ministrations of the watchful-eyed Tooloona.

He was glad, in his idleness, to study her at closer range. If she seemed always busy, she remained both surprisingly lighthanded and lighthearted. The one thing he regretted was her silence. For she spoke to him seldom, and always with reservations. He could not rid himself of an impression of her remoteness, even when two days of driving rain and sleet kept him under cover. And she lost something by that sheathing silence which, he knew, would continue to cut him off from her. Yet she retained the power, even in her wordlessness, of suggesting an inner alertness which the trivial barrier of language could not entirely obliterate. It seemed to bring her closer even while it held her remote. It gave him the repeated impression of studying her between bars, as one studies a sleek-limbed panther in a cage, not forgetful of the pathos of imprisonment while equally conscious of the perils involved in escape.

He felt, as he sat watching her, that Winslow’s gesture had been one of defiance, an uncouth announcement of his confidence in his shack-mate. And it was obvious that she merited that confidence. But her meekness, Stendal imagined, was largely delusory. For she could be voluble enough, he remembered, when talking with her Innuit friends of the village. She was defying and denying him, apparently, because she was afraid of him. And he was still teased by a hunger to win a confidence still withheld from him, to find and explore those shadowy recesses which could transform the mere silhouette into something three-dimensional and solid. Yet she would, in her effortless way, always evade him. She would remain, behind her bars of reticence, something remote and slightly mysterious.

But he refused to think of her as anything more than a usurper. Even while he paid grudging respect to her womanliness, he refused to forget that she was little better than a savage. And he had no intention of being deluded by her docility. He found consolation in the thought that she would be incapable of any great suffering. Sorrow, he told himself, would never strike deep into that rounded small body. She would prove as indifferent to profound emotion as she was indifferent to profound cold. And that salvaging indifference, he argued, was the left-handed gift of the life she had always led and always must lead.

That thought prompted Stendal to remember his mission. It was his white man’s duty not to abandon a white brother gone astray. Winslow, of course, had lost his perspective, had lost his reason, in one way. Even their passing hostility was a part of the passing delirium. And it was still a contest, he felt, between civilization and savagery. For the latter to triumph over the former would plainly be against nature. The higher could not bow to the lower. It was the savage who always receded before his superior. It might seem cruel, but it was inevitable. And the savage lost out, when confronted by the resourcefulness of the white man, through his very savagery.

Yet here, Stendal found, was a type of woman that was new to him. His approach to her, he decided, would have to be a guarded one. He took hope, however, from her prompt smile when he presented her with his second box of chocolates.

“Why does Kablunak Winslow,” he inquired, “go back to the Attagagli?”

It was a placer mine, he eventually learned, that took the white man into the inland valley. It was the Kablunak’s custom, when the ice cleared away, to pan out a few bags of gold-dust there. The season, of course, was short, and, Tooloona explained, his “rocker” was only a handmade one. But he was not satisfied, of late, with what gold he could wash out of the gravel-bars of the Attagagli. It was not good country, averred the quiet-voiced Innuit woman. She had been there many times. There was no longer any caribou, and smaller game was very scarce. And the only fuel one found was moss. But the lone prospector seemed to feel, if he struck deep enough up the tumbling river-bed, that he might yet stumble on the mother-lode and have a mine that would repay him for all his trouble.

“And make you rich for the rest of your days?” suggested Stendal.

“That would not matter,” said Tooloona with a shrug of her rounded shoulder.

Yet in that quest for gold Stendal seemed to sense some explanation of the white man’s rootage in his northern wilderness. It tended to rationalize the unreasonable. It brought things down to the material. He found a new satisfaction in picturing Winslow as a bullheaded adventurer, grimly intent on developing his claim, willing to face loneliness and hardship for the promise of some final security.

“I suppose,” ventured Stendal as he studied the dusky head bent over the foxskin on which the quick-moving fingers were sewing, “that you usually go out on the trail with Kablunak Winslow.”

She sewed on, for a moment, in silence.

“Most always,” she finally answered, “I go with my husband.”

Stendal found her use of the white man’s word obnoxious.

“Why do you call him your husband?” he mustered the courage to inquire.

“He ask me to call him that,” was the unruffled answer. “He is husband and I am wife.”

It would not be easy, the interloper realized, to apply reason to a situation so basically unreasonable. But if he had any compunction about the termination of an idyll the thought of Celina, as he had last seen her, promptly put an end to his hesitation.

“You know, of course, that Kablunak Winslow already has a wife?” he questioned. “A white wife, across the Big Water?”

“I know,” was the low-toned response. She sewed on for a moment or two. “But him say that no count.”

If Stendal felt like a surgeon about to make an incision, he steadied himself with the thought that it was not the time for half measures.

“But Winslow belongs to that woman,” he asserted.

Tooloona’s laugh was low and untroubled.

“Him say no.” She shook her head, thoughtfully, and corrected herself. “He say no,” she triumphantly repeated.

“But a white man,” he reminded her, “can have only one wife.”

Tooloona, with needle poised, considered that fact.

“Then why him leave her?” she asked.

That, Stendal remembered, was a question not easy to answer. He too had pondered as to the source of Winslow’s frustration with Celina. He had wondered, often enough, in what she had failed him or in what he had failed her,

“He had a sickness in the head and left her,” Stendal was finally prompted to proclaim. “And she is still waiting for him to come back.”

Tooloona went on with her sewing.

“He say he never go back.” Her voice was small and bird-like, but it was confident. “He like me best.”

That womanly vanity seemed to humanize her. He felt, for the first time, a shadowy sort of pity for the igloo dweller who had no knowledge of the forces contending against her.

“But what he says doesn’t count,” contended the messenger from the white man’s world. “It is against the law of the tribe.”

“I do not know her tribe,” Tooloona announced with a finality that gave her companion a repeated sense of her inaccessibility.

“But he belongs with that white woman,” pursued the exasperated Stendal. “He belongs to her. Just as she belongs to him. And I was sent here to bring him back to her.”

“I know,” said Tooloona as she folded up her sewing. Her movement as she rose to her feet was both dignified and dimissory. “But my husband belong here now.”

Stendal knew it was useless, at the moment, to press the point. He also knew, after Tooloona had left him, that a shack without a woman in it could be an abysmally empty place.

When he wandered out to the topek village, in his desolation, he stumbled on Noonaga in solemn-eyed conference with old Ootah. And the discovery that she had drilled holes in the silver coins which he had given her and was now wearing them as a glittering pendant on the heel of her kooletah, reminded him that his white man’s money was merely an ornament to such aborigines. And equally meaningless, he assumed, would be the clipped mandates and the stamped-out ethics of his older world.

The bear-like eye of the old shaman, once the Eskimo girl had fluttered away, studied the abstracted face of the white man.

“Um buy love charm,” explained Ootah, with a head-nod toward the departing Noonaga.

“So you’re a medicine-maker,” observed Stendal, frowning over the greasy bag of talismanic trinkets between the old man’s knees.

“Make good medicine,” Ootah proclaimed.

The tribe, apparently, still believed in that old wizard’s power. And if they were child-minded enough to believe in such pagan flubdubbery, they should be prepared to pay the price for their heathenish credulity. And the conviction that they could be fought only with their own weapons prompted the man with a mission to return to his duffel-bags. He sorted out the most tempting of his treasures, crowning the pile with a pair of blue suspenders and a plaid silk handkerchief. To these he hesitatingly added a bottle of cognac. Then he returned to the shaman squatting between the smoke-stained topeks.

“You make medicine for me?” he inquired.

Ootah, after a crafty appraisal of the wealth displayed before him, announced his willingness to exercise his ancient rites for the visitor from across the Big Water.

“Perhaps Tooloona does not believe in your medicine,” Stendal casually suggested.

That, averred Ootah, was not true. For Tooloona had come to him on different occasions for a love potion made from an unmentionable portion of a bull walrus. And she had come for the working of other magic and also to read the future. But it was not easy to influence the voice of the Great Whale Spirit.

“Could the Great Whale Spirit,” prompted Stendal, “be made to tell her that she must not live with the Kablunak Winslow?”

The bear-like old eyes considered the stranger from the South.

“Um make him good wife,” he protested.

“But the Kablunak has a wife across the Big Water, to whom he must return.”

Ootah, who was sampling the cognac, showed small concern in that statement.

“The Kablunak belong to my people now.”

“That,” argued Stendal, “is because this woman has worked bad medicine on him. He is in a trap. And she alone can set him free.”

A venal smile twisted the seamed old face.

“And the voice of the Great Whale Spirit tell um so?” he craftily suggested.

“If your medicine is good,” prompted Stendal, “that is what the Great Whale Spirit should say.”

Ootah sat wrapped in thought. “Um can do,” he finally announced. “But the Great Whale Spirit is not easy to move. Um take much magic.”

“You would be well paid,” conceded the man who refused to forget his mission.

“Ootah is a very old man,” mumbled the shaman, still again sampling the cognac bottle. “Um need many things.”

“For the rest of your days,” averred the man from across the Big Water, “you will have tobaccomik and blankets and good nucky.”

“And rum?”

“What rum I have.”

Once more the old man sat silent.

“That is good,” he finally asserted. But the Kablunak Winslow, he pointed out, must not know that rum had been given to an Innuit.

“About this,” Stendal promptly amended, “the Kablunak Winslow must know nothing.”

And if the white man detected a fraternal look of guile in the deep-sunken old eyes blinking up into his own he realized, to his secret discomfort, that he was not in a position to resent it.

Stendal had the qualified satisfaction of discovering that seed, carefully planted, could result in its eventual harvest of unrest. Tooloona, he could see, had lost a little of her lightheartedness. Her small brow was even creased by a line of perplexity. And, for the first time since he had come in contact with her, she was not unwilling to break into speech.

“You know my husband before he come here?” she hesitatingly inquired.

“I’ve known Owen Winslow for quite a number of years,” answered the white man.

“You know his wife across the Big Water?” was Tooloona’s next question. She was wearing, for the first time, a rather foolish number of metal rings on her small fingers.

“Of course,” Stendal acknowledged.

“You like her?” asked the small and bird-like voice.

“Everybody likes her. She is a very beautiful woman.”

Tooloona pondered this for a moment or two.

“Then why you no take her to your igloo?” she asked with an appositeness that made Stendal stiffen in his chair.

“She does not belong to me,” he finally explained. “She belongs to Winslow.”

His effort at casualness was not as successful as it should have been. He even resented the scrutiny of the ruminative dark eyes that so deliberately studied his face.

“She still sew for him?” asked the Innuit woman.

“She still sews for him,” retorted Stendal, realizing the need to confront the primitive with the primitive. “She sews for him and waits for him to come back to her.”

Tooloona, reaching for the Kablunak’s near-by shaving mirror, studied her face with no outward signs of satisfaction. Then she sat back on her heels, the low brow creased with thought. She was, obviously, a trifle less sure of herself.

“He like her?” she asked.

“Yes,” answered Stendal, “he liked her very much.”

The protector of the pale-face civilization did not hesitate over that answer. The end, he argued with himself, justified the means. The wistful-eyed Innuit facing him, he remembered, was something that could be bought and sold again for six blankets.

“How you know he like her?”

Stendal considered the small-bodied savage sitting cross-legged on a bear-robe. Her crow-black hair made her skin seem almost almond-colored. Her down-bent profile made him think of a Benda mask. And under the doeskin slip he could see the quickened rise and fall of the little breast as rounded as an igloo roof. But she was still a savage.

“He lived with her many winters,” explained the defender of the white man’s faith, remembering to fit his speech to untutored ears. “He kept her in an igloo, not small like this, but as big as a mountain.”

She held her small hands up before her face.

“And give her more rings than this?”

Stendal, who knew he had to be relentless, forced a laugh.

“Many more. And all of gold. For he big chief back in white man’s world.”

“He big chief here,” claimed Tooloona.

“But he still grieves in his heart for the big igloo across the sea.”

“When his heart is heavy,” maintained Tooloona, “I make him happy again.”

“But you will grow old and ugly,” said the man with a mission. “And then he will hate you for holding him here.”

She drew herself up, conscious of some undivulged power.

“He say he never sell me, not for all the gold on the Attagagli.”

“But what you do is wrong. In the white man’s world you would hang your head and live with the dogs.”

That, apparently, made a picture that meant something to her. She lifted her eyes and studied his face. He succeeded in remaining passive before the intensity of that sustained stare.

“There are white men who say what is not true.”

“But what I say is true,” maintained Stendal. “I am Owen Winslow’s friend. And I think only of what is good for him. It is you who have led him into the wrong trail.”

She moved her head from side to side.

“He was very lonely and I help him.”

“You made him forget his own people.”

“He say he want me to make him forget.”

“But some day he will wake up and remember,” averred the righter of wrongs. “And then he will hate you.”

Tooloona sat silent for quite a long time. Her face, when she lifted it, seemed clouded with its first doubt.

“It is hard to know,” she said with a small frown of perplexity. “When he come home, I ask my husband.”

“No, you must not do that,” Stendal promptly proclaimed. “He would say soft words, to keep you happy, as he did before. And it would anger him to think you knew you were not his true wife.”

Tooloona’s frown deepened.

“The white man has many ways that are unknown to me,” she hesitatingly admitted.

“Of course,” agreed Stendal. “And that is why I talk to you as a friend. But I am merely a white man. I am not one of your people. I cannot say, do this or do that.”

He endured the searching glance of the seal-dark eyes under the oblique and wide-arched brows.

“I think you are not a liar,” she gravely admitted. “But I do not understand. And one must know what to do.”

“Who,” asked the visitor, “is the wisest man in your tribe here?”

“Old Ootah, without a doubt. He talks with the Great Whale Spirit and knows many things.”

“Then go to Ootah,” repeated the well-satisfied white man, “and let him recount to you, in his wisdom, what is right. If the words that I speak to you are wrong, Ootah will tell you so.”

Tooloona sat looking first at her silver finger-rings and then at the dyed porcupine-quills that adorned her sewing-basket.

“Ootah is very wise,” she grudgingly admitted. Her slightly insurrectionary eyes, when she spoke again, were on Winslow’s shelf of books. “But my husband say Ootah’s magic is not true magic. He say medicine powder made from owl’s claw no good for sickness. He also say medicine drum cannot change wind.”

Stendal brushed this heresy aside. “But in your heart you believe in Ootah. His love potion brought you a big chief. Isn’t that true?”

Tooloona sat considering the gloomy vistas of her faith.

“Yes, I believe in him,” she finally conceded. “For last winter he cure our people of the coughing sickness. And he show where to find the caribou in the hills. And by-um-by he make big medicine and have Whale Spirit bring me baby.”

“God forbid!” was the over-prompt reply that broke from Stendal’s lips. But the wistful-eyed Tooloona disregarded the interruption.

“That take big medicine,” she quietly acknowledged.

“It would also make big trouble,” averred Stendal, remembering there was still a factor or two in the situation for which he could be thinly grateful. “But if you believe in Ootah, I’m willing to believe in him. So we must find out who is right. And when he talks with the Great Whale Spirit, we must accept his word.”

Tooloona’s eyes grew slightly luminous with excitement. Yet her face remained calm, beyond a faint quivering of her coral-red under-lip.

“Perhaps,” she suggested, “I talk to the white man’s God. My husband say He understand best.”

It was Stendal’s turn to shake his head.

“That God you have angered, by breaking the law of the white man. And if you are an Innuit you must do as the Innuit spirits command.”

“Always I have done so,” the grave-faced Tooloona asserted.

“Then you will go to Ootah?” persisted the equally solemn-faced white man. He felt like a swimmer who had been breasting rough water.

“When Ootah go to the Hill of the Winds,” was Tooloona’s answer, “I will go with him. When he make medicine and talk with the Great Whale Spirit, I will listen close to the words he say.”

“And do what he tells you?” exacted her wearily triumphant mentor.

“And do what he tells me,” agreed Tooloona, with a childlike intentness that did not altogether add to the other’s peace of mind.

Ootah, as a medicine-man, seemed unwilling to let haste interfere with his occult ministrations. And Tooloona herself, before she could partake of the wisdom of her tribal gods, was not without certain definite preparations of her own to be considered. It was a more serious business, on the whole, than the white man had expected.

After a day and a night of fasting, Stendal found, it was necessary for the two to repair to the Sacrificial Stone in the Meeting Place of Spirits. This, he discovered, was on higher ground beyond the talus-slope. It was marked by a cromlech of glacial hardheads, at the center of which stood two rough pillars of greenstone supporting an architrave of granite. But, being consecrated ground, he could study it only from a distance. He knew, however, that the she-pup of a husky dog had been carried there for sacrifice. He knew also that Ootah, in his medicine-bag made from the fœtus-skin of a hooded seal, took along with him dried herbs and barks and grotesquely carved images of wood and colored feathers and owls’ talons and the mummified claws of wild animals.

He had no knowledge of how these strange things were used, just as he had no knowledge of the preparatory rites that were preceded by the low and outlandish throbbing of the medicine drum, hour by monotonous hour. But in the oppressive silence, when the drum ceased, Stendal could see a thin ribbon of smoke drift skyward from the cromlech. He noticed, for the first time, the somberness of the mammillated hills that lost themselves in the east. They were all but barren of tree-growth. They impressed him as looking old and timeless, as belonging to a ghostly world from which the Age of Ice had scoured the last promise of life. Their emptiness depressed him.

He wondered, as he sat there, why any man could come to love the wilderness. For life in such places, as far as he could make out, was always hard and lean and laborious. But on the other hand it was, in some way, always large. And that passion for the frontier, he concluded, stemmed from man’s deep-seated love of liberty. Through all the ages he seemed to hunger for some freedom denied him. And outposts like this might be barren and unbeautiful in themselves, but when they brought one face to face with that longed-for freedom they could take on their own forlorn shadow of loveliness. They consoled one, apparently, with some desperate form of peace that comes only from solitude.

Yet man, unfortunately, was never entirely satisfied with solitude. Along with his hunger for elbow-room was an equally stubborn hunger for a mate. Adam, without Eve, was unhappy in the Garden. And there, of course, was where the trouble always began. There was where his fine dreams of freedom foundered on the little rock of sexual impulse. He might exult in his hilltop hours and imagine he was on an open trail, walking side by side with God, but after all the mountains and rivers and lakes he forgot the wine-glow on the peaks and circled back to a soft-bodied woman and a sleeping-stage that could smell of fish-oil and crudely tanned animal skins.

This thought depressed Stendal. But equally depressing, a moment later, was the renewed throbbing of the shaman’s drum, beating slower than before. It made the listener think of a tired pulse, the tired pulse of a dying faith.

But through it, in the quiet northern air, broke a newer and more nervous sound. It began as a far-off drone, deepening rhythmically as it increased in volume, drowning out the foolish throbbing of the hilltop drum.

Stendal, with a tingle of nerve ends, scanned the pale azure of the skyline. That sound was a familiar one. It was the voice of his abandoned world, as much so as old Ootah’s drum was the voice of the aboriginal North.

“A plane,” he gasped, electrified into life by that increasing throb of power. And to the south, along the broken coastline, he could make out the floating black beetle that grew in size even as he looked at it. Tooloona and the Meeting Place of Spirits, of a sudden, became remote and ghostly things. For here was an emissary from the world of white men, an imperial implement of power, a cunningly engined messenger of purpose, bringing him back to the age of reality.

He could see it now quite distinctly, with the sun flashing on the metal of its fuselage as it roared over the lonely talus-slope and banked and turned and swung out again over the Inlet. It came lower as it circled the Innuit settlement. By the time it had heeled down on the beryl surface of the inner bay Stendal was running down the long slope, shouting as he ran.

The silence of the village, as he strode panting through the scattered topeks, impressed him as a betrayal of barbarism. Behind door-flaps of worn deerskin he could see women and children hiding. Even most of the men, he observed, had taken to cover. Few of them, he remembered, were familiar with the “thunder-bird” of the white man.

The mooring-lines were out by the time Stendal reached the water front, and the pilot, with his goggles pushed up over his forehead, was lashing the plane to a couple of the rounded beach-rocks. He seemed very slow about it. Then he straightened up, looked about and took out a cigarette. His figure, as he stepped across the sand to where Stendal stood arrested, impressed the latter as oddly shabby and unconcerned.

“Your name Winslow?” asked the man with the upthrust goggles.

“No, I’m not Winslow,” answered Stendal, trying to steady his voice. “How’d you get here?”

The newcomer squinted over the topek village before answering.

“Flew up from the Mattagami Mining Camp,” he finally announced. “And had a hell of a time with the fog on the Lower Bay. Then I stopped at Cape Jones. And thought I was lost again until I spotted this settlement.” His careless eye wandered over the white man confronting him. “How’d you ever get here?”

“By the Baffin Belle, from Churchill.”

“That’s pretty slow travel for today, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so,” admitted Stendal. “I was sent here to find Owen Winslow.”

“And you found him?”

“I did,” Stendal answered. “That’s his shack there, up beyond the village.”

The careless quick eye assessed the cabin between the palings.

“Pretty nifty!” he acknowledged. Then he seemed to remember himself. “I’m a bush pilot for the Great North Airway people. And I answer to the name of Slim Downey.”

“My name is Stendal,” explained his constrained companion, wondering why this offhanded young stranger should have the power of making any such explanation embarrassing to him. A few of the natives, emerging from their topeks, were advancing guardedly toward the moored “thunder-bird.” And their appearance did not prove reassuring to the owner of the plane.

“How you fixed for grub here?” he asked.

This cleaver of the skies, Stendal realized, was clearly not living up to what one expected of him. It was a disappointment to find any such Viking worrying about his victuals.

“We can take care of you.”

The man from the South still again looked over the cluster of topeks.

“I’ve found these fish-eaters rustling some pretty rough chow,” he said as he took a final drag at his cigarette and flicked it over his shoulder.

“I’ll see that you’re properly fed,” retorted Stendal, forcing his voice to make it heard over the renewed howling of the camp huskies. He wondered why he should stand ready to defend what had so recently seemed obnoxious to him. And he wondered, when Slim Downey spoke again, why he should resent some lack of dignity in a messenger who had come so far.

“When that dame down at Mattagami said she had a husband marooned somewhere along this coast I thought she was crazy. But this seems to cinch her story.”

“She sent you here?” asked Stendal. His pulse quickened at the thought that Celina was somewhere along the fringe of that unforested wilderness.

“She not only sent me here,” was the slightly retarded answer, “but she’s waiting down in the Superintendent’s shack at the Mattagami camp for me to fly her in.”

Stendal, during the next minute or two, had a lot of thinking to do.

“There’s no need for her coming here,” he announced. “It would be dangerous. And it would be uncomfortable.”

“I wouldn’t call it so dangerous,” said the man of the air. “I’ve been a bush-wrangler for the mining people over seven years now and this is soft compared to the Great Bear route. I’ve covered about all of them and I ought to know.”

Stendal’s eye softened as he studied the plane moored at the water’s edge. It looked shabby and battered but efficient. And it was a means of uniting him with his lost world.

“What’s been happening Outside?” he asked with a wayward pang of homesickness.

“Oh, the same old stuff,” was the indifferent and altogether unsatisfactory answer. The apostle of his old world was still failing to live up to expectations. “The important thing is, can I bunk here tonight? And I don’t want these blubber-eating Piutes monkeying with my plane.”

“I can take care of you,” acknowledged Stendal. “But how did Mrs. Winslow get up to Mattagami?”

“She flew up from the Canadian National at Doucet. And she’s sure bent on getting in touch with that husband of hers.”

This, for some reason, neither added to Stendal’s happiness nor helped him out of his predicament.

“Winslow, at the moment, is up on the Attagagli River. He’s trying to dig out a gold mine up there.”

“It gets them all,” announced the bush-wrangler. His casual eye ranged over the treeless and lonely littoral. “But your friend certainly covered a lot of ground to look for his color.”

Stendal was prompted to proclaim that Winslow was not his friend, but he shut his teeth on that impulse. The earlier simplicities had vanished from the situation. They were no longer a lost patrol. They were once more in touch with the complications of civilization. And how to face those complications was giving Stendal a good deal to think about.

“Do you carry radio equipment?” he asked.

“I’m a bush pilot,” was the curtly elliptical reply. “Even a compass isn’t much good up here in the magnetic field. And about all you could get, in this latitude, would be a grain-carrier out of Churchill.”

Stendal stood digesting his disappointment.

“When do you go back?” he asked.

“Tomorrow morning,” was the prompt reply.

“Couldn’t you swing inland first,” asked the Ungava exile, “and help us find Winslow?”

Downey took out another cigarette. “Got any gas here?” he inquired.

“None that I know of,” admitted the heavy-hearted Stendal.

The pilot flicked a thumb toward the pontooned craft at the water’s edge.

“That boat can’t burn whale oil. And she’s got to have water under her heels when she lands.”

Stendal, after glancing toward the Hill of the Winds, was forced to a decision not altogether to his liking.

“Then I’d better go out with you,” he proclaimed.

“Whatever you say,” was the careless-noted reply.

“Then we can come back for Winslow.”

“Wouldn’t it be more to the point,” suggested the newcomer, “to round up your man here and have him ready when I fly in? That wife of his isn’t the kind to sit around and wait for us. She wants action.”

Stendal could picture Celina, in her imperiousness, demanding action. And the threat of impetuosity from that quarter brought a new turn to his troubled thinking. These winged engines, he remembered, made the world small for the impatient.

“Winslow’s wife mustn’t fly in here,” he affirmed. He was thinking, at the moment, of Tooloona.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s no place for a woman.”

“I’ll say it isn’t,” agreed the man of the air, with a mordant glance over the huddle of ragged topeks.

“And nothing would be gained by her coming here,” asserted Stendal. The anxiety in his voice brought the other man’s gaze slowly about to his face.

“Why has that bird stayed up here in the Barrens?”

“I said,” retorted Stendal, “that he was interested in a gold strike up on the Attagagli.”

“Is he bushed?” was the other’s diffident-noted query.

“What does that mean?”

“We say a man’s bushed when he’s been long enough in the wilderness to get his wires crossed. And when they get that way we usually have to carry ’em out.”

Stendal found himself compelled to abandon his earlier claim as to Winslow’s mental unsoundness. It no longer fitted into the picture. And it could no longer serve to advance his cause.

“You’ll find him quite capable of taking care of himself,” Stendal asserted. “And also ready enough to make his own decisions.”

The fact that one decision remained eminently unpredictable prompted the frowning Stendal to revise his plan.

“What you’d better do,” he told the casual-eyed bush pilot, “is carry word back to Mrs. Winslow that her husband is all right. He’s all right, but we’ll have to get him down out of the hills before you can pick him up.”

“Then you don’t come out with me in the morning?” asked the man of the air.

“No, I’ll stay here,” asserted Stendal. They were climbing the shore-slope up toward the Kablunak’s cabin. “I’ll have to explain to Winslow that his wife is waiting for him down at Mattagami. And have him ready for you when you come back for him in a week or two.”

It was all in the day’s work, apparently, to the careless-striding young airman, who came to a stop beside the juniper palings and passed a quick eye over the shack and the rectangular garden-plot that surrounded it.

“He seems to have pretty well taken root here,” observed the slightly bewildered sky hawk.

And Stendal, looking back at the wide-winged plane moored to the shore-rocks, admitted that he had. But the thoughtful-eyed white man, as he stepped inside the orderly shack, realized with not a little relief that Ootah’s ministrations upon the Hill of the Winds were keeping Tooloona out of the picture. For Tooloona, he remembered, might be hard to explain.

Stendal, backed by a group of Innuits, watched the plane take off. He saw it taxi across the ruffled green Inlet-water, rise into the wind and wheel slowly about, heading southward.

He watched it until its roar of power died down to a drone, until the drone itself could no longer be heard. When it passed out of sight, a mote in the morning sunlight, he turned heavy of heart to the garrulous natives behind him. He was acutely conscious of his isolation. And his loneliness was not lightened when Noonaga, stopping before him, smiled up into his over-solemn face. It was a shy smile, yet a challenging one, with a flash of white teeth behind the half-pouting lips that were always so singularly red. But he remembered, as he turned away from the heavy-odored topek village, that there was no bridge of language between him and these children of the North.

He was equally depressed, when he entered the shack, by its disorder, where tumbled bedding and unwashed dishes stood an open announcement of his helplessness. Even Slim Downey, he remembered, had cocked a questioning eye over his clumsiness as a cook. And an equally inquisitive eye, he also remembered, had coasted over the unmistakably feminine apparel draping the shack wall. But he had preferred not opening up the problem of Tooloona. That was a battle which had to be fought out on another field. It was, he told himself as he stood in the doorway and stared up toward the Hill of the Winds, already being fought out. For even as he stared he could see a solitary small figure weaving its way slowly down across the talus-slope.

He knew it was Tooloona, even before she approached the village. And in that figure, usually so vital, he could read both weariness and dejection. He could see, when she stepped hesitatingly into the shack, that her vigil in the Meeting Place of Spirits had not been a happy one. Her woebegone face disturbed him a little. He had once held it an inexpressive face, tending to be doll-like in its triangulated smoothness. But the stricken look in the seal-brown eyes that so silently questioned him made him think of a wounded deer.

“You have been a long time away,” Stendal said, finding it hard to begin.

She stood silent a moment, her deep-shadowed eyes studying her strangely altered home.

“I have talked with the Great Whale Spirit,” she finally admitted.

“And what was his message?” prompted the white man.

He had heard, somewhere, that an Innuit woman never wept. So he was surprised when he saw the tears that slowly coursed down the brown face.

“He is not happy,” answered the pitifully small voice, “that I have taken the white man who belongs to another.”

Stendal realized that old Ootah had not failed him.

“Did he say that you should give that white man up?”

Tooloona, who had crossed to the table, began gathering up the soiled dishes. Her head, when she spoke, remained lowered.

“That I cannot do,” she said in quiet-noted desperation.

“Why not?”

She stood silent a moment, her hands no longer moving about the table-top.

“He must be with me for a little time. He must be with me until he has given me nootarak.”

“What is nootarak?” asked Stendal.

Her body filled with a deeper breath, squaring the small shoulders.

“He must give me a son, so that my life will not be empty when my man is taken away from me.”

That, Stendal knew, was a consummation most devoutly to be avoided. But he found himself, at the moment, without the courage to say so.

“Did you know,” he said instead, “that a plane had been here?”

Tooloona took time to cross to her stove, where she replenished the dying fire.

“I know,” she answered, without looking up.

“Do you know what it came for?”

“Yes,” acknowledged the muffled small voice.

“It could not take Kablunak Winslow because he was up in the hills,” Stendal explained. “But it will come back for him.”

The small body in the fur-trimmed kooletah stiffened at that, and stood motionless.

“When will it come?” she asked.

“When,” countered Stendal, “will Winslow come back from the Attagagli?”

Tooloona stood considering this.

“One does not always know what one’s husband decides. It may be tomorrow. It may be ten sleeps later. But it is bad country. Nucky is not easy to get there.”

To her companion that brought a disquieting thought.

“He’s not in danger there, is he?”

Tooloona’s small shoulders grew straighter in line.

“No country is too hard for my husband,” she proudly affirmed.

Nothing more was said at the time, but Stendal found consolation in observing the promptness with which Tooloona put the disordered shack to rights. It seemed a different place with her moving about in it. The dinner she served that day, for all her preoccupation, was equally consoling. But she entered into no talk, he noticed, with the women of the village. She kneeled alone when she did her washing on the bank of the brawling little river. And she remained in such an aura of desolation, as the day wore away, that the watching white man was prompted to assess the last of the treasures in his duffel-bags. From these he selected a box of the time-hardened chocolate-drops, a bolt of blue ribbon, and an enameled tin of barbarically bright face-rouge. To them he added a nickeled vanity case and a mouth organ.

He carried them from his wall-tent to where Tooloona sat as motionless as a basking seal on the hard-packed earth of the dooryard. When he placed them, one by one, on her lap, she did not look up.

“Maybe these make you happy,” he said with his avuncular smile.

She remained silent, her eyes fixed on the gloomy waters of the outer Bay. Yet when he looked out at her, half an hour later, she was slowly and silently consuming the last of the chocolates. And having wiped the vivid red lips that seemed so childlike in their curved fullness, she took up the mouth organ and by blowing into it proceeded to produce a series of blithely plaintive sounds.

It was not music, as Stendal reckoned such things, but it brought a gaping and listening group of Innuits to the garden-palings. And Tooloona, for all her apparent passiveness, impressed the smiling white man as not ignorant of her passing importance. It was foolish, he told himself, to take the child-minded too seriously, when a handful of trinkets could wipe the tragedy from those seal-brown eyes.

And in the cool of the evening, when he found the loneliness of the shack oppressive, he wandered down to the topek village. On the beach, beyond a little parliament of granite boulders, he found the natives, young and old, gathered about a scar-faced brave in a ragged parka. In his hands this brave held Tooloona’s mouth organ. On a rock-shelf above him, wrapped in a Hudson Bay blanket against the evening cold, sat Tooloona herself. In her hair were plaited strands of blue ribbon and on her face she had smeared patches of the white man’s rouge. It made her look incredibly childlike as she sat silent above the excited crowd. She reminded the watching white man, in her immobility, of a woodland rabbit seeking to obliterate itself by its own stillness. She sat brooding in a world of her own, taking on an aura of mystery in the green-gold air that surrounded her. But she did not seem unhappy.

And when, above the murmur of the tidewater lapping on the beach-pebbles, the scar-faced brave started to make music on the mouth organ the clustered natives broke into a dance. Stendal could see Noonaga there, weaving back and forth in response to the music that seemed both rhymeless and rhythmless. He could hear her gurgle of laughter as she gyrated past him, showing the white of an eye and the flash of a bare shoulder in the sea-misted dusk. And even her outlandish dress and her equally outlandish movements could not rob her body of its faun-like appeal.

But in the shuffling and jigging of the men he could see no beauty. It impressed him, on the whole, as a grotesque and barbaric performance, without meaning or grace, just as the strains from the over-tortured mouth organ seemed without rhythm or sense. But they meant something, apparently, to the children of the wilderness. For the acrobatic hopping about and the tangled interweaving of bodies became more and more frantic, with the voices of the dancers finally drowning out the notes produced by the scar-faced brave. In it, as in the earlier mask-dance, the natives seemed to find something mesmeric and moving. It left them rhapsodic, their eyes shining and their faces glistening with sweat. And it left Stendal, as he stood studying them with a caustic eye, wordlessly lost in space and homesick for his own kind. It was a long way, he remembered, from the waters of Iviuk Inlet to the lordly river beneath the Palisades.

He let his glance go back to Tooloona. She still sat motionless as the stamping and pivoting was accelerated into a final fury and the mingling voices rose higher and higher in the green-gold air of the northern twilight. And Stendal, as he turned back to their acrobatics, accepted the scene as a justification of the course on which he had embarked. It brought home to him the distance one had to go to join hands with such barbarity.

“Why don’t you dance?” he asked the silent and self-immured Tooloona.

The seal-brown eyes rested for a moment on his face. Then they looked out on the glooming green of the Bay.

“My heart is too heavy,” was the unlooked-for and altogether unsatisfactory reply from the lips so childishly stained with the cosmetic of the white man’s world.

Stendal found himself the prey of a new impatience. He felt, after three restless days of waiting, a sharpening need for action. Time after time his anxious eyes not only scanned the talus-slope but probed deeper into the hills behind the wind-swept tundra, hoping for some sign of Winslow’s return. The tenuous northern nights, he noticed, were lengthening. The redberries shone coral-bright against the caribou-moss. The Eskimo-cotton and the twin-flowers were thinning out between the rocky slopes. The Innuit girls were busy gathering the last of their cloudberries and frost had blackened the last of the potato-tops behind the garden-palings. The brief northern summer would soon be slipping away. And when winter came, the visitor from the South surmised, it would close like an iron jaw on that country almost under the shadow of the Pole.

“If the Angarooka Winslow does not come down from the Attagagli,” he said to the impassive-eyed Tooloona, “he will have to be sent for.”

“He will come,” answered Tooloona, “when his heart tells him to come.”

“But I want him here at once,” averred Stendal, exasperated at what he felt to be a conspiracy of inactivity in everybody about him. The fugitive would be needed there when the plane returned. And at any time, now, the Baffin Belle might be dropping anchor out in the Inlet. “How far is it to the Attagagli?”

“It is seven sleeps away,” answered Tooloona.

That was farther than Stendal had counted on. He himself would be helpless in country like that. But even though he went with a guide, any such expedition involved the threat that a plane might come and go again before his return.

“Isn’t there a runner in the village who can be sent for him?” Stendal inquired.

“My people do not like that country,” announced Tooloona. “They would think it foolish to ask the Angarooka to come back before he was ready to come back.”

She was, plainly enough, not going to help him much.

“They would be well paid for it,” asserted the white man.

“I will talk with them,” Tooloona solemnly proclaimed.

The conference, apparently, was a prolonged one. Tooloona’s face, when she returned, remained as expressionless as a mask.

“There is no one,” she reported, “willing to go to the Attagagli.”

“Why?” demanded Stendal.

Tooloona hesitated, her eyes on the floor-robes.

“I would rather not tell you,” she finally asserted.

“But I insist on knowing,” said the frustrated man with a mission.

“They do not like you,” the young Innuit finally admitted. “They speak of you as the woman-man.”

Stendal could feel the blood surge up to his face. He had patiently endured this band of blubber-eating wife traders and had tried to look at life from their standpoint. He had overlooked their smells and their lecherous antics. He had emptied his duffel-bags into their laps. And this was his reward for it, to be accused of being deficient in manhood. He might not thrive on putrifying whale-meat. But he was as much a man as any offal-eating topek lounger in the settlement, and he would show them so.

“You don’t want them to go,” he said, turning angrily on the Innuit girl. But she stood impervious to his resentment.

“That is not true,” she quietly affirmed.

“But you don’t, of course, want Winslow back here,” he announced, still hot with anger.

“That also is not true,” answered the impassive-eyed Tooloona. “To show it is not true I myself will go up into the Attagagli country and bring back my husband.”

“He is not your husband,” snapped Stendal.

Tooloona let her gaze lock with the white man’s.

“When his lips tell me so,” she stubbornly maintained, “I will say it is true.”

That was a bridge, Stendal decided, that could be crossed when they came to it.

“With whom would you go?” asked the white man.

“I would go alone,” was Tooloona’s quiet-noted response. And Stendal, as he studied her face, suddenly saw the light. Such a trip would, of course, be playing altogether too neatly into her hand. It would give her a chance to slip away to her mate in the hills, where the two of them could hide out as long as it suited their purpose. In her desperation she would, obviously, prefer a life of starvation in the Barrens to separation from the man of her choice. And Stendal even harvested a suspicion that she had not been an entirely passive factor in turning the natives against him.

“No,” he decided. “It would be foolish for a woman to go alone.”

“Then what will you do?”

“I shall go with you. And since the country is rough we must take along two or three of the men from the settlement.”

Tooloona ventured no comment on that decision. But realizing the need for prompt action, Stendal arranged for a conference on the bone-strewn beach. It was not a successful conference, for Tooloona, acting as interpreter, seemed either unable or unwilling to arouse any enthusiasm for the projected expedition into the interior. There were, apparently, many tasks to hold the men of the settlement to their topeks. And in the end one brave, answering to the name of Upik, agreed to go. A moment later, to Stendal’s surprise, Noonaga quietly announced her willingness to be one of the party.

“What good is that girl?” Stendal demanded of the quietly smiling Tooloona.

“She is very strong,” answered the Innuit woman. “She will carry twice what you carry.”

“All right,” agreed Stendal, realizing that he had little choice in the matter. And his pride was further humbled when he found how frequently he had to consult Tooloona on the question of equipment. It would be necessary, she explained, to travel light, as the trail was rough and everything must be carried. They could take one rifle and a tea-pail and skillet. They could take tea, but no sugar, and meal and dried meat and a pail of lard, with half a side of bacon for the white man. And when Tooloona produced a sleeping-bag the white man inspected it with a skeptical eye.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“That is for you,” explained Tooloona. “You are not hard and it is best.”

Her own sleeping-roll, he noticed, was made up of a worn robe of interwoven rabbitskin strips. The sleeping-bag, for all its lightness, bulked dishearteningly large. It was fashioned, he found, of kashogiak seal, with the hairy side out. Inside this fitted a second bag made from the soft-haired skins of winter caribou. Between the two was a light mattressing of eiderdown, and at one end was an opening with a draw-string. Into this opening, he was told, one wriggled feet first, on cold nights shutting out as much of the outer air as might be desired. But once inside that downy nest, he foresaw, one could sleep warm in any kind of weather. And about him, he also saw, would be a never-ending aroma of crudely tanned animal skins.

“With two inside,” Tooloona explained, “it is always warm.”

“There will never be two,” was Stendal’s prompt retort.

He was equally skeptical as to the Innuit woman’s suggestion that he revert to native clothing. He compromised in the end, however, by putting aside his white man’s coat and vest and accepting a parka that was a trifle too big for his narrow shoulders. He must not, he remembered as he paraded about in that rough-furred garment, give them further excuse for regarding him as a woman-man.

“It make you look like nanook,” said the smiling Tooloona. She was kneeling on the shack floor, crowding greasy cakes of what appeared to be pemmican into a worn caribou bag. The smile suddenly faded from her face as she sat back on her heels.

“Listen,” she said, her seal-brown eyes becoming abruptly abstracted.

Stendal, as he hesitated over including a shaving outfit in his crowded kit-bag, could hear the high-pitched howling of the huskies at the village-end. But the sudden solemnity of Tooloona’s face took him to the door. He thought at first it was Winslow come back. Yet a moment later he knew better.

“It’s the plane,” he said in an oddly flattened voice.

For down on the Inlet he could see the wide-winged beetle drifting slowly in toward the shoreline. He could see the dip of the wings when the pontoons grated against the beach sand. He could see the pilot clamber down and tug and warp the craft still closer to shore. And then he could see the same goggled pilot reaching up for a passenger, a slender-bodied passenger who slid down into his arms and clung to his shoulders as he waded from the shallow seawater up to the dry sand.

Even before she stood upright and turned about on the shore-slope, studying the cluster of smoke-stained topeks, Stendal knew it was Celina Winslow. He wondered, as he stared down at her arrested figure, why she looked so out of place there. And he wondered why, for the first time in his life, he stood depressed by the thought of her nearness.

He could see, as he started down the path, that she had turned back to the plane, from which the pilot was lifting out pieces of luggage. She wanted to help, apparently, but he waved her away. And her posture, as she stood watching him, seemed one of bewildered helplessness.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Stendal could hear her calling out to the pilot.

“It’s the right place all right,” answered the busy man of the air. He dropped a Klondike bag on the sand. “I’d know it by the smells.”

“But there’s nobody here,” she complained, unconscious of the numerous eyes peering out from the darkened topek doorways. Her voice seemed husky with hopelessness.

“I told you not to expect much,” Slim Downey reminded her as he dragged the last duffel-bag ashore.

“It seems so dead,” she cried as she stared down at the broken skeleton of a kayak bleaching on a ledge of limestone. She was peering so intently at the empty talus-slope, when she turned, that she did not see Stendal as he hurried down between the silent topeks. And for the first time in her life, as she stood in the misted sea-air, she seemed pitiful to him. She seemed out of place there, with all her defenses down. Her shoulders had lost their familiar Flying Victory poise, as though some inkling of her own helplessness was both perplexing and subduing her. Behind her, Stendal remembered as he saw her step forward and stand irresolute on the windy limestone ledge, she had left all the resources and consolations of the white man’s world. It struck him, of a sudden, that they had been wretchedly unfair to her. And the thought that life was to be still more unfair to her made it hard for him, when he called out to her, to keep a note of blitheness in his voice.

She turned and looked at him, without surprise and apparently without concern.

“Where’s Owen?” were the words that broke from her lips. A residuary gray weariness made her face so colorless that Stendal assumed she had been air-sick on her hop up from Mattagami. She was in high-laced hunting-shoes and a brightly dyed jacket of green leather that did not go well with her pallor. “Where’s Owen?” she repeated, this time with almost a note of impatience.

“He’s still back in the hills hunting gold,” Stendal quietly reported. He was glad, when he came to think of it, that he had that search for the precious metal to give a coloring of reason to the situation.

“Could anything have happened to him?” she asked, an unlooked-for quaver in her voice.

“He’s all right,” Stendal assured her. “We were just getting ready to go out for him.”

“When will you go?” she asked with the immediacy of impatient womanhood.

“I don’t know. But I do know you shouldn’t have come in here.”

“There’s no suffering,” observed Celina, “like suspense.”

“But your coming here does no good. And you’ll find no comfort in a wilderness like this.”

She gazed beyond him toward Winslow’s cabin at the center of its quadrangle of garden-soil, where the blighted leafage still showed against the talus grayness. It was the only thing in all the flattened landscape that looked permanent and positive.

“I’ll have the comfort of finding out the truth,” she said with a vigor that in no way added to Stendal’s happiness. She looked, for the first time, at the native parka that hung loose about the white man’s shoulders. “And I rather imagine I can stand anything you can stand.”

Stendal masked a sense of disappointment in that speech by turning for a brief but earnest conference with the helmeted Viking of the air. Then he hurried after Celina, who was already groping her uncertain way up toward the cabin behind the whitewashed palings.

“Is that Owen’s home?” she asked as she stopped to study the shack, a small frown of perplexity on her face.

Stendal, following her in through the narrow gateway, explained how Winslow had built the shack from the timbers of his wrecked schooner. But his mind was troubled as he thought of still other explanations that might be called for.

Celina stepped in through the doorway and looked studiously about her.

“It’s better than I expected,” she said as she took off her hat and tossed it onto the well-scrubbed table-top. Then she looked at Tooloona, who was on her knees in front of the Russian-iron stove. She was, Stendal could see, busily engaged in polishing the stove metal with moistened black-lead. She was polishing energetically and earnestly, for the stove, of all her possessions, seemed the thing in which she took the most pride. And it was only right that her wealth should shine forth in the face of this unheralded visitor. But her posture, as she worked, impressed Stendal as both menial and unlovely.

“Who’s this Eskimo girl?” asked Celina.

“She’s not a girl,” was Stendal’s prompt reply. “She’s a woman. And a very capable one.”

“But what’s she doing here?” asked the lady with the deepened frown of perplexity.

“She’s a sort of chore-boy for the camp,” answered Stendal, not unconscious of the need for discretion. “Or you might call her my house-boy. She’s been assigned to look after me here. And I must say that I’ve found her startlingly efficient.”

Celina’s pointed gaze assessed the small and rounded figure so meekly squatted on its heels.

“There’s not much boy about her,” was her none too comforting announcement.

“Attention,” warned Stendal. “She speaks English quite well. And you’ll depend on her considerably more than you imagine. I think you’d better say ‘Chimo’ to her.”

Celina stepped closer to the quietly squatting figure with the smudges of black-lead on the rounded bare arms.

“Chimo,” she said with unexpected friendliness.

“Chimo,” responded Tooloona with a fleeting glance up through the tangle of dark lashes. Then in silence she gathered together her polishing properties and passed out through the door.

Celina stood looking after her.

“Why is she afraid of me?”

“You’re probably the first white woman she’s ever seen. And her pride is hurt, I imagine, because you caught sight of her stove before it was completely polished.”

But the issue was not a closed one.

“Does she work for Owen?”

“She works for anybody, apparently, who will give her work. But frankly, Celina, I’d advise you to be as friendly as you can with her. These Innuits, in fact, are a very friendly people. I was guilty of the mistake, when I first landed here, of not meeting them on their own terms. And it’s made things considerably more difficult for me.”

Celina, who had been examining the sleeping-stage, let her eye rest on the diminutive native clothing hanging on its wall-pegs.

“I’ve been told they’re a very friendly people,” she said with an intonation that was not altogether to her companion’s liking.

“We’re rather at their mercy up here,” he ventured to remind her.

But Celina’s thoughts, apparently, were still centered on Tooloona.

“She’s quite pretty,” conceded the newcomer to Iviuk Inlet. “But didn’t she smell of fish-oil?”

Stendal’s laugh was largely a defensive one.

“They all do,” he acknowledged. “But one seems to get used to it in time.”

He detected the old queenliness and the old pride of race in her stride as she crossed the shack floor and stood, meditative of eye, before Winslow’s deal desk. She seemed, in some way, pathetically out of place there.

“There are many things, I find, that one must get used to,” she said without turning to face her companion. That companion, as he studied her, became more than ever conscious of her preoccupation. He knew better than to expect her to be voluble in her expression of gratitude. But that newer air of remoteness, touched with humility, continued to perplex him.

“You seem to have changed,” he ventured, wondering how much of her brooding self-absorption might be written down to fatigue. Her flight up to Iviuk Inlet, he remembered, could not have been a very comfortable one.

She turned and studied him. He could see the unmasked desperation in her eyes.

“Perhaps I have,” she acknowledged.

“You know, of course, that I’ve done everything possible to get Winslow back.”

“Back to what?” she asked, a faint tremor in her voice.

“Back to you,” was Stendal’s slightly delayed reply.

“But apparently without success,” she answered, the familiar golden voice now sharpened with a note of bitterness.

“I have wondered, sometimes, why you should want him back,” Stendal ventured to assert.

Her response to that was not an immediate one. She picked up one of her husband’s socks, so neatly darned by some unknown hand, turned it over, and put it down again.

“A deserted woman,” she deliberately proclaimed, “has a lot of thinking to do.”

That proclamation presented a train of thought so unpalatable that Stendal was grateful when Tooloona’s figure darkened the doorway. She came in without speaking, carrying a load of the white woman’s dunnage on her shoulders. It was a heavy load, but she lowered it without trouble to the shack floor, where she arranged it in an orderly row along the wall.

“Do you let women do work like that?” Celina demanded of her companion.

“That’s what she’s here for,” Stendal answered. Then he added, conscious of Celina’s quick frown of disapproval: “The women seem to be the real workers in this settlement.”

“In that case,” announced Celina, “I won’t prove of much use to you.”

“Let’s hope,” suggested Stendal, “that you won’t have to stand it long.” He was not unconscious of the narrowed eye with which the newcomer was reinspecting the four walls about her. “But while you’re here, of course, this shack is yours.”

He fastened his gaze, as he spoke, on the silent Tooloona. But the face of the Innuit woman remained expressionless.

“Do I have to sleep on that?” asked Celina, indicating the strange-looking sleeping-platform.

“Unless,” proffered Stendal, “you prefer my cot in the wall-tent.”

The thoughtful-eyed white woman, however, asserted her preference for the Innuit bed in the shack.

“Will I be alone here?” she asked.

“Of course.”

“I thought,” said Celina, “that Eskimos always slept together.”

“We aren’t yet Eskimos,” Stendal replied with all the dignity at his command. “But if you’d feel safer with Tooloona in here with you I’m sure she can manage with a bed-roll in a corner somewhere.”

He tried to be casual about it all. Yet he knew, even before his quick glance probed Tooloona’s face, that the situation involved an issue that was momentous.

“Yes, I’d like to have Tooloona with me,” was Celina’s unexpected reply, after a second study of the dusky and silent face confronting her.

But Tooloona also accosted Stendal with the unexpected. She drew herself up to her full height, with her head thrown back a little, and her eyes half-closed, so that the dark tangle of her lashes showed black against her almost bloodless face.

“That I cannot do,” she said with simple dignity.

“Why not?” demanded Stendal, only too conscious of what her opposition could imply.

“Because tonight,” was the equally unexpected reply, “I must spend at the Stone of Sacrifice in the Cave of the Winds.”

The next morning’s conference was a prolonged one. It was finally decided that Slim Downey was to fly back to Iviuk Inlet as soon as he could after the freeze-up, leaving the white woman and her friend to round up Owen Winslow while the sheet-ice was growing thick enough to afford a safe landing with the skis that would take the place of his useless pontoons.

It was also decided that the searchers should start out for the Attagagli without loss of time. And Celina Winslow was fixed in her determination to be one of the party.

“It will not be easy going,” Stendal pointed out to that obdurate lady who could so consistently smile at his objections.

“It will be easier than waiting here,” was Celina’s coolly impassive rejoinder.

“You’ll have to live like a native,” her friend of other days reminded her.

“That seems to have proved its attractions,” she retorted in a voice slightly barbed with bitterness.

And Stendal, when the strange safari set out, was almost glad to find himself face to face with something positive. He found consolation in the thought of action after inaction. He even nursed the hope that the hardships of the overland trail might in some way prepare Celina for that greater hardship which he felt to be awaiting her. And if the worst came to the worst she would not stand completely ignorant of the sacrifices he had made for her.

The one thing not to his liking was the completeness with which he was compelled to place himself in Tooloona’s hands. For it was Tooloona who, from the first, quietly assumed charge of the strangely assorted group. Her pack was as heavy as Upik’s. It was she who pointed out the trail and decided on the camp sites. When bad weather overtook them and a day of driving sleet hinted that summer was almost a thing of the past, it was Tooloona who fashioned a shelter under a friendly rock-shelf and kept them passably warm and dry. She had the knack of finding fuel and making a fire when no fire seemed possible. She was always sure of her direction, having the power, as she expressed it, of “feeling” the North. With needle and thread from her doeskin brin-bag she could mend a torn garment while the packs were being unlaced. From unseen corners and crevices she garnered dry moss or a bit of juniper and soon had meat cooking and the tea-pail boiling. When dried meat became monotonous she busied herself with her wisp of a fishnet, seining stream or lake-end until she landed a flashing silver body that was later browned in lard and bacon-fat. But it was plain that the white man and the white woman in the party were eating more than Tooloona had counted on, being unused to labor on straitened meals. Over this, however, the Innuit woman showed small concern, explaining that the Kablunak Winslow made it a point to maintain a food cache on the Attagagli.

“Can we depend on this girl?” Celina inquired of Stendal as they picked their way over a desolate plateau of glacier-worn shale.

“We’ve got to depend on her,” was the white man’s grim-noted reply. He had been keeping Tooloona under his observation. And in doing so he had harvested the impression of something cat-like in her quietness. There was something cat-like too in her quickness and economy of movement. She was always surefooted. She seldom hesitated and she never stumbled or went astray. Instinctively she seemed to know which turn would take her down the easiest path, which broken ascent would lead to some final pass through the hills, already grooved, even where the rock was hardest, with the countless hoofs of migrating caribou. If she ever tired she betrayed no evidence of it. She went on like an automaton, as uncomplaining and self-immured as a sled-dog.

With Celina, Stendal could see, it was different. Everything was new to her. What concerned her most, apparently, was her utter loss of privacy. There were no boudoirs, in the Barrens, into which she could retire. She was not accustomed to feeding and cleansing and resting her delicate body in the open. But she faced it, in the end, with a stoic indifference. And for that lost privacy of the flesh she seemed to substitute an inner privacy of the spirit. She talked very little. But when she did speak, it was mostly with Tooloona. For Tooloona, apparently, piqued her curiosity. She studied the Innuit girl as patiently as a hungry hunter studies a seal-hole. She stood anxious, obviously, to acquire something of her small-bodied companion’s fortitude. She learned to face each passing hardship with a tight-lipped sort of courage. If she stumbled and blundered she recognized her mistake and tried to make amends for the foolish steps that resulted in a loss of effort. Her one aim was to get on.

“You’re standing it better than I expected,” Stendal exclaimed one evening after a long climb out of a valley as empty as a valley of the moon.

“Why shouldn’t I stand it?” asked Celina as she unburdened her shoulders of its pack. Her eye was apathetic as she sat down and examined her hunting-shoe, where a gap showed dolorously big in the toe. She gave no outward signs of robustness, but her athletic girlhood, Stendal assumed, had given her subliminal reserves of strength. She had climbed mountains in Switzerland, he remembered, and had once ridden the trails about Asheville ten hours at a time. But in this newborn concentration of hers on a single end, he observed, she was growing careless of the smaller things. She could sit barelegged on a rock while her heavy woolen socks dried out in the sun. She remained indifferent as to how wind and sun roughened her face. It was physical weariness, her companion concluded, that led her into this new indifference as to her appearance. She disregarded the accumulating grease-spots on her once spotless jacket of green leather. She washed with Tooloona in an open lake-end while Upik and Noonaga unpacked the camp-equipment and set the tea-pail to boiling. She even became less fastidious in her manner of eating, tossing a bone over her shoulder and licking her fingers after the manner of the Innuit. Her hair, after losing her comb, became disordered and tangled, giving her, in a strong wind, a look of almost wolfish wildness. There were times, in fact, when Stendal nursed his secret suspicions that she was wringing her secret joy out of that modified relapse into savagery. She could sleep on a bed of caribou-moss, within arm-reach of her guarded companion, and ask him as she lay staring up at the heavens if he too could hear the rustling sound of the Northern Lights. And when she changed her clothes she no longer detailed Tooloona and Noonaga to hold a camp-blanket between her and any indifferent male eyes. The Innuit women, she began to see, were not ashamed of their bodies. There were more important things to think of.

When they came to the Attagagli they found it to be a tumbling and brawling river twisting down through striated gorges and channels of ice-scored rocks. Tooloona showed them traces of the Kablunak Winslow, from time to time, here and there the ashes of a campfire, somewhere else the imprint of a mukluk on a sandbar. But a disappointment awaited them at the Kablunak’s food cache. It had been emptied of its stores. They found the roughly made “cradle” at the base of a rapid where the river widened out into series of fan-shaped shallows. It was here, Tooloona explained, that the gold-seeker had washed out his first color. But all they could find, after a repeated search of the shore-slopes, was a broken pick-handle and a little pile of fish-bones.

“What are we going to do?” asked Stendal, his dismay tempered by a momentary relief. For he so dreaded that meeting in the wilderness that he was not disappointed at its postponement.

“We must go up the river,” explained Tooloona. “The Kablunak Winslow will be there.”

Stendal turned to the tumble of empty rocks under an empty sky. It seemed a worn and bloodless country, a valley from which all life had been washed away.

“What will we live on?” he questioned, remembering the sadly lightened grub-bags.

“You will eat fish for dinner tonight,” was Tooloona’s quiet-noted response to that challenge. And they stood watching her, with indifferent eyes, as she went clambering over the river-boulders toward the pool where the white-watering river-tumult ended in its amber-green “cellar.” She was away longer than they expected. But she did not come back empty-handed. And the trail-pounders, with a good meal of fish under their belts, found the world a less desolate one.

But the ascent of the Attagagli was not easy work. It meant rough going that was as hard on clothing as it was hard on tempers. Sometimes they had to detour about precipitous cliffs and sometimes they had to wallow, knee-deep, through spongy muskeg. Sometimes, too, there were no fish to be had. It was an event when Tooloona came back to camp with an Arctic hare dangling from her small brown hand. The next day she disappeared with her rifle and returned with three ptarmigan, which were dressed and spitted and broiled over a frugal bed of coals. They were not cooked, Stendal felt, as thoroughly as they should have been. But every bone was picked clean.

When a bear prowled about their camp, attracted by the meat-smell, it was Tooloona who caught up the rifle and crept out through the darkness, a shadow stalking a larger shadow. Stendal and Celina sat up, side by side, listening to the repeated rifle-shot from the distance. When the white man wakened, in the morning, he saw Tooloona and Celina dragging the bear carcass down the rough slope. They looked oddly paleolithic as they tugged and pulled at the inert furred body, momentarily united in a kinship of savagery. Celina, strangely abstracted, helped the Innuit woman skin and quarter the bear, oblivious of the blood that maculated her forearms. Noonaga and Ipuk, he noticed, ate some of the meat raw. But the white man found it unpalatable, even when well cooked.

“Tooloona says this hide will be useful,” explained Celina, “if we don’t get down out of the hills as soon as we should.”

“How long does she expect us to stay here?” demanded the footsore white man.

“Until we find Owen,” was Celina’s even-noted reply.

Stendal became conscious, and not for the first time, of some ghostly remoteness from his companion. He was not so close to Celina as he had hoped to be. Even the enforced intimacies of camp life, ironically enough, had insinuated some phantasmal barrier between them. It was like a lead between float-ice, widening slowly and imperceptibly, but most unmistakably widening. And he found the discomforts of the body sharpened by a new discomfort of the spirit. He even began to nurse a suspicion, as they moved on again, that Tooloona was secretly against him, that she was not, at heart, doing her utmost to find the lost Kablunak Winslow. It would be to her advantage, he morosely remembered, to make that search an unsuccessful one, to prolong to the last her tenuous claim on the man who had to be taken away from her.

Yet the Innuit woman showed signs of excitement when they came to the ashes of a recent campfire and later on to a hillside where there was clear evidence of stripping and equally clear evidence of blasting. A small shaft had even been sunk down through the pre-Cambrian rock. It had resulted, apparently, in nothing promising and the prospectors had moved on, farther up the valley. But those scars on the surface of an empty terrain seemed to bring the searchers nearer to their quarry. They carried a consoling promise of life in what had looked like a lifeless world. So they broke camp and went on again, striking deeper into their hinterland terra incognita.

The frosts became sharper at night, in the uplands, and since fuel was scarce they suffered more and more from the cold. When Stendal was awakened in the darkness, by nestling movements close to his tired body, he sat up to find the lawless young Noonaga lying close beside him.

His first impulse was to push her away. But on second thought he rose wearily to his feet and groped about for a new sleeping-spot.

When he awakened early, two days later, he was conscious of a cryptic smile playing about the lips of the indifferent-eyed Celina.

“Upik and Noonaga seem to be sleeping together,” she casually observed.

Stendal, studying the two close-huddled figures still wrapped in their united and travel-worn skin robes, was the prey of a small and teasing sense of frustration.

“They keep warmer that way,” he indifferently retorted, remembering how he had been told that even starving caribou huddled together for the sake of warmth. And, since a prowling wolverine had spoiled much of their bear-meat the night before, he also remembered, the shadow of starvation once more fell across their path.

“Who could blame them?” questioned the quietly smiling white woman.

“I do,” retorted Stendal. “And so should you.”

He said it promptly enough, but he was not unconscious of some vague twinge of envy coursing through his trail-worn body.

Celina reached for her sadly battered hunting-shoes and pulled them on. Then with stained but resolute fingers she proceeded to lace them up.

“This sort of life,” she observed, suddenly arrested, “rather humbles one.”

Stendal moodily agreed with her.

“And that,” he as moodily added, “hasn’t often happened to you.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” was the unexpected response.

He became more acutely conscious of the lead widening between them. The thought of it even sharpened his voice a little when he spoke.

“The trouble with you, Celina,” he found himself saying, “is that you’ve always had everything your own way. Until now, you’ve never faced a situation you couldn’t really control. But in this wilderness it seems to be different.”

She looked at him with frankly studious eyes, disturbed by the unexpected hollowness of his cheeks.

“We never get everything we want,” she asserted.

“Certainly not on the Attagagli,” he said with his bark of a laugh. “This sort of thing flings you back to first principles. It teaches you that you can only survive through your own strength. And if you survive, you’re a success. If you don’t—well, it doesn’t seem to matter so much.”

“That ought to put me where I belong,” announced Celina, still with the heat-lightning smile hovering about her lips. “But my kind of women, I suppose, get too sure of themselves. And when we’re too sure of ourselves we lose out.”

“Does that mean you were too sure of Owen?” he found the courage to ask.

“I was never sure of Owen,” she surprised him by saying.

“He certainly justified your uncertainty,” was the slightly embittered response. But Celina’s eyes remained broodingly grave.

“You don’t know him as I knew him. He had something in him you’d never understand, a streak of wildness that always rather frightened me. I know, now, I should have respected it. I should have respected it even when it threatened to take him away from me.” She turned, with unexpectedly candid eyes, to her companion. “I’m not an iceberg, Richard.”

“Who said you were?” challenged Stendal.

“Owen must have made me think I was. I wanted him, you see, much more than you imagine. But you can’t hold a man by merely making him comfortable. Comfort seems to have been the one thing Owen didn’t want.”

“Or want you to have.”

“No, Richard; I was the failure,” Celina contended, intent on some obscure campaign of confession. “As I said before, a deserted woman has a lot of thinking to do. And I know, now, I was a failure as a wife.”

“I refuse to believe that.” The sharpness, for some reason, had gone out of Stendal’s voice.

“But the proof of the pudding, my friend, is in the eating. I wanted to hold him too close. You must have seen that sort of thing when you try to hold a child, how they wriggle away from the arms you lock about them and go on with their games again. I didn’t expect to tame Owen. I don’t even think I tried to. But I kept telling myself that as time went on he’d think more about that middle-age comfort which seems to loom larger as we grow older. I kept thinking the wild streak would fade out of his make-up. It was like waiting for him to grow up.”

“He wasn’t worth waiting for,” Stendal asserted.

“I thought he was,” contended Celina.

“And you still feel that way?” questioned her companion, conscious of so many things of which she stood ignorant.

“That,” answered Celina, “is what I’m here to find out.” She seemed so alone in the world, to the staring Stendal, that a look of pity showed on his face. “But you mustn’t think I’m misjudging Owen,” she hastily added, “because I harp on that streak of wildness in him. For that’s the thing that made him different. It’s what women like in a man, even when they refuse to admit it, just as it’s what he himself succumbs to, in a country like this.”

“I prefer my pleasures,” retorted Stendal, bewildered by a touch of the tiger in what he had accepted as merely a house-cat, “without the fillip of peril.”

“You would, Richard,” acknowledged Celina, not without a cadence of contempt. “That is why Upik slept beside Noonaga last night.”

His only possible answer to that, he felt, would be too cruel to articulate. There was so much, he remembered, that she had still to learn. And his moody gaze rested on Tooloona as she toiled up from the river-bank, carrying a cartel of light driftwood from the gravel-bars. Celina too sat silent as the Innuit girl set about building the morning fire.

“Tooloona, you know my husband?” the white woman abruptly inquired.

“Yes,” answered Tooloona, after a moment’s silence. Her voice sounded small and childlike.

“Is he not big and brave?” questioned the grave-eyed Celina.

“He is big,” Tooloona finally replied. “And I have seen him do many brave things.”

“Are you not proud of him?” asked the solemnly smiling white woman.

Tooloona, in her uncertainty, turned to study the face of the unsmiling white man. But from him, she realized, she would be able to get very little help.

“It is you who should be proud of him,” she answered with what Stendal regarded as unlooked-for sagacity.

“But you like him?” persisted the white woman.

Stendal, with a faint tingle of nerve ends, knew that Tooloona was not a good liar. And he waited for her answer, stirred by a sense of approaching climax.

“He has been very good to me,” the young Eskimo woman quietly acknowledged.

“I suppose so,” Celina said with a newer note of listlessness. Her eyes were clouded, for all her smile, as she turned to Stendal, startling him by the abruptness with which she tumbled her secret knowledge into his lap.

“He must have found her a wonderful woman,” she slowly and distinctly proclaimed.

“What’s wonderful about her?” asked Stendal, feinting for time. But Celina smiled away his foolish pretenses.

“I suppose,” she said with a defensive note of abstraction, “it’s like having a dog, something to adore you and make you feel like a demigod, no matter what you are or what you do. Just blind devotion! Just woman, you men would say, in her fit and proper sphere!”

“What are you talking about?” parried Stendal, depressed by a knowledge of certain duplicities of his own.

“About Tooloona, of course,” answered the wife who knew so much more than she pretended.

Stendal decided, two days later, that it was foolish to go any further up the Attagagli. His feet troubled him and his body, either in rest or in motion, was the nesting-place of innumerable aches. He was not only tired of bad food; he was alarmed at the thought that even what rations they had might fail them. He suspected, at times, that he was running a fever. And a touch of dysentery filled him with a vague resentment toward his Innuit companions, whose stomachs registered no revolt against moldy meat and meal-cakes fried in gangrenous lard. Nor did those children of the wilderness, inured to their narrow margin of safety, share in his accruing alarm over their depleted provisions.

When he talked to Tooloona, however, he found her as determined as ever to push on. There were always ways, she maintained, of keeping alive. And the Kablunak Winslow, she felt sure, was still somewhere on the upper reaches of the river.

“The weather will not be good,” said Stendal, looking up at a leaden sky from which a few feathers of snow were sifting down.

“But this,” maintained Tooloona, “is a good place to camp. There is shrub-willow and juniper for the fire. I can make a shelter against the rock. There you can rest. Then for one day I will go up the Attagagli. And if I do not find the Angarooka I will come back.”

The thought of laying up for a day or two was not without its appeal to Stendal. But he still had his suspicions of the Innuit woman’s intentions.

“No,” he amended. “The others will rest here and you and I will go on for a day.”

“That is good,” was Tooloona’s impassive-noted reply.

Stendal, in imparting this decision to Celina, made no effort to conceal his lack of faith in their Eskimo guide.

“That’s nonsense,” was the white woman’s prompt rejoinder to his claim that Tooloona was not to be trusted.

“Do you know her so well?” challenged Stendal.

Celina’s gaze rested on the quick-handed figure so busily engaged in building a shelter against the rock-wall.

“I don’t altogether understand her. But I know her well enough to realize how wonderful she is. She’s so wonderful that she makes me feel rather helpless and humbled. And she’s so unselfish through it all that it gives me the feeling of being an impostor. It’s not only what she does and does so expertly, but it’s more what she does without. That girl, Richard, has been going hungry so that you and I could still have enough to eat.”

“I haven’t had enough,” Richard promptly reminded her.

“But yesterday I saw her grubbing lichens off the rocks and eating them. And I haven’t been driven to that yet.”

“She’s done it before this,” retorted the unimpressed white man. “She’s pretty well used to that sort of thing. And I’m not.”

Celina’s gaze became ruminative.

“She makes me wish I could take her out of all this, that I could put her somewhere where I could shower everything that is rich and lovely on her, just to make amends for what she has gone without.”

Stendal’s laugh was caustic.

“She’d miss her blubber and bird-dung. And she wouldn’t like your steam heat. And she’d still want to sleep on the floor and rub lard in her hair.”

“I wonder,” murmured the abstracted white woman.

“Personally, I’d prefer trying to civilize a polar bear. She may look good to you, against this background. She may look like a woodland flower, up here, but on Park Avenue she’d be something for the police to gather in.”

“Fine feathers,” said Celina, “make fine birds.” She pulled a rent in her hunting-jacket together and let it fall apart again. “Tooloona is a woman,” she averred, “the same as I am. And a considerably more successful one. That’s what makes me feel so humble. And also so hopeless. She knows so much more than I do—about the things that count, I mean.”

“Back home,” Stendal reminded her, “those things wouldn’t loom up so large.”

He realized, as his eyes rested on the travel-worn hunting-jacket, that the once fastidious-minded white woman was becoming a trifle neglectful of her appearance. She had lost both the softness and the sleekness which he had once associated with her. But a nameless something had taken the place of that earlier quarantining sense of perfection, when she had been hedged about by an elaborate organization of service that tended to immure her in an ivory tower of inconsequential side-issues. He refused to admit that it made her more human. Yet he had the feeling, at times, of being brought a trifle closer to her.

“We’ve both something to learn from Tooloona,” the grave-eyed Celina was saying. “I envy anyone who can simplify life that way.”

“Her simplicity,” he was cruel enough to affirm, “seems to result in a complication of smells.”

Yet he wondered if he so persistently thought of the Innuit girl as an animal because, encased in skins as she always was, she carried about with her that equally persistent aroma of the wild animal. And he wondered if her physical appeal didn’t depend on the fact that she was a lonely pebble on a wide beach of desolation.

“But she can get along with so little,” Celina persisted. “And do it, in some way, without any loss of dignity. She knew, from the first, that I was bringing a lot of useless stuff with me on this trip. She even added that junk of mine to her back-pack and lugged it along for me. It should have been thrown away, of course, at the start.” Celina’s sigh was an audible one. “There’s so many things in life, in fact, that should be thrown away.”

“You mustn’t,” warned Stendal, “let this dip into wilderness life strike too deep. I rather imagine we’ll remember it, when we get back, like a nightmare.”

Celina looked about at the glaciated hills.

“We’re not back yet,” she reminded him. “And I’ve had a nightmare or two, Richard, when I slept between linen sheets.”

“I wish to God,” announced the unhappy exile, “we were both back in the land of linen sheets.”

“I wouldn’t care to go back a failure,” Celina quietly asserted.

“Your Tooloona,” Stendal suggested, “seems to nurse much the same ambition.”

“Perhaps we might both succeed,” was Celina’s unexpected retort. And Stendal, in his indecision, ventured to send up a trial balloon.

“Have you ever wondered why Tooloona is so anxious to find the Kablunak Winslow?” he questioned.

“I have an inkling,” answered Celina. But the mist of remoteness that gathered about her, like fog about an iceberg, was not conducive to further talk on the matter. That withdrawal, in fact, made him feel so friendless and alone, after a dolorous evening meal, that he retired early to his sleeping-bag, where he discovered that the accumulation of warmth was, after all, entirely a personal enterprise.

When he set out with Tooloona, the next morning, he remained peevishly critical of the venture. He trudged behind her in silence, resentful of the lightfooted quickness with which she mounted the roughest hill-slope. He remained equally silent when they stopped to brew tea and rest. And when a cold wind from the northwest brought a driving rain that in no way added to their comfort, he interpreted that visitation as confirmation of his prediction of failure. This rain, an hour later, turned to sleet. It not only lashed their faces and stiffened their clothing but soon crusted the trail under their feet with ice. The caribou-moss became brittle. Every stone and pebble took on the appearance of a glacé nut. Every frond and leaf stood scabbarded in an icy sheath that crunched and tinkled with a passing foot. The smoother stretches of limestone turned into glistening planes of treachery, defying any intruder to mount the gentlest of slopes.

Stendal, at mid-afternoon, decided it was useless to go on. Tooloona, silent in the face of his complaints, slipped down to the river with her seine. He could see her creeping out over the glacéed boulders, looking for a pool from which she might dip a fish. He stood watching her until a chill struck into his tired body. Then he began turning over stones, in search of dry moss enough for a fire. He felt the need for hot tea. Hot tea, he remembered, took the gripe of pain from his intestines and seemed to bring life back to the lifeless.

But his efforts at starting a fire were not successful. He would have to wait, he realized, until Tooloona got back. The storm, he also realized, had blown itself out, with the leaden sky brightening to silver all about him. Then he looked up, startled by a sense of movement in a shimmering world which held nothing that seemed to move. He became conscious, as he stared along a widened and crystalline skyline, of a shadowy something moving down toward him along the glittering valley-slope. It moved very slowly. He thought, at first, that it was a prowling and uncertain-footed bear, incredibly elongated and gaunt with hunger. Then he saw that it was made up of two men in ragged fur parkas, one at each end of a fur-draped oblong that gave them the appearance of stretcher-bearers circling cautiously in from a battlefield.

Stendal, standing erect, shouted to them with all the strength of his lungs. He shouted until the two parka-clad figures came to a stop, staring down at him. He saw that they were carrying a roughly made litter and that on it lay the body of a man, a large-limbed man over whom a sodden hide of caribou-skin was draped.

His first thought, as he went scrambling and sliding toward them, was that they were carrying Winslow and that Winslow was dead. But as he shouted and fought his way closer to them the two litter-bearers rested their burden on the ice-sheathed rock and the figure under the sodden caribou-skin abruptly sat up. And behind the rime-encrusted beard Stendal recognized the face of Celina’s husband.

It was Winslow staring at him, with the familiar half-satiric smile widening his hairy face.

“Got any tobacco?” were the first words that came from the bearded lips. And the air of casualness in that greeting brought Stendal up short.

“No,” he answered. “I haven’t smoked in six days. But what’s happened to you?”

“How about grub?” inquired Winslow, ignoring the other’s question.

“We’ve none too much.”

“Who are ‘we’?” demanded the man on the litter.

“Tooloona’s down there on the river-bank. We’re out looking for you.”

“So you’re still after me!” said Winslow as he lay back on the litter, the habitual ring of mockery in his voice.

“Why can’t you walk?” demanded Stendal, impatient of what he accepted as pure histrionics.

“This fool Mawri,” was the offhanded answer, “set off a blast before I could get under cover. It got me in the leg here.”

“Is it broken?”

“No, but it gave me a torn ligament. It’s not much, just a nick in the wrong place. And I could walk, all right, only it keeps breaking the wound open.”

Stendal looked down at the deerskin stretched between spliced juniper-poles, at the broad-shouldered figure in the wet parka that steamed in the air and at the leg so ludicrously bound up with ragged cotton and rawhide thongs. Then he looked at Askim, whose gaze was directed to the lower valley where a small figure in a kooletah could be seen stooping over a small fire.

“Let’s get going,” was Winslow’s curt command. He reminded Stendal, as they moved on again, of an oriental potentate in a palanquin. He remained lordly, in some way, even in his lameness. And if he suffered from his wound he dissembled his pain in a rough and rather profane jocularity that impressed his companion as three parts play-acting.

Stendal watched the man on the litter as it came to a stop beside the campfire. He could see Winslow’s hungry eyes rest on the Innuit girl, who stood silent a moment and then crossed to the litter, where she knelt beside the bearded white man, studying his face so intently that he broke into a laugh.

“You’ve got a man with one leg in the grave,” he said with a roughness that was transparently defensive. “But it won’t be for long, Little Seal.”

Tooloona’s face remained grave.

“It will not be for long,” she quietly repeated.

“They couldn’t kill me,” he said as he swung heavily off the litter, “even with dynamite.”

“I suppose you found your gold mine?” questioned Stendal.

“To hell with gold,” was the unexpected reply. “It’s not worth scratching out of its hole.” He turned his great shaggy head toward the rapt-eyed Innuit girl. “I’d rather have Tooloona.”

Her low-voiced answer to that was in her native tongue and incomprehensible to Stendal. But it prompted Winslow to bark out an order to Askim, who went off to find fuel for the campfire. At a second curt order Mawri fell to scaling and dressing the fish which Tooloona had carried up from the river.

Winslow, a moment later, turned back to the Innuit girl. He smiled at her broadly but abstractedly. Then he pivoted on his buttocks, swinging his heavily shod feet about until they rested in her lap. They looked large and gross there. And the movement itself seemed a gross one, though a certain rough tenderness was apparent in his large and lazy smile.

Tooloona seemed to understand that tenderness, for her answering smile was one of pride as she continued to nurse the great feet between her knees. She even pressed the open palms of her hands against the rough mukluks, as though indicating her readiness to shield their wearer from the rough places of the world. The gesture impressed Stendal as both naively protective and possessive.

“It will be easier going, after this,” Winslow said with a sigh that heaved his roughly clad shoulders.

Tooloona, who had been studying the bandaged leg, looked up with a cooing sound of disapproval.

“You must have fresh dress for this,” she sternly announced.

“From where?” asked her smiling Kablunak.

Tooloona gravely drew aside the front of her kooletah, disclosing the slip of fawnskin beneath.

“From this,” she explained, “after it has been boiled in the tea-pail.”

Winslow lifted his feet from her lap. He leaned back on his elbows, studying her face.

“You’re the only woman in the world,” he finally proclaimed, “who’d give me the shirt off her back. But we’ll get along without it, Little Seal.” His huge hand, reaching out, rested on her crow-black hair. Tooloona, shuffling forward on her knees, bent over the bearded big face. She did not kiss him, as a white woman would and as Stendal expected. But with a hand pressed to either side of his head she rubbed her nose softly over the upturned face of the white man.

It was uncouth, in a way, and yet it carried with it an impression of infinite tenderness. It reminded the embarrassed Stendal of his first days at the Inlet, when he had tossed his one remaining orange to a slant-eyed Innuit child of the village. The happy child, in much the same manner, had rubbed his nose over that rare and precious fruit, calling out as he did so, “Peeru-walluk-pumpa!” And that, Stendal had later learned, meant “the very sweetest of everything sweet!”

But Stendal was not in a mood to regard the scene as an idyllic one. If he detected a look of tragedy in the eyes of the Innuit girl he refused to consider it. He thought of the white woman waiting just over the hills. And he knew that the final reckoning could not be long postponed.

“I suppose,” he suggested, “we ought to be pushing on.”

“To what?” demanded Winslow, his big hand still clasped about Tooloona’s small one.

“To where we can get food and shelter,” retorted Stendal. “And to where you can be taken care of.”

“So you’re still worrying about me!”

The note of scorn in that cry sent a surge of anger through Stendal’s travel-worn body.

“I’m thinking more about your wife,” was Stendal’s icily deliberate reply.

“Which wife?” challenged Winslow, the note of scorn still in his voice.

“I’m sorry to seem old-fashioned, but to my mind you have only one.”

“And you still don’t approve of Tooloona?”

“I don’t. And I never shall.”

“Then what are you going to do about it?”

Stendal realized that the inevitable could no longer be deferred.

“That’s something which seems to have been taken out of our hands,” he proclaimed with a tremolo in his voice.

“Why do you say that?” demanded Winslow, arrested by the other’s note of passion.

“Because Celina is waiting for you,” announced Stendal, not without a consciousness of the climactic.

“Where?” asked Winslow, after a moment’s pause.

“In camp there,” answered the other, indicating the valley of the Attagagli, “just a few hours away.”

Tooloona, sitting sphinx-like on her crossed heels, remained as motionless as the startled Angarooka. But her head drooped a little when Winslow finally broke into a laugh. The white man laughed long and heartily—a little too heartily, Stendal felt. But he faced, without flinching, the sobering eyes that studied his face.

“This is some of your blundering,” Winslow roughly proclaimed.

“On the contrary,” retorted Stendal, “it seems to be the result of yours. And I wish you joy in straightening it out.”

Stendal, whose thoughts had so repeatedly centered on the meeting of Winslow and his wife, found himself giving little attention to the event itself. The physical discomforts of hunger and fatigue tended to dim his interest in the situation. Winslow himself, with his wound reopened when the two Innuit litter-bearers had slipped and fallen on the icy trail, was unexpectedly impassive about it all. And Celina, looking up from the tea-pail over its meager fire as the dejected mushers invaded the camp circle, showed small response to the dramatic possibilities of the occasion. She merely sat back on her heels and let her gaze focus in silence on the bearded man confronting her.

“Hello there,” was the quiet and altogether inadequate greeting of the runaway husband.

“Hello, Owen,” was Celina’s equally quiet response. But her eyes, Stendal observed, remained on Winslow. She found it difficult, apparently, to recognize her husband in the ragged and bearded man on the litter. And her frown deepened as a ghost of a laugh rumbled through his gaunt body.

“I guess I’m not much good to you,” he said as he rolled from the litter, easing his stiffened leg to the ground.

“What happened?” asked Celina, still frowning over that too grim jocularity.

“I got a nick on the leg,” he repeated. “And these numbskulls dropped me and started it bleeding again. But if there’s any tea in that pail I’d like a swig of it.”

It was Tooloona who cleansed a battered tin cup on the skirt of her kooletah and carried the steaming tea to the wounded man, who drank it down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Then after glancing down at the battered tin cup, he looked at his wife.

“You prefer it out of Coalport or Sèvres, as I remember it,” he said as he motioned for a second cupful. It reminded Stendal of the preliminary sparring and feinting of ring combatants.

“We’re out of grub,” Celina announced, still sitting back on her heels.

“Then the sooner we get down to the coast the better,” Winslow said as he sipped at his tea. “My guts have been playing tag with themselves for over a week now.”

But even that casual effort at coarseness, Stendal felt, was a flimsy barricade of defense. For he was beginning to be conscious of tremendous reservations tangled up with a quiet-eyed sort of watchfulness.

“Can you walk?” asked Celina.

Winslow stared down at his crudely bandaged leg.

“I’ll manage all right,” he said with his bark of a laugh. But from under his shaggy brows, Stendal observed, he was studying the silent woman beside the campfire. “And I’ll be around again, in a week or two.”

Nothing, obviously, was being solved. And Stendal was almost grateful for those calamities of the flesh that could throw so lethal a veil over the problems of the spirit.

He was equally grateful, when they broke camp and started out for the coast, for the narcotizing weariness that came from fighting their way through such empty and inhospitable country. They moved on languidly and mostly in silence, hoping for some sight of game with which to stoke the empty engines of energy. For their carefully doled out rations were now cut down to tea and three grease-cakes a day. When Tooloona set her seine overnight, to trap a fish or two, she found it carried away by some oversized river invader. When she suggested weaving a new net, from strips of hide cut from her sleeping-robe, Winslow refused to consider any such sacrifice. When Askim said he knew of seal-lakes, only a few sleeps to the south, the grim-voiced Kablunak retorted that their one and only job was to get back to the village. When snow came and fell steadily for a day and a night, they floundered on through the drifts, with a new note of misery in their symphony of distress. For it was not easy, after that, to conjure up a fire and make the hot tea that brought a semblance of life back to their tired bodies. Even the tea-leaves left in the bottom of the pail were saved and distributed, to be chewed on as they trudged so painfully through each rocky defile and down each drifted talus-slope. They slept together in the snow like a huddle of ragged mummies, strangely silent and self-immured. When Mawri was found stealing a handful of meal from the bottom of one of the grub-bags Winslow’s decision was that he should be shot. But Celina was so actively opposed to any such extreme penalty that the culprit was allowed to live. Stendal refused to take sides in the matter, remembering as he did his own midnight impulse to creep to the same grub-bag and dull the hunger that taloned at his entrails with a pound or two of the same meal. He fell into the habit of consoling himself, as he tried to sleep, by thinking of those opulent repasts of other days when food enough had been thrown away to feed seven hungry human beings for a week. He thought mostly about meat, about thick steaks pyramided with mushrooms, about the English roasts and the Yorkshire pudding browned with gravy on which he had once regaled himself at Simpson’s, about corn-fed capon under glass which he had accepted so lightly at the Park Lane. And in his restive emptiness he reached down and drew a little tighter the belt that encircled his dwindling waist.

When the cold deepened about them and the heavier snows still further added to their troubles Stendal remembered that in Westchester the leaves were still fluttering and flowers were still blooming. Summer, in the land of his birth, was something more than a brief entr’acte in the drama of the seasons. And he had not, he realized, the animal-like endurance of the Eskimos, who could plod on without protest, adding a patch of bearskin to their worn footwear when needed, grinding the last shred of dried meat between their strong white teeth when it was given them and sleeping like a sleigh-dog when night overtook them.

Celina, Stendal saw, did what she could to approximate their stoicism. She failed to show, as he had feared, any signs of collapse. The oval of her face narrowed and the shadow under her cheekbones became more prominent. But she kept up with the others. No complaint escaped her. She spoke, in fact, very seldom. She went on, sustained by some secret fortitude which her companion could neither fathom nor define. Yet she impressed him as waiting for something.

When Tooloona suggested that she should start off alone for the coast and come back with help, Winslow promptly opposed the suggestion. They would get through, he announced, if they kept together and kept their heads. And at any twist of the trail they might happen on a rabbit or a ptarmigan or two. And a few days more would see the trick turned.

But their keeping together impressed Stendal as something in the nature of a mockery. They were no more together, he knew, than fear-driven creatures of the wild in flight from a forest fire. The only bond that united them, he told himself, was a common hunger and a common misery. And unless they found food they would end up in a common grave.

They fell into the habit of stopping more often to “mug up” along the trail. But dry moss and juniper and shrub-willows were not easy to find under the obliterating drifts. And with even their tea running low they were compelled to resort to weaker and weaker infusions. Stendal found, too, that he perspired more profusely as his weakness increased, leaving him, when he rested for half an hour, prey to a chill that stiffened his clothing and struck into his very bones, a chill which even hot snow-water flavored with its few tea-leaves could not altogether dissipate. So he was glad, for all the ache in his legs, to flounder on again. Sometimes he went ahead of the slow-moving litter and sometimes behind it. He no longer resented Winslow’s hour-long silences. He no longer envied Noonaga’s smiling abstraction as she tightened the caribou-band about her diminished waist. He only knew that his shoulders were chafed sore and that his body stank, that his ears rang and that he was infinitely tired and hungry.

He was conscious of Winslow’s derisive inspection of his person as he followed the slow-moving litter across a frozen muskeg.

“You’ll soon be one of us,” said the man on the stretcher. His laugh was both ironic and indifferent.

“I suppose so,” retorted the leg-weary Stendal.

“You begin to look like a native,” proclaimed Winslow.

The note of mockery in his voice rasped on every nerve-end in Stendal’s body.

“I resent having to smell like one,” he snapped.

“Why,” demanded the man on the litter, “are you always harping on smells?” He grunted his disapproval of his uncertain-footed companion. “That’s the trouble with you whites. You’re too damned over-sensitized about smells. You’re almost sissified about ’em. You’re afraid of any good honest odor that comes from the human body. You want everything wrapped up in some sort of perfume. You can’t even wash in plain soap and water.”

“Show me some,” challenged the unhappy Stendal.

But Winslow had his own resentments of which to unburden himself.

“You’ve coddled your noses until they turn up in resentment at anything that isn’t muffled in a cloud of drug-store scent. You’re afraid to look biology in the face. You’ve even turned your women into a walking laboratory of artificial smells. And the whole thing is based on cowardice, on your craven fear of facing actualities.”

“A decent fondness for cleanness has something to do with it,” contended Stendal, his voice unsteady with both weariness and aversion.

“But these Eskimos are clean,” persisted Winslow. “They’re clean, in their own way. Any smell they have is an honest and happy smell. It’s like the smell of a good horse or a healthy dog. And Walt Whitman was poet enough, remember, to know there was nothing revolting about the odor of a human armpit.”

“Not for me, thank you,” barked Stendal. He could have said more. But he was too tired to waste energy on words.

“No,” persisted the rag-draped Winslow; “you’re ashamed of the smells nature gave you. You insist on burying them under something artificial. But you’re as much a walking curiosity to the nose of the Eskimo, remember, as he is to yours. Only you’re hag-ridden by a hundred fears and timidities that he, in his honesty, doesn’t know anything about.”

Stendal, counting his steps, trudged on for a period of silence. Words, after all, didn’t mean much. What he wanted was an honest meal between his ribs.

“I wouldn’t,” he muttered, “be afraid of the smell of roast beef.”

He sat down on the snow and listlessly watched the litter as it forged ahead of him. He rested there, listening to the carillon of bells that pealed somewhere at the back of his brain, until Celina caught up with him. She was walking slowly and studiously, with her head down, following the serpentine trail in the ruptured snow.

Her smile, as he swung in behind her, was abstracted and mechanical. For she too, Stendal could see, was infinitely tired. But she refused to rest. Her eyes, puckered by the strong light on the snow, dwelt for a moment on the lithe and valorous figure of Tooloona, breaking trail in the foreground. And that seemed to give her the strength for some final effort.

“I mustn’t be the failure,” she muttered as she tightened the strip of bearskin about her own waist and staggered along the violated snow-field where the footprint shadows were purple and amethystine in the light from a low-hung sun.

It was Askim, when their last food was gone, who spotted a snowshoe rabbit while grubbing for fire-fuel and brought it down with the rifle, which he chanced at the time to be carrying. But, oddly enough, instead of taking the carcass to Winslow, he dropped it beside Tooloona, who was on her knees trying to blow damp moss into a flame.

Stendal could not understand the quick and heated colloquy that followed this movement, for the talk was all in the Innuit tongue. But Winslow’s outburst of anger impressed the other white man as unreasonable. And the relief that should have come with even a half-cooked rabbit-leg to gnaw on was overshadowed by a perplexing and persistent sense of tension. That tension even survived the camp excitement when Tooloona, returning from a hill-climb, announced that she could see the waters of the Bay. This meant that by another “sleep” and a quartering down across the long talus-slope they would finally be in sight of the village.

Stendal slept better that night. And the next morning, with hope stubbornly triumphing over hunger, he was almost reconciled to the thought of a mealless day. He could stand another ten hours of ear-ringing and sweating dizziness, he felt, if eventually he was to stumble into a warm shack and smell real food cooking on a Russian-iron stove.

But it was not ordained that he should go on with an empty stomach. For Tooloona, he found, had cut the sealskin tops of her mukluks into strips, which she boiled in snow-water until they became pulpy and slightly oleaginous. And there was relief, he also found, in macerating these tripe-like strips between his teeth. It was not much to go on. But it took the twisting knife-blade of pain from his stomach and left him less lightheaded.

He too, he suddenly remembered, was an animal, prowling, hunger intent, on the one end of keeping life in the unclean carcass which he had once so scrupulously cared for. He would have fought, like a snarling husky, before he would have surrendered that last pulpy fragment of sealskin. Even the odor of it, he found, was no longer offensive. And his thoughts of Tooloona, trudging so stoically on through the snow where the shadows were turning blue in the early twilight, became less unkindly. She herself had refused to eat. And she had tied rawhide thongs about the top of each shortened mukluk to keep the snow from her feet.

Winslow, he remembered, was right. She could be, as a machine, incomparable.

“I don’t see how she does it,” he acknowledged as he plodded on beside the brooding-eyed Celina.

“But she should never have done it,” retorted the white woman whose chin had acquired a new sharpness. She limped a little, as she walked, and the sag of her shoulders reminded Stendal of the hungry panhandlers he used to watch, in the old days, heading for their East Side flop-joints. Yet she herself, in those old days, had been serenely remote from that daily sordid struggle to satisfy the needs of the body. She was discovering, for the first time in her life, the meaning of hunger.

“What,” he asked a half-mile farther along the trail, “was all that row about the rabbit?”

“It goes deeper,” answered Celina, “than you’d imagine.”

Stendal nodded a shaggy head.

“You lose your perspective,” he asserted, panting a little with the extra effort of talk, “in a mess like this. It’s not fair to any of us. And we won’t think straight until we get a square meal tucked away under our belts.”

Celina remained silent for a minute or two.

“But there seems to be different kinds of hunger,” she finally observed. “This man Askim, I find, has been talking to Tooloona.”

“About what?”

“About the lady herself. He has explained that the Kablunak already has a wife and that, since it is against the law of the white man to have more wives than one, she should go back to him.”

“Back to Askim?”

“Yes. They tell me she was bought from Askim, in the first place, and that for so many skins she should go back.”

Stendal, in his weakness, found it hard to concentrate on that problem. But as he stopped in the snow and stared at the thin-faced white woman, he discerned a faint and far-off opening in what had seemed an impenetrable wall.

“Then why, in God’s name, can’t he have her?” was the cry that broke from Stendal’s wind-roughened lips.

“It’s not that simple,” was Celina’s quiet-noted reply. “We have Tooloona to consider.”

“To hell with Tooloona!”

Celina smiled a little at the harsh croak in which those words were uttered.

“We’ve suffered enough from the tricks of these wife traders. And from now on we have to look at things in the white man’s way.”

“And where will that get us?” asked Celina.

“Where do you want it to get you?” was the other’s impatient query.

“I don’t know yet,” answered the white woman.

“Then what are you waiting for?”

“For something that Owen has to decide,” was the slightly delayed reply.

Stendal, obviously, found it hard to keep himself under control.

“You don’t propose to leave him in this sink-hole, in the condition he’s in?”

Celina stared down at the far-off waters of the open Bay.

“He claims that his wound is healing and that he’ll be walking in a week. And you must remember that we’re not out of the sink-hole ourselves as yet.”

“We’ll get out of it,” maintained Stendal, wearily compelling one lagging foot to follow the other. But each step was an effort.

“If we do,” Celina said as she glanced forward at the small figure so resolutely breaking trail for them, “we must also remember that we owe it to Tooloona.”

“We owe the whole damned mess to her,” contended the man with over-tensioned nerves. “And that’s something she’s going to remember, when the time comes.”

“I’m afraid,” murmured Celina, “that it goes further back than that.” But she said it in a voice so low that her companion apparently failed to hear her. He trudged on in silence, blinking hungrily at the far-off curve of the coast where Iviuk Inlet ought to lie.

Stendal’s memory of his first day and night back at Iviuk Inlet was always a confused one. It remained a blurred picture of weariness shot through with relief, of disappointingly light eating and consolingly deep sleeping, of warmth and the singing of a kettle on a Russian-iron stove, of a bruised and stiffened body bathed in hot water and restored to a long-lost dignity by the final luxury of fresh clothing. He was satisfied to rest, as comatose as a convalescent, and let the run-down clock of energy wind up again.

But he was dimly conscious, even with the toxins of fatigue dulling his brain, of decisions yet to be made and problems still to be solved. They were all safe and alive, back at what he had once regarded as their home base. But that home base, he began to realize, was merely the stopping-off point on a longer and more decisive journey. And the nature of that journey would soon have to disclose itself.

The Baffin Belle, it was true, had failed to put in at Iviuk Inlet. This, he was told, was probably due to ice conditions. The growler drift along the coast had been unusually heavy, often shutting off the Inlet from open water. And already the harbor saddlebacks were lost in a grinding and shifting flotilla of float-ice. This, he was also told, might account for Slim Downey’s delay in swinging north with his plane. Even that winter-hardened bush pilot would want to be sure of his sheet-ice before attempting a landing. He must have a runway for the skis that would replace his pontoons. And there must be no mistake about that runway, where black sheet-ice, from the air, was so hard to distinguish from open water.

Winslow, who knew all this, said little about it. He remained, in fact, perplexingly withdrawn, notwithstanding the quietness with which he once more assumed command of the camp. He insisted, from the first, in housing himself in the wall-tent, leaving the shack to Celina and Stendal and Tooloona. All he asked for was rest. His leg-wound, he contended, was almost a thing of the past. And he demonstrated that recovery by hobbling, with the aid of two juniper-sticks, about the crowded little village of topeks.

It was Celina, however, that Stendal watched with a covert eye. She too had suffered a wound, but she too remained reluctant to discuss it. She did not ignore the white man who sat beside her by day and slumbered on his shack-corner bed-roll within a biscuit toss of her by night. But between her and Stendal she maintained a barrier as definite as a partition of juniper-boards. She seemed to relapse into an aboriginal indifference to exposure. She dressed and bathed as impersonally as did the Innuit girl who shared the shack-end sleeping-stage with her. Tooloona, Stendal suspected, still regarded him as a woman-man. But as he blinked at the two figures so indifferently reposing across the room from him he knew both a vague resentment at a companionship which struck him as absurd and an equally vague impression of being excluded from their waking thoughts.

They could sleep side by side, he realized when he wakened early one morning, but they were divided by the sword-blade of an issue that still had to be forced to a conclusion. Even their friendship, he remembered as he sat up and studied the face of the sleeping white woman, was bound to be a good deal of a mockery. A little of the color, he noticed, had come back to Celina’s face. Under each cheekbone, however, he could still see a betraying hollow of fatigue. And the violet-tinted shadow under the sleeping eyes was still a perceptible one. But on the thin face, etherealized by weariness, he could see some indestructible pride of race, the sensitiveness of the thoroughbred tangled up with the cool hauteur of the gently-born. She was not a savage and no roughness of life could make her one. She was of his own kind and color. And she would be closer to him, even in her passing moods of hostility, than any brown-skinned daughter of the North.

That thought prompted him to turn his eyes to the sleeping Tooloona. He was compelled to study more than her face, for the Innuit girl, uncomfortable in the warmer air demanded by her white companions, had formed the habit of sleeping without much covering. She lay naked from the waist up, with her crow-black head nested in the crook of a bare arm. Her lips, he saw, had never lost their vividness. And the rounded small body, so childlike in its diminutiveness and yet so compact in its strength, still retained all its earlier softness of contour and creaminess of skin. This gave to it a certain marmoreal impersonality, so that he could gaze at the rounded and softly rising breast with the same detachment with which he might study a statue.

He failed to remember the day or the occasion when he had first grudgingly admitted that her body was a beautiful one, that there was something arresting in even the triangulated face with the dark tangle of lashes along the smooth cheek, too pale to be called a daffodil-yellow and too dark to be compared to a gardenia. But he had been compelled to revise his earlier estimate of her. Nothing was gained, he knew, by contending that she was an undersized and flat-faced barbarian who exuded an odor of fish-oil. It was a white man’s duty to be loyal to his white race. But this wilderness woman was not without her appeal. He wished, as he watched the Artemis-like breast that so quietly rose and fell, that he could say it was purely an appeal of the flesh. But, looking at the relaxed small hand, he remembered the cunning with which that hand could face the exactions of every-day life. And as he studied the dewy low brow under its dark tangle of tresses he knew that the mind behind that frontal bone had both its own loyalties and its own secret aspirations. That she was not happy did not greatly disturb him. But he found disquiet in the discovery that she could, in the face of all the coarsenesses surrounding her, still be in some way exquisite. For that led not only to her own unhappiness, but to the unhappiness of men.

His sense of being excluded from the heart of things was not diminished by Stendal’s discovery that Celina and Winslow had conferred together in the wall-tent. It was a long conference. But it could not have been a happy one, judging by the gravity of Celina’s face when she finally returned to the shack. Tooloona, who was molding loaves of bread for the sheet-iron oven that could be placed on the stove-top, looked quietly up from her work as the white woman entered the shack. For only a moment the questioning seal-brown eyes rested on the other woman’s face. In that face she read, apparently, some answer that was not altogether unexpected. She neither smiled nor frowned. But her own down-bent face became inscrutable as the small hands went on with their work.

A wave of resentment went through Stendal as he watched the white woman, who had once been so free and proud, return to her seat by the stove, like a prisoner returning to his cell. She looked hesitatingly about, for a moment, and reached for the woolen stocking she had been darning. And it made Stendal no happier to remember that the darning was being done with one of the skeins of colored wool which he had earlier given to Tooloona. The cabin, of a sudden, seemed a tragically small one to house three souls at peace with neither themselves nor one another. And the forlorn howling of the village huskies, whimpering and restless because of their lack of freedom, made up a sympathetic obbligato for his own brooding unrest. Stendal’s hands were shaking a little as he filled and lighted his pipe.

“A winter here,” he morosely observed, “must be simply hell on earth.”

Celina plied her needle for a silent moment.

“Tooloona says not,” she finally asserted. She spoke with the indulgence of an outlander who had watched an Innuit mother quiet her baby with a “comfort” made from a wad of cotton soaked in seal-blood.

“It may be all right for Eskimos,” Stendal retorted. “But I want something more than seal-oil and igloos. And the sooner Slim Downey gets back the better.”

He could see Tooloona’s hands come to a stop, as he spoke, arrested for a moment above the dough loaves she was fitting into a pan. But she did not look up.

“I wonder,” questioned Celina, “why he’s so slow in getting here?”

“They have to make sure of their winter flying conditions,” Stendal was at pains to point out. “They have to have an ice-field, to land with skis.”

“But there seems to be ice enough in the harbor out there,” ventured Celina as she went on with her darning.

It was then that Tooloona spoke.

“It is not good ice,” she said. “It is broken and rough. And it changes with the wind. For the ‘thunder-bird’ it must be smooth. If it is not smooth here the white man must land on one of the lakes, which are half a day from the harbor.”

“How will he know that?” asked Stendal.

“He will be in the air, high up like the blue goose, and without doubt he will see them, just as he will see our topeks and the smoke from our fire.”

Celina crossed to the door and held it open a moment. “If he fails to see the smoke from our fire,” she said with a pointed stare at Stendal, “he’ll undoubtedly spot the smoke from that pipe.”

“Do you object to it?” Stendal demanded out of the blue cloud with which he had surrounded himself.

“I can stand it,” said Celina as she went back to her walrus-hide chair. “But you’re smoking too much. It’s bad for your nerves.”

“There are other things that are worse for them,” protested the tremulous-fingered white man. And he realized, as Celina bathed him in her cool glance of disapproval, how life could be cramped and denuded and drained of its dignity. He had not asked to be cooped up there, a hanger-on in a verminous village of Innuits. He had not elbowed into their sordid drama of his own free will. And if it was going to hang on much longer he could very easily learn to hate the lot of them.

He was almost glad when he saw Celina making ready for the open. He surmised, when he sat watching the brooding-eyed white woman wriggle into one of Tooloona’s kooletahs and later pull on a pair of her mukluks, that imprisonment such as theirs was as odious to his companion as it was to him.

“Where are you going?” he peevishly inquired.

“Where I won’t be in your way,” retorted Celina as she pulled on her dogskin mittens and lifted a seal spear from the wall-rack. “And I’d like to know what the ice is like along the harbor-front.”

Stendal, remembering the eagerness with which he had once sought her out, encountered a sense of shock in the discovery that her departure from a common roof could now endow him with a sense of relief. Luxuriating in that new elbow-room, he hung a blanket across the shack-end and took a bath in what had once been a lard-pail. He shaved and trimmed his own hair. Then he took stock of his diminished wardrobe and carefully packed his belongings in the biggest of his duffel-bags. Then he studied the map of northern Canada thumbtacked to the wall above Winslow’s work-desk. After that he read through a government report on Ice-Conditions in Hudson Straits and then sat and smoked, listening to the singing of the kettle on the stove-top. Finally he found a dog-eared deck of cards and fell to playing solitaire.

He saw, when he looked up from his game, that it was growing dark outside. And he was glad of it. For that meant the end of another dreary and meaningless day. He glanced over his shoulder, with a listless eye, when a scattering of natives appeared at the door. He found small interest in them until old Ootah pushed his way through the fur-clad figures. And the white man peevishly inquired as to the cause of all the excitement.

“It is white woman,” cackled the old shaman. “Um go out on ice.”

This meant little to the indolent-minded shack-prisoner.

“What about it?” he testily demanded.

“Um go too far,” averred Ootah. “Ice not good. Um break open with wind and tide.”

Stendal, a moment later, was on his feet.

“Are you trying to tell me the Kablunak’s wife went out on that drift ice?” he said with his first tingle of alarm.

Ootah nodded a shaggy head.

“Plenty brave see um go. That not good. Boys here say um no come back.”

“But she’s got to come back,” cried Stendal. He pushed through them and pounded on the double-flaps of the wall-tent where Winslow, in a cloud of smoke from his trade tobacco, was cleaning and oiling his firearms. “Celina’s lost somewhere out on the float-ice.”

“Who says so?” questioned Winslow, his shaggy head erupting through the tent-flaps.

“These natives saw her go out. And she hasn’t come back.”

Winslow’s hardening gaze steadied on the face of the other white man.

“Why did she go?”

“Because of you!” Stendal was prompted to retort. But the genuine alarm that crept up into the haggard big face caused him to shut his teeth on that charge. “How should I know?” he countered instead.

“Where’s Tooloona?” asked Winslow.

Tooloona was found struggling into her heavier fur garments. The small face she lifted to the Kablunak, as he thrust a flashlight into her mittened hand, was an impassive one. It was not often, she remembered, that she saw fear in the eyes of her camp-mate.

“I will find her,” she said in her small and bird-like voice. It sounded, to Stendal, like an avowal. It held even Winslow motionless for a moment or two.

“It is best for us all,” he finally said, “that she be found.”

The irony of the situation did not escape Stendal.

“What good can that girl do?” he asked as he joined the natives in following after Winslow as the latter went limping down to the sea-front.

“You don’t know Tooloona,” retorted Winslow. His note was curt, but not without confidence. “She’s the cleverest trailer in all this camp.”

There was still light enough for Stendal, looking out across the Inlet, to see the countless acres of float-ice. It had the appearance of an immobile and solid mass, made up of pan-ice veined with many small ridges and freckled with an occasional hummock. But he saw, as he watched, that the entire field was in motion, grinding and crowding together like a flock of sheep shouldering through a pasture gate, then widening out again and showing an occasional ribbon of darkness against the blue-gray of the moaning and muttering float. And those ribbons, Stendal knew, were open water.

His heart sank as he thought of a helpless woman out on that checkerboard of uncertainty, where a false step in the darkness could mean death. He even nursed a qualified admiration for Tooloona as he watched the small gray figure diminish in the distance, become uncertain and finally vanish in the universal grayness.

Winslow, leaning on his stick, stood beside him in the cold air filled with the innumerable noises of the ice-grind. There was dejection in the droop of his once stalwart shoulders.

“That should have been my job,” was the cry that broke from him as his cavernous eyes continued to study the wider grayness that had swallowed up the smaller point of moving gray. Once or twice, out of the darkness, they could see the blink of the flashlight.

“Couldn’t I go out there?” asked Stendal, a little ashamed of the tremor in his voice.

“You wouldn’t last half an hour,” answered the other. “It takes a seal-hunter to manage a field like that.”

“But won’t a wind like this drive them out to sea?” questioned the man from the city. And the thought of two helpless women being slowly driven out into the open Bay and there dying miserably of cold and hunger brought a chill to his blood.

Winslow moistened a finger in his mouth and held it aloft.

“This wind isn’t altogether offshore,” he explained. “And if the field moves out it will move in again.” He turned and shouted for Askim and Mawri and Upik. “What we’ve got to do is have a kayak ready. And get a good beach-fire going here as a beacon.”

The fire was started and fed with palings torn from the fence that surrounded the shack, with Winslow hobbling and stumbling about in the snow as he called out his orders to the Innuits.

Stendal, straining his eyes through the darkness, could no longer see any friendly little blink from the moving flashlight. But within a hundred yards of the shore he saw a lead widen and darken, leaving open water between him and the ice-field. It brought a tightness about his heart and a groan of protest to his lips. But an hour later, he discovered, the lead had closed up again.

When he looked up he saw Winslow at his side.

“I can’t stand this,” said the haggard-eyed Angarooka. “I’m going out there after them.”

That, Stendal cried out, would be foolish. He even clutched at the other’s parka-sleeve. But Winslow tore himself free.

And, once free, he went lurching out across the ice-ledge. He reminded Stendal of a wounded seal as he slipped and fell, tumbling headlong across the first small pressure-ridge.

Stendal, picking his way through the uncertain light, helped the fallen man to his feet.

“I can’t make it,” he groaned.

“Of course you can’t,” said Stendal.

“But I can’t leave them out there,” cried Winslow, trying to free his arm from the other’s detaining clutch. “If they go, I go too.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Stendal. “They’re not dead yet.”

Winslow, who had been straining his eyes through the darkness, suddenly turned and shouted to the village braves behind him.

“Get out there,” he cried, “get out and find ’em!”

But there was no response to that foolish cry.

“I’ll give ten rifles to the man who brings ’em in. I’ll give twenty rifles.”

The ice-drift, Askim explained, had opened still another lead along the shoreline. “We must wait,” he quietly affirmed.

And there was nothing to do but wait. Stendal continued to watch the dark line of the ice-field until his eyes ached. When chilled by the cold air he warmed himself at the beach-fire. When another hour dragged by, with no answering cry out of the darkness, he found a deeper chill striking into his bones, a chill which the fireglow seemed unable to dispel. But he still watched, hoping against hope.

Even when the gray light of morning broke late above the mammillated hilltops behind him he did not entirely abandon hope. But he knew, by Winslow’s haggard face, that the chances were against them. And he remembered how blind and groping had been all his efforts to solve a problem which Fate, by one move on the board, could so entirely take out of their hands. He felt sorry for himself. But he felt sorrier for Owen Winslow, who had openly defied the laws of God and man and crowned his year of madness with this final tragedy not only to himself but to others.

It was Askim, shouting and gesticulating from the top of a beach boulder, who wakened Stendal out of his reverie. Behind him the whole village broke into a chorus of cries. These were taken up in turn by the camp huskies, whose shrill yodeling swelled and sharpened the outbreak.

Winslow, exchanging shouts with Askim, hobbled to Stendal’s side.

“They’re safe,” he said, with a choke in his voice. His hand was unsteady as he pointed to two moving specks advancing over the broken ice-field.

“They’re safe,” shouted Stendal, without knowing he was echoing the other’s cry. But a lead, widening in the shore-ice, still cut the two fur-clad figures off from the mainland. A sea-canoe had to be brought down from its stage behind the fish-flakes. This, sledded out to the lead, was used to ferry the two women across the open water.

“Are you all right?” asked Winslow, hobbling out on the ice-lip to meet them. His shoulders sagged and he looked old in the morning light.

“Yes, we’re all right,” Celina answered. She seemed tired, and her face, in the cold air, looked colorless. But her voice, for all its weariness, held a slightly defiant note.

“I thought you were dead,” cried Stendal. The unsteadiness in that speech brought a smile to the lips of the white woman, who reached out a hand and rested it on the shoulder of the Innuit girl beside her.

“I would have been,” she quietly acknowledged, “if it hadn’t been for Tooloona.”

“I knew she’d find you,” said Winslow.

“Then wasn’t it rather foolish to send her after me?” Celina asked. The note of sharpness in that question brought Winslow’s haggard eyes about to her face.

“Not so foolish as what you did,” he finally said.

“And what you need now,” appended Stendal, “is some hot coffee.”

“Is it?” asked the self-estranged Celina.

“Aren’t you half frozen?”

“Tooloona,” answered the white woman, “did more than find me. She kept me warm, through the night, when we were waiting for that lead to close up. She showed me how, by keeping together, two people can survive.”

And Celina surprised the scattered group along the beach by turning to the Innuit girl and holding the upturned triangulated face between her two hands. When she stooped and touched her lips to the rounded brow under the crow-black hair Stendal found something not altogether to his liking in that unlooked-for salute. It seemed to add a new complication to a drama already sufficiently complicated. And it must have contributed somewhat to the mental perplexity of Winslow himself. For that huge-bodied Kablunak, later in the day, extracted two bottles of old Scotch from his stores, shut himself up in his wall-tent and got morosely and most unmistakably drunk.

Tooloona was not happy. That fact was apparent in the quietness with which she went about her daily work. Her brow was furrowed with a small frown of perplexity. And her eyes, from time to time, wore the questioning look of a sled-dog uncertain of its master’s wishes.

In Winslow, too, Stendal detected a new irritability, betraying the fact that the Kablunak was not entirely at peace with his own soul. He seemed impatient of opposition and more arbitrary in his decisions. When word came down to the village that caribou had been seen in the Iron Hills to the north, the little coast settlement was electrified into sudden activity. Sleds were repaired and snowshoes were restrung and harness was patched. But Winslow took no part in those preparations. He preferred watching the skyline for the delayed plane from the South.

When Askim came to him, suggesting it was time for the tribe to strike North, if they were to have deer-meat that winter, Winslow inspected him with a hostile eye and announced that he had other things to think about. And Askim, humiliated by that public reproof, went sulkily back to his topek.

“Do you mean,” asked Stendal, “that the whole village goes out on the trail?”

“Of course,” answered Winslow. “These people, remember, are nomads. They have no permanent home. They can’t have one. They’re compelled to go where their food happens to be. When they want a house, in winter, they can build it of ice or snow, in an hour. So they never need to take root in a place. They’re still a free race.”

Stendal looked at the topeks that stood so dingy against the snow.

“They’re welcome to their freedom,” he curtly proclaimed.

“But you’d do the same, in their shoes,” retorted the other. “For, naturally, when they trap out one district they have to move on to another.”

“Just as when they tire of one mate,” amended Stendal, “they move on to another.”

But the big-shouldered Angarooka was beyond the reach of that short-lined harpoon.

“When word comes in that the caribou are three hundred miles north of here they have to pack up and go after their fur and meat. That’s what takes everything that is permanent out of their existence. It keeps them from our love of home and our habit of thinking ahead. But we’d never be quite so lighthearted over that daily gamble with life. We’d fret and worry about where we’d be next month and what the chances were for next spring and what was happening to our caches over the hill.”

“While they can love and breed in a ten-foot igloo,” Stendal mordantly suggested.

“Not overlooking the fact,” amended Winslow, “that their loving and breeding is the one permanent thing in their life of impermanents. So I suppose it’s no wonder they go in for that sort of thing a trifle more actively than their civilized cousins.”

But there was no excuse, Stendal felt, for a white man relapsing into any such improvidence. The disturbing factor, he told himself, was not in the morals and manners of these child-minded Innuits. They obviously were able to get along with their own rules of life. The trouble lay in trying to combine two lines of conduct that were incompatible. The white man, left to himself, could feel sure enough of his civilization. And the Eskimo, in his wilderness solitudes, could pursue his own naive paths of happiness in his own naive way. But when the one invaded the territory of the other, there was a confusion of standards, a reopening of issues once regarded as finally answered.

Stendal wished that he was well out of it all. He was glad of even the qualified privacy of the topek which had been put up in the dooryard for him to sleep in. He preferred the cold of that deerskin tent to the constrained silences of the shack. But he knew, as he lighted his candle and looked at the bear-robe resting on the willow mat, that it was Tooloona’s hand that had made his little cave of retreat an orderly one. And he resented his inability to escape her. For it was Tooloona, he still contended, who was at the root of all their trouble. He was, of course, averse to claiming that she was not decently clean-minded and reasonably courageous. She conformed to her native code. From the white man’s standpoint, however, her record was anything but a commendable one. And the fact that she seemed to stand helpless between two clashing and conflicting orders even gave to her an aura of pathos of which she herself seemed unconscious.

For she was still barbaric, Stendal reminded himself the next morning as he sat watching her filling and cleaning the kerosene lamp of which she was so proud. She had mastered a few of the tools and had picked up a little of the patter of the white man. But underneath those trivial alterations remained the ethos of the Innuit. It was like the ice that underlay the summer tundra, the eternal ice that no summer sun could reach and release. Above it flowers might bloom and moss might grow, a thin rind of promise on the unchanging cold, but underneath it remained the land of eternal frost.

That estimate of her seemed confirmed when, an hour later, Tooloona began changing her clothes. She found it hard, apparently, to fall into the white man’s way of thinking about exposure. From her childhood, Stendal assumed as he caught the flash of bare flesh from the shack-end, she had slept in a huddle of half-naked bodies. There had been no closed doors between her and biology. On some crowded family sleeping-stage, like the one beside her, she must have seen her elders caress and cohabit. She must have watched there her mother in labor and heard the first wails of quietly littered brothers and sisters. She must have lain close to some wrinkled-bellied old grandmother who fought for her last breath and waited for the final death-rattle in a lean old throat. She could not be called bold, yet she was no more secretive about the emission of the body’s waste than she was about the intaking of the body’s food. She was no more ashamed of her uncovered genitals than she was of her uncovered face.

It was the Eskimo way. And she was slow in learning any other.

Stendal noticed, for the first time, that she was fitting an armless chemise of feathers about her smooth-lined torso. It was an odd-looking garment, made of cormorant breasts neatly matched and stitched together. It was light and lustrous and it would, he concluded, be incredibly warm. It went about her rounded body like a cuirass. And at the same time it converted her into something that looked half bird and half angel.

“What is that?” he asked as he stared at the rise and fall of the plumaged breast.

“Anorak,” was Tooloona’s answer.

“What,” he exacted, “does anorak mean?”

There was pride in the movement of Tooloona’s hand as she smoothed the full bosom that glistened in the side-light.

“Anorak,” she told him, “means what you call shirt. It is my best one.”

“It is very fine,” admitted Stendal. She was, he remembered, no angel. But he felt the need for wings above the smooth-textured shoulders to complete the picture.

“It is more warm than fur,” explained Tooloona. “And when I wear him it makes me feel light on my feet.”

He sat studying the iridescent figure. And a twinge of pity went through him. But it was the attenuated pity he might have felt for a softly feathered spruce-partridge on which his gun barrel was leveled.

“Why you look at me like that?” Tooloona asked out of the silence.

Stendal, startled by that question, continued to study her.

“I was wondering,” he acknowledged, “what was going to happen to you.”

“I too have wondered,” she quietly responded.

“Something, of course, will soon have to be decided.”

“That is true,” averred Tooloona.

“What do you intend to do?” questioned Stendal, fortified by the thought that the initiative of the white man was not out of place in any such moment of inaction.

“I do not know,” answered Tooloona. “But tomorrow I go with Ootah to the Hill of the Winds. And there, maybe, Sedna who rules the shadows or the Great Whale Spirit will tell me what to do.”

Stendal, who had made it a point to confer with Ootah, could offer no objections to that visit.

“I know you’ll do the right thing,” he added, disturbed by the foolishly tragic light in the seal-brown eyes that continued to study his face.

“You think me bad woman,” she finally announced.

He was human enough to repudiate that claim.

“It is the situation that is bad,” he contended, discomfited by the beaten look in her eyes.

“I am not bad,” said Tooloona, her small hands pressed close to her side.

“Of course you’re not,” was his inadequate response.

Her face lightened, for just a moment, but slowly the tragic look crept back into her eyes.

“It is not easy,” she said, “to do what is right.”

“The hard thing,” he countered, “is to know what is right. And when we know what that thing is and don’t do it, we cannot be happy.”

Tooloona stood considering this.

“Tomorrow,” she announced, “I will know.”

She spoke quietly enough. But Stendal, watching the curve of her throat in the side-light, detected there a quickened beat of the pulse.

“Which means,” he prompted, “that you will go back to Askim?”

The red and rebellious under-lip hardened a little.

“Why to Askim?” she asked.

“Because he is your husband,” asserted Stendal, “your real husband.”

“But when one is sold,” questioned the troubled girl, “does one not belong to the man who buys?”

“That man,” Stendal reminded her, “was not an Innuit. He is a white man. And he already has a wife who is unhappy because he has broken the law of the white man.”

The door opened, as Tooloona stood frowning over the old problem, and Celina Winslow stepped into the shack. Her eyes, as she drew off the borrowed kooletah that made her look so much like a native, rested for a moment on the brooding Innuit girl and then passed on to the white man’s face. But she remained silent until Tooloona, taking up her pail, went out through the door.

“What have you been saying to that girl?” Celina lost no time in asking.

“If you must know,” retorted Stendal, “I’ve been trying to give her the white man’s slant on this mess. And the sooner she gets it the better for all of us.”

“Is it that simple?” questioned Celina.

“There’s nothing complicated about it,” contended Stendal, “unless you make it that way.”

“You mean by leaving out Tooloona?”

“She has to be left out,” was the other’s prompt reply.

“Then how about Owen?”

Stendal’s movement was one of impatience.

“You’re giving him his chance, it seems to me, and if he won’t and can’t take it he’s not worth worrying over.”

Celina sat silent a moment.

“But there’s a part of this, Richard, that you don’t seem to understand.”

“What part?”

“I mean about what first brought him here,” was the deliberated reply. “About Owen’s need for escape.”

“Escape from you?” Stendal demanded in a tone that was almost a taunt.

“Don’t you think we’d do better if we called it his escape from Dynamo?” questioned the even-voiced Celina. “It seems to me intelligent men go primitive like that only when the machinery of civilization crowds them in a little too closely. That makes them want to run away from it. But, unfortunately, they can’t run away from themselves.”

“As they mighty soon find out!”

“It isn’t always fair to sneer at the effort. There’s something almost mystic in it. And also, I suppose, something just a little bit sad.”

Stendal stared into the earnest and humorless face confronting him.

“So you were too refined for him?” he challenged.

Celina stooped to straighten the bear-robe at the foot of the sleeping-stage.

“No, merely too complicated,” was her studiously quiet reply. “I happened to stand for all the tangled up things he couldn’t keep in step with. And in running away from them, of course, he couldn’t help running away from me.”

“His lawful wife,” ejaculated Stendal.

“But lawful wives can sometimes be like polished rice and white flour, that carefully milled white flour which seems to give men beri-beri. And sometimes there’s a real need for something coarser.”

The sad part of it all, Stendal felt, reposed in the fact that a proud and sensitive woman could be humbled into any such forlorn philosophy of life.

“You can call it a pilgrimage, for his soul’s sake, if you want to,” he conceded with his slightly embittered laugh. “But to me it looks like weak-minded selfishness. That’s what I thought at the beginning. And I still think so.”

Celina crossed to the stove and put a turn or two of juniper on the fire.

“Perhaps,” she ventured, “that is why you failed.”

“Where you have succeeded?” demanded Stendal, unable to hold back the note of mockery.

But Celina’s smile, when she looked up at him, was almost a condoning one. “I may not be as great a failure as you’re counting on,” she said.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean that even a woman can go on a pilgrimage, now and then, for her soul’s sake.”

When Stendal entered the shack the next morning, he realized that the appointed processes of life had to go on, no matter what the mental upheavals of mortals might be. For there he found a grave-eyed Celina stooping over a boiling coffee-pot and toasting squares of Tooloona’s brown-crusted bread. He watched her in silence as she opened a can of condensed milk, marveling at the neatness with which she cut her tin-disk from the top. Her hands, he noticed as she turned her slabs of toasting bread, were roughened and reddened and not like the hands he had once seen hover over their glimmering silver and china. There was nothing enriching, he told himself, in that sort of life. And spiritual consolation obviously didn’t come from getting rid of a corps of servants. But Celina struck him as a woman with a new definiteness of outline. He seemed to see her more clearly, in that painfully restricted background, like the intensified impression of a garden landscape glimpsed under an arch. For she was, he realized, still mysteriously appealing to the eye. She remained vaguely regal even in the way she hung a towel over a drying-line.

But the newcomer, watching her as she brushed the stove-top with a blackened goose-wing, was struck by a sense of emptiness that hovered about the shack. He was impressed and in turn a trifle depressed by the denuded look of the walls, by a sense of desertion which he found hard to define.

“Where’s Tooloona?” he asked, with an effort at casualness.

“That,” answered Celina as she turned to put wood in the stove, “is what I’ve been wondering.” Her eyes met Stendal’s, for the first time. “She seems to have taken most of her native clothes.”

That, apparently, gave Stendal something to think about.

“Did she sleep here?” he inquired.

“Yes, but she slipped away before I was awake this morning. I thought, at first, that she had gone to Owen’s tent.” For the second time her glance locked with Stendal’s. “But I realize, now, that that was unjust to her. And equally unjust to Owen.”

That she should even be subjected to such conjecturing sent a wave of resentment through him.

“One can waste too much thought, it seems to me, on these savages,” he said as his gaze wandered from one empty wall-peg to another.

“I find it hard,” said Celina, “to think of Tooloona as a savage.”

“Then perhaps you’ll understand her a little better,” Stendal retorted, “when I tell you where she’s gone. She’s gone with that rheumy-eyed old shaman they call Ootah to powwow with Sedna and the Great Whale Spirit and the rest of her native gods. And before they’re through they’ll probably burn up a seal-pup and read their future in an owl’s entrails.”

Celina’s gaze remained a shuttered one.

“Would you mind speaking more respectfully of Tooloona?” she suggested. “That girl, remember, saved my life.”

“And is also responsible for everything we’ve had to face,” amended the embittered white man.

“I’m sorry, Richard, you were ever brought into this,” said the woman with the oddly barricaded eyes. And the sense of her remoteness did not add to his happiness.

“Well, it won’t last long,” he said with an unlooked-for note of savagery. “And it can’t end up any too soon for me.”

Instead of answering him, Celina scraped the green mold from a half-side of bacon and from it cut slices which she dropped in the skillet on the stove-top. Then with a ruminative eye she surveyed the duly prepared breakfast-table.

The processes of life still had to go on, Stendal remembered for the second time, no matter what nails were being driven into your heart. Even Tooloona, apparently, had realized that. For before going out to her tryst in the hills she had carried in wood and water and molded and baked her accustomed four loaves of bread. On the shelf back of the stove, Stendal saw, there was even a redberry tart. And redberries, he remembered, had the vitamins needed in a white man’s diet.

“Suppose we have breakfast,” Celina quietly suggested. “Will you call Owen?”

Stendal, as he did so, knew that the old ordeal was about to repeat itself. Three self-immured white people, calamitously close together, would solemnly attend to the wants of the body and at the same time succeed in entirely hiding from one another the secrets of their own souls. And it was encounters like that, he held, that took the dignity out of life.

The repeated feeling of inaccessibility touched with frustration returned to him as Winslow strode into the shack, bringing with him an encircling nimbus of the outside cold. He still limped a little as he walked and his eyes looked both tired and preoccupied. But a slightly ironic smile showed on his face as he saw Celina stooped over the stove. Stendal, watching him, was struck by the spirit of desolation brooding over the broad-shouldered figure. He suggested largeness and aloofness. But he seemed as lonely and as unapproachable as the palisaded bergs out in the Bay.

“Where’s Tooloona?” he asked as he lowered himself into the chair of plaited walrus-thongs.

Stendal, realizing that Celina had no intention of answering that question, was able to make his smile an indifferent one.

“I believe she’s off somewhere with old Ootah, powwowing with her native spirits.”

Winslow’s brow darkened.

“She knows I don’t approve of that.”

“Have you the right to pick and choose,” asked Stendal, “when it comes to a question of native procedure?”

Winslow, disregarding that taunt, turned to Celina.

“Did you know she was going to the Hill of the Winds?” he demanded.

“Of course not,” was the prompt reply.

Winslow turned to the somber-faced Stendal.

“Then how did you know it?” he exacted.

“She happened to say so,” Stendal acknowledged. His effort at indifference was not entirely a success.

“And you did nothing to stop it?” demanded the indignant Winslow.

“The lady in question,” he said with his familiar enough note of derision, “does many things I’m not able to stop.”

Celina, as she watched her husband, could see the equally familiar feral flame that blazed in his eyes as he studied the smaller-bodied white man.

“Of course,” he finally averred, “I couldn’t look for any help from you.”

“Do you need help?” challenged Stendal.

“None that you can give,” retorted Winslow as he reached for his heavy caribou parka and drew it down over his shoulders. The enfolding fur made him look even larger and rougher than before.

“What are you going to do?” asked Celina, still quietly seated at the table-end.

“I’m going to put a stop to this pagan idiocy,” Winslow proclaimed from the doorway. He reached to the gun-rack for one of the rifles that rested there. “And I’m also going to find out why Ootah is so interested in my affairs.”

“Could I go with you?” questioned Celina. Her voice, in contrast to the other’s, sounded oddly even and passionless.

Winslow, wheeling about, inspected her for a moment of silence. And the feral flame, Stendal observed, was not burning as brightly as before.

“Why should you mix up in this?” he demanded, his frown deepening as he continued to study her face.

“I’m afraid I’m already mixed up in it,” was her low-toned reply.

And Stendal was startled to see on Winslow’s rugged face some first fleeting look of contrition.

“That,” conceded the man in the parka, “is the one regrettable part of it.”

Celina watched him as he went out. Her eyes, in fact, remained quite a long time on the door that separated her from her husband.

“I think,” Stendal admitted, “that you are a very courageous woman.”

“What makes me that?” questioned Celina.

“Remaining reasonable in what impresses me as an essentially unreasonable situation,” answered Stendal.

“I’m only reasonable,” answered Celina, “when the wind is northeast by east.”

But she showed no signs of stress as the morning wore away and afternoon deepened into evening. She remained quiet-eyed even when a knock sounded on the door.

Stendal, answering that unexpected summons, found Ootah outside in the snow. The old shaman, muffled to the eyes in his ragged furs, refused to come into the shack.

So Stendal went out to him.

“What do you want?” he asked.

The Angarooka, he was told, was in a rage like a bull walrus. He had acted like a madman. He had invaded the Innuit sanctuary on the Hill of the Winds and had thrown the altar of sacrifice to the ground. He had for all time offended the Great Whale Spirit. But, what was worse, he had threatened to put a bullet into the heart of old Ootah, who made medicine only for the good of his people. And there would be trouble, warned the tremulous old shaman, when the Angarooka came back to the village.

“Why has Tooloona not come back?” demanded Stendal.

Because, explained Ootah, the voice of the Great Whale Spirit had told her it would be wrong to come back where she no longer belongs.

“Then where does she belong?” asked the white man.

“In the topek of Askim,” was the answer. “And there she will sleep tonight.”

“Are you sure of that?” questioned Stendal.

She knew, maintained Ootah, that his medicine was good medicine and that the voice of the spirits must not be disobeyed. But with the Angarooka it was different. He held that the Great Whale Spirit had the soul of a skunk. And it would be well not further to anger him. For Tooloona was good to look on. And men who lose their women always seem to lose their sense of restraint. So it would be well, argued Ootah, that nothing should be said of what had passed between him and the white man who was rich in worldly goods.

“Nothing will be said,” Stendal found it easy enough to agree.

But the rage of the Kablunak Winslow would be great, argued Ootah, when he found that Askim had taken his woman away from him.

“She is not his woman,” maintained Stendal, “and never was. His woman is in this house. And he can have only one. For that is the written law of the white man.”

Where a woman who was good to look on was concerned, persisted the quavering-voiced old shaman, laws were not always remembered. And already the Angarooka had taken him by the throat and shaken him as a husky dog shakes a lemming. It was well, in fact, that Tooloona had left the Hill of the Winds; otherwise she too might have been the victim of his madness.

Stendal, as he stood listening to the old Innuit, remembered the mission that had first brought him to Iviuk Inlet. And now there was some promise that the end for which he had fought might eventually be achieved he was tempted to waste little thought on the decrepit agent of that achievement. He recalled his earlier and none too happy encounters with Ootah. That venal old procurer, he saw, was now singing a different tune.

“Why,” he demanded, “should you be afraid of the Angarooka, when you have done only right?”

The braves of that village, Ootah contended, were at the mercy of the Angarooka. And it was not easy for an old man to get along.

“When this is all over,” proclaimed Stendal, “you will have many blankets. I will see that they come to you from over the Great Water.”

A little rum, suggested Ootah, could keep an old man warmer than many blankets.

“That,” Stendal solemnly announced, “is against the law. And since you have broken no law you had best go to your topek and sleep in peace.”

Stendal’s sense of triumph, when he reentered the shack and warmed himself at the stove, was a clouded one. He even found it hard to face the level gaze with which Celina accosted him.

“What did that old native want?” she finally inquired.

It was not easy, Stendal found, to frame an answer to that question.

“He was explaining the anger of the Kablunak Winslow because Tooloona went to the Hill of the Winds.”

“Why should that make him so angry?”

“Because it brings so forcibly home to him, I suppose, the fact that she is still a pagan.”

“She is not as pagan,” asserted Celina, “as she pretends.”

“But she’s still Innuit enough to do what that old shaman’s medicine drum tells her to do. And I don’t see that any of us should sit down and weep over it.”

Celina, stopping short, turned and looked at the grim-jawed Stendal.

“Did you,” she challenged, “have anything to do with Tooloona’s going to the Hill of the Winds?”

“I’m not responsible for her superstitions,” parried the cool-eyed white man.

“But did you bribe that old shaman to say things that you wanted said?” persisted the even colder-eyed white woman.

“Anything I did,” answered Stendal, “was done for your own good. But it’s not necessary to bribe an Innuit like that into a knowledge of his native gods.”

“How about our gods?” asked Celina. It struck the other as a rather foolish question.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to remember,” he maintained. And the fact that she looked so out of place in that robe-strewn northern shack both reminded him why he was there and confirmed him in his decision to keep his mission from being a fruitless one.

“But is this being fair to Owen?” his companion was foolish enough to inquire. “Or fair to Tooloona?”

Stendal made an effort to speak quietly.

“You seem to forget just how unfair they’ve been to you,” he reminded her. But he remembered, even as he spoke, how tenuous had grown his earlier sense of guardianship. He had been fighting to bring back some semblance of her earlier happiness and yet she stood ready to question the only avenue of escape open to her.

“Haven’t you been humiliated enough,” he asked, “without the final humiliation of defeat?”

“I’m not quite sure,” answered Celina, “what you mean by defeat.”

“Then you’re willing to give up your husband?” challenged Stendal, with a nettle of nerves not entirely under control.

“Is that what you mean by defeat?” she asked.

“Do you mean you don’t want him?”

“I didn’t say that,” was the low-toned reply. But for a moment he could see the old imperious light flash from the parapets of pride.

“But something has to be decided here and decided soon. And if we can save him out of this mess we can’t be too lily-fingered about the way we do it.”

“You mean we mustn’t think about Tooloona?”

Stendal’s gesture was one of impatience.

“We can’t afford to.”

He observed, as Celina stood before him, the old-time imperial poise of the shoulders that had more than once made him think of the Nike of Samothrace.

“I’m not asking for that sort of victory,” she quietly asserted.

It was snowing when Stendal awakened the next morning. It was snowing quietly and steadily, without wind, the flakes sifting down like infinitely small feathers. They came so thick that they lowered a muffling blanket of white on the world about him, restricting the range of vision and putting a soft pedal on the noises of the Innuit village. Even the howling of the husky dogs seemed filtered and faraway.

He could see, as he glanced down over the settlement where that purifying blanket was obliterating the soiled village-trails and the midden-heaps and the drying-flakes, that a number of the topeks had already been taken down. The skins had been rolled up and the poles tied together, leaving here and there a ring of stones, a scattering of bleached bones, a lacework of empty paths, which the muffling snow soon transformed into a relief-map of unbroken white. Even the sleighs that waited beside the topek-rolls had acquired a thin and muffling mattress of white.

But the sight of those sleighs both disturbed and depressed him. He trudged down through the snow to where a fur-clad group were stowing their meager possessions away in a caribou-hide bag. He could see where an Eskimo child, contentedly seated in the falling snow, was eating the raw tongue of a seal. The child, for all his smallness and helplessness, seemed quite happy. His small round face, as he sucked at the ensanguined pulp, was stained with blood. There were also smudges of red on the diminutive parka that enclosed his crooning body. And the oblique small eyes, intent on the tidbit that was adding completeness to his joy of living, refused to waste time on the white man who stood beside him in the ever-sifting flakes.

Stendal moved on to the group that was binding walrus-thongs about a worn topek-covering.

“What’s going on here?” he demanded. He noticed, for the first time, that Noonaga was one of the group.

They failed, apparently, to understand his repeated question. They gave him, in fact, little more attention than had the child with the seal’s tongue.

“You go away?” he asked, addressing himself more definitely to Noonaga.

But Noonaga, instead of answering him, merely looked up and laughed.

That laugh was not altogether to his liking. It was colored, he felt, with a tinge of indifference merging on contempt. And it brought home to him the gulfs that yawned between him and these children of the wilderness whom he would never fully understand.

He was glad to make his way back to the shack, the shack that housed people of his own kind and color. He could see, through the falling snow, where the blue smoke went up from the sheet-iron chimney-pipe, suggestive of shelter and warmth, of hot coffee and food.

But when he stamped the snow from his feet and swung open the door he was overtaken by an unexpected sense of intrusion. For seated at one end of the breakfast-table he saw Winslow. At the other end, with the tin coffee-pot between them, sat Celina. Her face was pale and the line of her mouth was firm with a resolution that left it almost stern. Her hand, as she moved a coffee-cup along the top of the table, was not as steady as it might have been.

Stendal could see the barricading shadow that came into her eyes, slightly luminous with some excitement which she had no wish to share with others. It made him think of a curtain being drawn across a lighted window. Winslow’s face, he could see, was equally grim. It bore no sign of welcome. The cavernous eyes, in fact, were scarcely raised as the newcomer entered.

Stendal knew, in spite of the painfully prolonging silence that hung between them, that they had been talking together. It had not, apparently, been a happy encounter. And it was equally obvious that he had put an unwelcome end to it.

“Do you want me,” he somewhat awkwardly inquired, “to go away?”

Celina seemed to gather herself together with an effort.

“Don’t go,” she said with almost a note of weariness.

Conditions like theirs, Stendal once more remembered as he took up a knife to cut bacon and bread, robbed life of its dignifying possibilities of retreat. The stage on which their drama had to be played out was too small and cramped for the consolations of secrecy, for the decencies of reserve. They were like goldfish in a glass bowl, with no final retreat in their movements of stress.

They even had to haul down their flags of pride and eat together, he remembered as he held his bread-slices before the coals of the open stove-front. That bread, he also remembered, had been made by Tooloona’s quick brown hands. And he wondered what part Tooloona had been playing in that solemn conference over a tin coffee-pot on a plain deal table.

“What seems to be going on down in the village?” he inquired as he turned his bacon slices.

It was Winslow who answered the question. He spoke with a slow note of indifference.

“The natives are going north for their caribou.”

“Are you going with them?” Stendal asked. His effort at casualness was not altogether a success.

“I don’t know yet,” answered Winslow, the note of indifference still in his voice. But Stendal, over his shoulder, could see the unrest in the wide and melancholy brown eyes just as he could see the granitic firmness of the wide brown jaw above the barrel-like thorax haired as high as the throat.

He was conscious, as his gaze went on to Celina, of her glance of reproof, plainly implying that he had asked a question which should never have been spoken.

“Something,” said Stendal, “has to be decided.”

His sharpened tone brought Winslow’s indifferently haggard eyes up to the other man’s face. They rested there a moment, almost contemptuously, and then moved on to the colorless face of his wife, who refused any response to the silent question he seemed to be putting to her.

“You’re right,” Winslow asserted as he rose heavily to his feet. “The sooner all this is settled the better.” He reached for the hooded parka that could make him look so big and bear-like, his head lost for a moment in the enveloping fur. It emerged, after a seismic struggle or two, more rubicund than before. “And we may as well find out why Askim is so anxious to get these Innuits out on the trail.”

He disregarded Celina, who rose from her chair as he crossed the room and stopped before the gun-rack. But instead of taking his rifle from where it rested there he went on to his desk in the shack-corner. There, after an impatient rummaging through tools and papers and books, he took up a revolver. It shone bright in the modified light as he broke the chamber, made sure it was loaded, and thrust it into the belt under his parka-paunch. His jaw was ominously grim as he went out through the door, slamming it after him.

Celina continued to stand so erect and tense, at the table-end, that Stendal’s questioning eye met and held her glance.

“I’m afraid, Richard,” he heard her say. She spoke quietly enough. But he was startled by the tremolo of alarm in her voice.

“Afraid of what?” he asked, unpleasantly conscious of her pallor.

Her hands, after a slight wringing movement, dropped to her side.

“Because we’re so helpless,” was her somewhat stifled reply.

Her tragedy, he felt as he stared into her colorless face, was that of the idealist compelled to live in the tents of compromise. They hadn’t the right to put her through everything she’d had to endure in that God-forsaken village of pagans.

“It won’t last long,” he protested. But she found no consolation, plainly, in that cry. Her eyes seemed fixed on something faraway.

“Tooloona came here this morning,” she said, her voice still tremulous. “She came before Owen got back.”

“What of it?” questioned Stendal. And Celina, as her gaze went back to the other’s face, made an effort to control herself.

“Owen doesn’t know it yet,” she said. “But she spent the night in Askim’s topek.”

Stendal’s laugh was brief and mirthless.

“Isn’t that where she belongs?” he demanded. The hostility in the eyes turned to his startled him.

“Do you realize what it means?”

Stendal found it necessary to think twice before speaking.

“I should say it means the safest and surest way out of this whole odious mess,” he finally asserted. “The trouble with us is we’ve been too fastidious in dealing with these blubber-eaters. And when a man drops down to their level he can’t expect to escape the effects of their customs.”

“But you don’t understand,” cried Celina, “why that girl went back to Askim.”

“It ought to be enough,” retorted the unimpressed Stendal, “that she has gone back.”

“But it’s immolation. She’s sacrificed herself, for Owen. And for me. She’s done the one thing that her blind sense of duty prompted her to do.”

“Then why not accept it?”

Stendal found her look of scorn not easy to endure.

“I can’t and won’t accept it,” she declared. She was reaching for her top-coat of abraded green leather. “And I wouldn’t ask Owen to accept it.”

“What can he do?” asked Stendal, fortified with the thought that the issue had finally been taken out of their hands.

“That,” averred Celina as she struggled into her coat, “is what I’m going to see.”

Stendal stood back, puzzled by the tragic intensity of her eyes.

“Aren’t you being unnecessarily emotional about this?” he demanded.

“It goes a little deeper than that,” cried Celina. “I’m not thinking about myself.”

“Then why worry about Owen? He’ll swallow his pill. And he’s pretty well earned any bitterness he gets out of it.”

“I’m afraid,” said Celina, “that I’m thinking more about Tooloona.” Her face hardened in the dim light of the shack. “And about what you’ve done to her.”

“So that,” cried Stendal, “is all the thanks I get for it?”

He could see her lip-curl of scorn as she stood looking at him. Her hands, as she pulled on her fur mittens, were unsteady.

“I don’t think you should expect gratitude, Richard,” she said with all the golden richness gone out of her voice. “People who do good should never look for gratitude. They seem to get their reward out of their own blind pride and their blinder pleasure in what they do. And I know you don’t want your bread buttered on both sides.”

“That’s unfair,” he cried. But before he could say more she was gone. And for the second time that morning the slamming of the shack door took on a note of the conclusive.

There was nothing for him to do but to go after her. He wondered, as he struggled into his parka, why he should so repeatedly arouse her hostility, why she should resent his efforts to serve her. She even seemed determined to belittle him. He told himself, as he stepped out into the falling snow, that she had changed. She had lost, he felt, some of her fineness. She had hardened, in coming to a hard country. Yet about her was something he envied, even while it remained undefined. He dolorously wondered if it could be that the iron North was bringing out her bigness, while it conspired to bring out his own smallness.

“We’ll see who’s small,” he muttered as he adjusted the parka-hood over his head. Then he glanced through the flake-stippled air at the Innuit village. It had an empty look. More of the topeks, he could see, had been taken down. And over it the gently falling snow seemed to fling some final desolation, as though intent on burying something that had already passed away. It gave a universal grayness to the beach-slope, softening the outlines of the boulders and translating the commonplace into mounded unrealities. It also restricted his range of vision, giving him the feeling that the world had contracted to a snow-covered slope about which the last remnants of some last race was moving in the ghostly gray gloom. For he could see where the fur-clad Eskimos, indifferent to the snow, were loading their hide-bags and bundles on the sleighs about which the flakes were forever falling. Their possessions, plainly, were pitifully meager. And their movements seemed as inconsequential as the movements of ants when a stone is turned over. Yet these men, Stendal remembered, were heading into the open wilderness in search of meat, were facing cold and hunger and peril that they might continue to procreate in their igloos of ice, that the women of their choice might not die of hunger, that their slant-eyed children might suck marrow from cracked caribou-bones.

Stendal quickened his step when he caught sight of Winslow. He could see the wide-shouldered white man towering above the group of natives in front of a meetchwop at the upper end of the village. Winslow was addressing an Innuit who stood a little taller than the others. And even before he caught the booming notes of anger in the Angarooka’s voice Stendal nursed a feeling of impending climax, of ancient enmities narrowing up to some final issue. For the man at whom the white man was storming was Askim. It was Askim, stoically silent and sullen-eyed, leaning on the shaft of his walrus-spear, the point of which rested in turn on the loaded sleigh beside him.

When Winslow’s huge foot swung out and kicked the heavily loaded sleigh over on its side Askim, without further movement, rested the point of the walrus-spear on the snow between his mukluks. The sleigh, with its upturned runners, looked grotesquely helpless in the snow. But Askim made no effort to right it.

“What does it mean?” asked Celina.

And Stendal realized, for the first time, that the leather-clad woman beside him was not a native.

“I don’t know,” he answered. For whatever was passing between the two was being said in the Innuit tongue. The one significant word he could harvest from that medley of sound was “Tooloona.” It was only as Winslow made a quick step toward the meetchwop that Askim wakened into action. He attempted to block the path of the irate white man. But Winslow’s great arm reached out and swept him aside. When Askim for the second time interposed his body between the white man and the meetchwop doorway Winslow lifted him bodily from his feet and sent him sprawling in the snow.

It was then that Stendal first saw Tooloona. He caught sight of her as she emerged from the meetchwop opening, stooping low to get through and standing upright again the moment her shoulders were free of the worn drapery of deerskin. The movement, in some way, seemed both a dignified and a decisive one. The hood of her kooletah was thrown back, the enmuffling fur tending to make her head look smaller and more childlike than it really was. There was no color in her face. There were, however, two arcs of shadow under the seal-brown eyes, ending in the high cheekbones that threw a second small shadow across the creamy oval of her face. Her eyes, slightly luminous, fixed themselves on Winslow.

“What must I tell you?” she said in English. She spoke very quietly, with her eyes still on the face of the anger-swept Angarooka.

Winslow, instead of answering her, reached out his great arm and clutched the edge of her kooletah-hood. The motion was a violent one, but he did not shake her, as Stendal had expected. He merely drew her a little closer to his own intently staring face, studying her with hardened eyes as the snowflakes sifting down about them powdered her crow-black hair with white.

Stendal could hear the faint moan that broke from the lips of the white woman standing beside him. But he refused to feel sorry for the small-bodied Innuit girl with the odd light of immolation in her eyes. He refused, in fact, to think of her as a human being like himself, like Celina Winslow, like the people of that safer and saner world to which they would so soon be turning back. He could regard her only as a savage. Yet he found himself still again wondering if his thought of her as an animal could in any way be based on the fact that she went clad in the skins of animals. For in that quiet and colorless face he saw burning some flame of spirit which was not in any way adding to his happiness. She was being brave enough, in her own way. She was refusing to flinch even when Winslow, releasing his grip on her kooletah edge, caught her by the hair of the head and savagely forced up her face.

“Why did you come here?” he demanded, his voice thick and rasping.

The seal-brown eyes remained impassive.

“Because Askim is my husband,” was the low-toned reply. Yet her voice seemed neutral, as neutral as the voice of a child repeating a school lesson.

“And you slept with him?” challenged the harsh voice that seemed to have lost its power to hurt her.

“He is my husband,” repeated Tooloona, almost stubbornly.

“So that’s all I’ve taught you,” gasped Winslow, his wide mouth hardening into what looked like a line of hate. But into the eyes that continued to peer so hungrily up at that hardening face crept a look of pleading touched with pity. Stendal could even see the trembling of the red and softly foreshortened Innuit under-lip.

“Adulterous bitch!” the gray-faced Winslow cried out in his rage. His movement, as he pushed her violently away from him, seemed an unwilled and instinctive one. She remained so passive, under the force of those repudiating arms, that her customary quick-footedness seemed to have deserted her. She stumbled and fell, without any redeeming touch of grace, along the trodden snow.

It was Celina who gave a sharp cry of protest. She stooped and helped the Innuit girl to her feet, imposing her green-clad figure between the smoldering-eyed Tooloona and the towering white man.

But the white man was not even looking at them. His blazing eyes were turned on Askim, who refused to fall back as the big ursine figure moved toward him. The Innuit brave’s head was lowered a little. This gave him a sullen and almost bull-like appearance. It seemed without any promise or possibility of quick action, except for the poise of the muscled body on the disturbingly wide-planted feet.

Stendal had seen that posture before. He had remarked it more than once, down on the ice-floes along the coast, when a walrus harpoon was about to be launched into the heaving hillock of flesh that could so promptly become a mound of commotion. It was, he suspected, one of the quickest motions of which the human body was capable. It had always impressed him as having the speed of a striking diamond-back. That lightning-like dexterity was something ancestral, acquired and perfected by sinewed meat-hunters long moldered in their graves. The training for it began even in childhood, where the chubby hands of chubby-cheeked children sent toy spears of bone whistling into a snow-mound.

Stendal, with his eyes on the long-bladed harpoon in Askim’s hand, had no expectation of abrupt movement. It was Askim’s face alone that disturbed the white man. For on that lean and sun-darkened face under the oblique scowling brows he saw sudden hate. He saw more than hate. He saw revolt harden into recklessness. And it startled Stendal that passivity could so quickly flower into movement. He was equally startled, as he saw the poised spear flash back in the upraised hand, by the abruptness of a second and nearer motion.

It came from Tooloona. And it, too, was incredible in its quickness. She had always been cat-like in her ease and economy of movement. She could, when the call came for it, be as quick as a fingerling. And the call had most unmistakably come. For as the long-bladed spear swept back and sang forward through the gray air she flung herself between its arrowing point and the body of the Angarooka who flapped his hands foolishly across his stomach as he saw, too late, the flight of the cleaving long blade.

For Askim, with instinctive malice, had aimed low, had aimed at the belly of his enemy, the belly that was wide and vulnerable and inviting in its softness. The aim was true. It was so true that it struck well above the stomach of the intercepting body. It drove through the puckered fur of the Innuit girl’s kooletah-front, striking so deep, just under the rounded left breast, that the shaft showed no droop as Tooloona fell back into Winslow’s quickly encircling arms.

He held her for a moment, stunned into inaction, his hands reddening under the warm cascade that darkened the kooletah-front.

Stendal, if he cried out, was not conscious of it. He saw, or thought he saw, a faint smile on the triangulated face that rested for its moment against the Angarooka’s rough body. But it died away in a convulsive movement as the lips lost the last of their redness.

Winslow, with a sound that was half groan and half grunt, lowered the body to the trampled snow. He was making frantic and foolish efforts to withdraw the spear-head.

But that spear-head was barbed, to anchor it home, and Stendal refused to look at the struggle, the absurdly unnecessary struggle, to work it free. He turned away, sick with a feeling of constriction under his own breastbone. He had a feeling that he wanted to vomit. He was conscious also of near-by guttural shouts and the throatier wailing of women, backed by the widening chorus of a dozen howling husky dogs stirred by the smell of blood. He could see Celina on her knees, where the island of scarlet had widened on the snow. Kneeling beside her he could see Winslow’s heavier frame, slumped low over the oddly small figure from which all movement had passed.

“Is she dead?” asked Stendal, knowing the question was a foolish one even as he uttered it.

Winslow, sitting back on his stained mukluks, moved his head slowly up and down. Then the grim face with the cavernous eyes looked at the silent faces clustered about him. He saw Stendal and made a wearily indifferent movement with his hand.

“Send men after Askim,” he said in a flattened voice. “He’ll head for the hills.”

As Stendal, shouting to Upik and Mawri, made signs for those braves to take up the pursuit of the murderer, Winslow bent lower again and covered Tooloona’s torn breast with a flap of her sodden kooletah. Then he rose slowly to his feet.

He leaned against the snow-burdened meetchwop-wall, for a moment, like a spent runner fighting for breath. There was a faraway look in his eyes as he stared down at his wife, who had lifted Tooloona’s head from the snow, where the raven-colored hair-coils stood out so dark against the whiteness. The white woman sat flat on the trodden snow, so that the Innuit girl’s head could rest on her lap. And her movement, as her unmittened hands pressed quaveringly against the crow-black hair, impressed Stendal as both a tender and futile one. He expected to see tears in the eyes of the white woman. But they were quite dry. There was even the ghost of a smile on her lips when she looked up at Stendal.

“She gave her life for him,” Stendal could hear her murmur as she smoothed the dark and glistening hair-coils that so closely banded the low brow. That hair glistened, Stendal remembered, because it had been greased. And the thought of grease so meticulously rubbed into one’s head-dress brought him some sudden and ghostly shadow of consolation. It reminded him that Tooloona had been merely an Innuit. She was and always had been an illiterate Eskimo, a daughter of the wilds infinitely remote from the white woman so foolishly leaning over her.

“You must help Owen,” he said as he placed a hand on the stooping shoulder. “He’ll need it.”

He was prompted to say that because he had just seen Winslow’s face as the cavernous-eyed Angarooka, towering above the Eskimos clustered about him, had stood staring through the falling snow at the shack beyond the topek lanes, the shack that had once been his home. And the emptiness in those dumbly questioning eyes had not been pleasant to look at.

But he made an effort, after helping Celina to her feet and carefully covering Tooloona with a robe of plaited rabbitskin which an old woman of the tribe had handed him, to hide from the white woman beside him an accruing feeling of standing paltry and pinched and small before a bigness that still tended to bewilder him.

Stendal wondered why no one smoked. It seemed strange to him that, at such a time, the consolations of tobacco remained so stubbornly overlooked. He also wondered why Celina’s effort or two at speech, as she gravely gathered together what remained of the intimate small belongings of the Innuit girl, should seem listless and irrelevant. The things that were being put in the basket of sweet-grass embroidered with porcupine-quills, he assumed, would be placed in the grave beside the dead Tooloona. For such, he had been told, was the Eskimo custom.

It was as a small soapstone oil-lamp was being added to the collection that Winslow, rousing himself, rose abruptly to his feet. His hands, as he stood up, fell to his side, fell limp, in an unexpected gesture of despair. It made Stendal, for some reason, think of a flag being hauled down.

He knew a distinct sense of relief when Winslow, with a body-movement not unlike that of a Newfoundland dog emerging from water, deliberately made ready for the open. For Stendal had not been happy watching that haggard-eyed giant sitting so silent and self-immured in his corner. It seemed to hold everything in suspension. And that restricted room, he felt, was too small to harbor so unpredictable a triangle of suppressions. It made him think of an overcrowded aviary, where wings fashioned for freedom and flight could only bruise one another.

Yet he had stubbornly refused to feel sorry for Winslow. He had refused that relapse into emotionalism even when the old Innuit woman, with a face as scarred as a chopping-block, had come to the door asking for Tooloona’s best kooletah and best fawnskin slip, explaining that a daughter of the tribe must be properly clothed to face the Great Whale Spirit. He had wondered why Winslow should so carefully clean and oil Tooloona’s duck-gun and then so silently restore it to the rifle-rack. Once, when the Kablunak had bent over Tooloona’s doeskin prog-bag, the watchfully waiting Stendal had thought the dykes of reserve were about to break. But Winslow, after a slow and abstracted assessing of the bag’s contents, had carried it to the desk-corner and placed it on the shelf next to the nickel alarm-clock, the alarm-clock of which the Innuit girl had once been so inordinately proud. Then he had stood staring out the window, where, under the clearing skies, the low-lying hills stretched so interminably off into the distance.

“I’d like,” he had said, “the funeral service to be as simple as possible.”

“Of course,” said Celina as she stooped to replace the duly aired blankets on the sleeping-stage. Then she restored the snow-beater to its hook beside the door.

“Where,” Stendal found the courage to inquire, “will the burial be?”

Winslow stood looking at him, for a moment, without speaking. Then he moved back to the window, still with an odd emptiness in his eyes.

“Out there,” he finally answered, pointing to the snow-covered quadrangle between the palings. “She always liked that garden.” The unsteadiness of his own voice, apparently, was a surprise to him, for he achieved, as he spoke again, a more matter-of-fact tone. “The soil there ought to be deep enough for a grave.”

Both men could hear Celina’s catch of the breath, at that, but it was Winslow’s vaguely questioning eye that rested for a moment or two on her face.

“Hadn’t I better,” asked Stendal, “have some of the natives get busy on it?”

The cavernous eyes considered him for a moment.

“That,” Winslow quietly responded, “is my job.”

And having spoken, he deliberately made ready for the open. But instead of putting on a parka, for some reason he put on a cloth cap and a plaid woolen Mackinaw that made him look less a native. As he trudged out through the snow, Stendal observed, he still limped perceptibly. But the watching white man, through the shack window, could see him at work with shovel and pick-ax.

Stendal could see where he shoveled away the snow and marked out a narrow oblong on the bared ground. He could see the pick-ax hack at the frozen soil, slowly and deliberately, and the dark wound of the raw earth widen against the universal stretch of whiteness. And Stendal knew a faint feeling of envy at the thought that inner tension could be so adequately relieved by open action.

It was Celina, he told himself, that he felt sorriest for. Her face, for all her determination to carry on without protest, showed her suffering. Yet she preferred to surround herself with a shell of inaccessibility. She was trying, apparently, to fill the place of Tooloona. She had carried in wood and water; she had cooked and washed dishes; she had hung the shack blankets out to air as he had so often seen the Innuit girl do. And she too, he assumed, was finding some ghostly consolation in work.

He found, in fact, something almost reproving in her calmness. Her hands were quite steady and her eyes quite dry as she gathered together what remained of Tooloona’s clothes, carefully sorting and folding them and finally tying them up in the robe of plaited rabbitskin.

“What will you do with those things?” Stendal asked, dolorously conscious that he was more than ever a mere spectator on the sidelines.

Celina’s hand, before she framed her reply, caressed the interwoven fur-strips beside her.

“That,” she answered, “is for Owen to decide.”

There were many other things, Stendal remembered, for Owen to decide.

“He’ll be able to see things more clearly,” ventured the man on the sidelines, “after the burial is over.”

How insistent could be the processes of obliteration had already been brought home to him. For he had observed, earlier in the day, that the hungry camp-dogs had licked away the ensanguined snow where Tooloona had fallen. They had nuzzled there in a snarling group until the last red stain was gone and the ground showed bare. And time and change, he felt, could be as voracious as a camp-husky.

But Celina, as she crossed to the window, didn’t seem to be listening to him. She was staring out at the wide-shouldered figure so steadily busy with pick and shovel, delving into the frost-hardened earth. She surmised, when she saw where two Eskimos with a sleigh were hauling stones and unloading them beside the dark gash in the snow-field, that the pick-ax was already encountering bedrock. Even graves, she remembered, could not be deep in country like that.

“I wish,” she announced in low-toned abruptness, “that I could have dressed Tooloona.”

“You’ve faced horrors enough without that,” contended Stendal when he had reasoned out her meaning. He was not unconscious of the shadows under the quiet eyes that retained the habit of resting on him without apparently seeing him.

“That is not the kind of horror I’m afraid of,” she said with her hands pressed close to her side. And the unuttered tragedy in her face sent a wave of pity through Stendal.

“This is going to work out all right,” he maintained.

That large and airy effort at optimism brought the abstractedly somber eyes back to his face.

“Is it?” she said, quite without emotion.

But Stendal had no intention of being silenced.

“Owen was trapped in all this, remember, just as that schooner he belted with greenheart was trapped in the ice. The pressure was too strong for him. He’s going to suffer, of course, for what has happened here. He’s——”

“He’s suffering now,” said Celina, with her back to the over-voluble Stendal.

“I don’t deny that and I don’t deny that he won’t miss Tooloona. He’ll feel about the same as a man does when he loses a faithful dog, a dog that was loyal enough to make him forget his loneliness. But you can’t——”

“Stop,” commanded Celina. She was facing him, oddly tense, in the modified shack light. “You may think things like that. But don’t parade them before me.”

“But at a time like this,” he argued, remembering that she was not altogether mistress of her own emotions, “we have to be realists. We have to face facts.”

“Then how about the fact that Tooloona was a human being? How about her? She may have been an Eskimo, but she was still human. She had as much right to life and happiness as you or I have.” Celina walked, rather brokenly, to the window, where she stood staring out at the deepening hole in the ground. “And now they are putting her in that!”

“Don’t we all come to that, in the end?” demanded Stendal, remembering there was nothing irreparable in life except life itself.

“Not the way she did,” Celina cried out with a tremor of revolt.

It was because she was a woman, he concluded, that she could be so compassionate. To admit the fact was not the fashion of his time, but women, he felt, had a fineness of fiber not found in men. A woman could be sacrificial even in her selfishness. And she was acquisitive only that she might be devoted. She seemed to have grown into an understanding of the ancient paradox that the giver alone is the final receiver. And even her weaknesses seemed based on the belief that man might some day learn the blessing of betraying her less unselfishly.

“Your big job, of course, will be with your husband,” said the man who insisted on being a realist.

“Doing what?” exacted Celina.

The sharpness of her voice was a disappointment to Stendal.

“The one thing that confronts you,” he maintained. “Getting him back to his old place in the world.” He looked up at her small hand movement of dissent. “You intend to take him back, don’t you?”

“Back to what?” asked Celina.

Her companion was disturbed by the return of some older imperial line to her lips.

“Back to what you can make of life together,” he persisted, knowing that the gateway of candor was about to swing shut between them.

“I think,” said Celina in confirmation of that knowledge, “our first duty is to bury poor Tooloona.”

And he was conscious, for the rest of the day, not only of a closed door between them but of the gulfs, as definite as leads in float-ice, that could yawn between a man and a woman who had once stood singularly close together.

Morning broke clear and cold, the next day, with a wind that riffled the loose snow and half filled the open grave in the garden with ground-drift. Winslow, after going out with his shovel and removing that intrusive blanket of white, returned quietly to the shack. He stood in the doorway for a minute or two, peering down at what remained of the Innuit village.

It had lost its old air of close-clustering friendliness. It was, in fact, no longer a village. The brooding-eyed white man could see the skeleton-like drying-stages and the rings of stones where so many topeks had stood. And on the fringes of that emptiness he could see the dog-sleighs, already loaded and tarpaulined, waiting for the lean-bodied huskies to be placed in the hauling-traces. For through woe or weal, Winslow remembered, life had to go on.

He could see the natives moving about in the clear air, stoically gathering up the last of their possessions, baling their flimsy sleeping-robes, making ready for their long trek into the North. But their movements were perfunctory and uncertain. They were waiting, he remembered, for that final ceremony in the garden of the Angarooka who no longer seemed one of them. Once that was over and done with the long-lashed dog-whips would crack in the air, the traces would tighten and the gray cavalcade would set out for its hunting-grounds beyond the hills.

Winslow felt no enmity for them. He was, after all, only an accident in their life. And they had their own paths to pursue, their own hungers to appease. They were, he remembered, a brave people. And, in their own way, a happy people. Whatever their faults, whatever their failings, they were free because they had learned that freedom dwells in the recognition of the necessary. They were honest with themselves. And they were not without valor, the valor of the North.

He could see where the women were clustered about the one remaining meetchwop. That, he knew, was the meetchwop where Tooloona lay, with the two oldest women of the tribe keeping watch and with the candles of the Angarooka burning night and day at her head and feet. And now, as soon as those candles were put out and the waiting litter moved up the beach-slope, that last meetchwop would be taken down and folded away. The village that had once seemed so vital with life would be no more. It would fade like a memory in the winter’s snows, a passing scar on a coastline scarred deep by Time. And even the grave in the garden behind the palings would lie unremembered in the deepening drifts.

It was old Ootah who hobbled up to the shack door, half an hour later, asking if he, as the patriarch of the tribe, was not to officiate at the burial of Tooloona.

Winslow studied the old shaman without rancor.

“Tooloona,” he finally said, “was a daughter of your people. But she came to know the God of the white man. And for that reason, among others, I’d like her to have a Christian burial.”

“That is good,” said Ootah, wondering why the strange white woman stood so straight and silent in the shadows behind the Angarooka.

“It is,” said Winslow, “what she would wish.”

“Since Askim, who is her husband,” amended the old man with the bear-like eyes, “is now lost in the hills and will not return to say otherwise.”

Winslow’s face clouded, but only for a moment.

“We will not go into that,” he quietly responded. “But your parka is old, Ootah, and I have here an extra one of winter caribou, which your daughter Nyla can cut down for you.”

The old shaman was not slow in taking possession of the oversized garment, which he promptly inspected inside and out. He stuffed it with tremulous hands into the paunch of his own incredibly ragged parka. Then his wizened old face was directed toward the village-site along the shoreline.

“My people,” he explained, “are waiting to start out on the trail. And the women sent me to tell you that Tooloona is now ready.”

“Ready for what?” demanded Winslow, abruptly emerging from his abstraction.

Ootah pointed to the dark oblong in the quadrangle of white.

“For the bed where she will sleep,” answered the old shaman, making a sign which was incomprehensible to the two silent and waiting white men before him.

The silence lasted so long that Ootah could see the snow melting on his patched mukluks.

“All right,” Winslow said with a hand movement of wearied acquiescence. “I’m ready.”

He looked at the silent Stendal and the equally silent Celina. “We may as well get through with it,” he added with an effort at casualness that was obviously protective.

But he wasn’t as ready, Stendal discovered, as he had claimed. For when he searched for the Church of England Prayer Book which he felt sure should be among his books he failed to find it. All he could unearth there was Tooloona’s Oxford Bible, dog-eared and stained with grease, with two yellow bird-feathers and a dried twin-flower pressed between its leaves.

Stendal, standing in the doorway, could see the natives moving in a mass up the snow-covered slope. At the head of the group walked two braves, bareheaded, carrying a litter, the same litter on which Winslow himself had been carried down from the Attagagli. Over it was draped a white blanket that seemed to have been made of rabbitskin. The men, as they walked, were silent. But the women and children, trailing behind, emitted a series of sounds that made up a chorus not altogether a wail and not altogether a chant.

It was Ootah, as the cortège approached the gateway in the palings behind which the three white people waited, who silenced that low-toned chorus.

Winslow, with the Bible in his hand, motioned for the hesitating litter-bearers to enter the gate. He was bareheaded and there was very little color in his face. But his step was steady as he walked beside the draped blanket of rabbitskin.

Celina, on the other side of the litter, seemed to move with an effort, like a woman wading through water. But Stendal, a few steps behind her, could see that her chin was held high and that the line of her shoulder was a defiantly resolute one. She had, he remembered, many things to shut out of her mind. For she too must have been conscious of something awkward and unorganized in that stumbling procession across the snow-covered garden and the equally awkward pause as the litter came to a stop beside the open grave. It seemed stark and bald, without dignity and almost without meaning. The few funerals he remembered had been cushioned and softened by the elaborateness of their ceremonial, with something almost narcotic in their stateliness. But as Winslow took his place at the head of the grave, Stendal could see how he had difficulty in getting secure footing on the frozen clods. He could see where three smaller Eskimo boys, untouched by the meaning of the occasion, were shooting with their whale-bone bows at the fence-palings. He could see where Noonaga, half hidden in a huddle of dingy-clad women, was quietly chewing on a flitch of dried whale-meat.

Then he saw that Celina was stooping over the roughly made bier. She lifted back the end of the rabbitskin blanket, uncovering Tooloona’s face.

It looked small and childlike and oddly etherealized in its bloodlessness. The desanguinated body looked equally small, with rawhide thongs binding together the knees which rigor mortis had only too plainly made unruly.

Winslow, with his face toward the hills, waited until his wife had replaced the rabbitskin. Then he made a sign for the body to be lowered into the open grave. The line of his jaw, as he did so, was as grim as granite. But his voice was steady as he opened the dog-eared Bible and began to read:

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” were the low-toned words that rose and fell in the gusts of the hill-wind. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me beside still waters.”

Stendal could see where the two Innuits, lowering the body by means of traces cut from a dog-harness, were frugally retrieving the good bands of walrus-hide that could be of no service to the dead.

“He restoreth my soul,” the bareheaded giant was reading in a voice that grew huskier as he went on. “He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.”

They were moving and majestic words, Stendal admitted to himself, but they did not impress him as especially appropriate to the occasion. He wondered who was expected to shovel the earth in on the rumpled white rabbitskin.

“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for Thou art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me.”

Winslow’s voice came to a stop. He lifted his hand to his throat and stood motionless a moment. Then with a gasp of helplessness he handed the open book to Celina, who moved closer beside the wide-shouldered figure that swayed a little where it stood.

Stendal, reaching for the shovel that lay against the stone-pile behind him, could hear the clear and bell-like voice of Winslow’s wife as she went on with the reading. He waited until she came to the end of the Psalm and closed the book. She saw the question in his face and nodded.

A small sound of protest came from Winslow. His wife, peering into his face, moved about so that she stood between him and the open grave. Her hand rested for a moment on the rough wool of his Mackinaw.

“What is it?” she asked.

Winslow did not answer her. But his vague gesture of remonstrance led her to believe that the brevity of the service was at the root of the trouble which he failed to articulate.

“It’s all we can do,” Celina gently reminded him. “And she liked silence best.”

Winslow’s head went down.

“She liked silence best,” he repeated in a husky whisper.

And Stendal knew it was time for him to act. But it was not easy, he found, to begin filling the grave. He clenched his teeth, without knowing it, as he flung the first dark shovelful on the unspotted white rabbitskin. Burials like that, he felt, should be in a casket, in something defensive between a small body and the weight of the open earth. For the frozen soil, falling in rough lumps, seemed almost malignant on so frail a structure of flesh and bones.

He was glad when the two Innuits came to his help. He knew his first sense of completion when they began laying the accumulated boulders along the rough oblong, placing them in orderly rows and building a sort of cairn. That, he remembered, was the Eskimo way. It was the only manner, along those coasts of eternal ice, in which they could give an air of permanence to the impermanent.

“That,” he heard the quiet-voiced Celina observe, for the second time, “is all we can do.”

She stood beside Winslow, as though waiting to lead him away. But when the Angarooka in the plaid Mackinaw lifted his head he seemed unconscious of her presence there. His eyes were empty and abstracted. He remained oblivious to the fur-clad natives who filed out through the narrow gateway. He failed to notice the snow-buntings that were already chirping and hopping about the unclean ground, the ground so soiled and scarred and trampled by the feet of the departing mourners. He remained motionless as a stray malamute from the village began to nose interrogatively about the fresh-piled stones that covered so puzzling a hole in the ground. He seemed to show no concern when Celina, with a quick cry of protest, caught the shovel from Stendal’s hand and sent the wolfish-looking cur out through the broken palings. He even showed no interest when a far-off throbbing, rising and falling on the wind, grew into a steady and purposeful drone of sound.

It was Stendal who looked up and peered along the opal-green rim of the world to the south. He saw nothing at first. But as he stared he made out a drifting small cross where the opal-green deepened into a robin-egg blue. It grew bigger as he watched it. And he knew, as he listened, there was no mistaking that unconquerable voice of power. He found himself running about on the uneven garden ground, waving his arms as he ran.

“It’s the plane,” he cried out, wondering why the snow-trampled settlement on the shoreline between the glittering float-ice and the lonely talus-slope that melted off into the hills should so abruptly dwarf into insignificance. Beyond the opal-green rim of the horizon, he remembered, was a saner and warmer world, a world of white men like himself.

“It’s our plane,” he repeated, resentful of Winslow’s lack of interest. For Celina alone turned and looked up into the sky as the engined wings circled out over the Inlet and swung inland again, swooping lower over the broken snow-fields. There was something reassuring in its roar of sound as it banked and turned, with the pilot plainly nosing out his lake-level for a landing. And equally reassuring, a minute later, was the sense of hush that told the engine had been shut off and the tired wings were coming to rest. Even the Eskimos farther down the shore-slope had stopped in their work beside the loaded sleighs to look up at the “thunder-bird” from across the Great Water. But when it passed out of sight over the ridge they busied themselves with their restless dogs. They looked small and ant-like as team by team they crawled away along the glimmering shoreline, becoming more ghostlike as they receded into the distance.

Stendal was glad of the hot coffee Celina had ready for him before he started back to the seal lake just over the neighboring coastal ridge. It kept out the cold. And he was feeling the cold, of late, more than he was willing to admit.

But he consoled himself with the thought, as he glimpsed the snow-fields through the rime-fringed window, that his sojourn in that wind-swept wilderness would soon be a thing of the past. The shack, when he glanced up over his tilted cup-rim, looked unexpectedly bald and aboriginal.

“Downey says we can’t take luggage back with us,” he observed. His gaze swerved to Winslow’s deliberately inexpressive eyes. If he expected some answering spark from the struck flint of indifference he was disappointed.

“There’s not much to take,” Celina said as she refilled his cup for him. And he wondered why the two of them were so stubbornly maintaining a coalition of remoteness that made escape into the open almost a relief.

“The three of us,” explained the solemn-eyed Stendal, “will be about all he can manage.”

It was meant as one of his trial balloons, but it resulted in no enlightening answer from the others. Celina moved to the stove, where she put a few turns of wood on the fire. Winslow, remaining silent and self-absorbed, continued to stare at the empty pegs on the shack wall.

Stendal resented both the silence and the sense of being excluded that went with it. When he spoke again his face was turned toward Celina.

“Downey had trouble, or he’d have been back here three weeks ago. He smashed a propeller-blade in a bad landing at the Great Whale Post. And that, naturally, looked like a tie-up. But he found an old Scotchman there who’d been a cabinet-maker in Glasgow. And the two of them carved a new propeller out of a house-beam.” Stendal drank the last of his coffee. “You can’t down those bush pilots.”

Celina put water in her teakettle and replaced it on the stove-top.

“When does he want to start back?” she quietly inquired.

“The sooner the better, he says. His propeller works, but it isn’t working the way he wants it to. And he claims another three hundred miles of shimmying may shake his old crate to pieces. But he’ll get us out all right. The only thing he can’t understand is why we’re not ready and waiting.”

Stendal glanced, for the second time, toward the silent and self-contained Winslow.

“You’re going out, aren’t you?” he asked, fortified with the thought that he was no longer the passive object of a choleric host’s unpredictable whims. He could even afford to disregard Celina’s quick glance of reproval.

“I don’t know yet,” was Winslow’s deliberately indifferent reply.

Stendal, as he rose to his feet, made no effort to conceal a deepening frown of protest.

“Then what am I to tell Downey?” he demanded.

He was, after all, only trying to be reasonable. But he still felt himself to be a reasonable man involved in a persistently unreasonable situation. Under the circumstances he couldn’t, of course, expect Winslow to be lighthearted. The man, obviously, had too much on his conscience for that. But even if he had wakened to some final realization of his wrongdoing it gave him no excuse for imposing his moods on others. For it was not the end of everything, to those others; it was more like the beginning.

“Tell him anything you like,” was Winslow’s altogether inconclusive reply.

Stendal stared at the gaunt hand that was passed so drearily over the gaunt face. And as he grew into a realization of the desolation of spirit that brooded over the huge figure he found his impatience tempered with a coloring of pity.

“He could come in for you, of course, later on,” Stendal ventured. He was struggling into his cloth overcoat, which, after the fur parka, made him look oddly urbanized.

“We can go into that,” said Winslow, “when Downey comes back with you.”

Stendal turned to Celina as though looking for help from quarters more reasonable. But Celina, with her face obdurately remote, said nothing. She remained silent, in fact, even after the door had closed on the man in the muffling greatcoat.

It was Winslow who spoke.

“Now that blundering ass is out of the way,” he said with an unexpected vibrato of passion, “we can breathe a little easier.”

Celina stood silent a moment, as though schooling herself to patience.

“Don’t blame Richard,” she said, “blame me.”

“Why should I blame you?” asked her husband.

“Because I sent him here.” She turned to the other, compelling herself to meet his gaze. “And in a way, remember, I sent you here too.”

Winslow’s gesture was a dismissive one.

“That’s all over,” he said with a curtness that was largely defensive.

“Is it?” she countered, still studying the gaunt face confronting her.

He turned away from her and looked wearily about the shack. Then he crossed to the window and stared out at the rough cairn in the trampled snow.

“It’s buried,” he said in a quieter voice, “with Tooloona.”

But Celina moved her head slowly from side to side.

“It’s not that simple,” she still again contended. “Tooloona isn’t as dead as you imagine.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked in a sharpened voice.

But there was no accusation in the quiet eyes so quietly considering his face.

“I mean,” said Celina, “that unselfishness like hers isn’t quickly forgotten.”

She was sorry, a moment later, that she had said it. For she could see the clouded look of pain that came into the haggard face where the cheekbones stood out so crag-like in the side-light.

“I was the one,” Winslow acknowledged, “who was selfish.”

She did not deny it. But knowing him as she did, she harvested an inkling of the inward desolation that was undermining the ancient walls of arrogance. And the look of pity that crept into her face didn’t altogether escape him.

“I don’t suppose you realize it,” he said in a more meditative tone, “but you’ve been rather wonderful through all this.”

That, for some reason, took the hardness out of her eyes. She turned to move the steaming teakettle farther back on the stove, disturbed by the discovery that a tear or two was blurring her vision. And in that hour, she told herself, judgment must not be blurred. There was still an issue to be decided and a Great Divide to be crossed.

“Are you going to stay on here?” she asked with altogether delusive quietness.

He looked up, for a moment, studying her face.

“Would that,” he exacted, “make any difference to you?”

His question, apparently, was not an easy one to answer.

“I’m not thinking about myself,” she said with a slight tinge of color creeping into her thin cheeks.

“Why shouldn’t you?” challenged her husband. For the second time she found herself confronted by a question not easy to answer.

“Because I’ve learned something,” she finally said, “since I blundered up into this northern home of yours.”

“Home!” he echoed, with a protesting note of irony.

“It was the home you made for yourself,” she maintained, “when you left me. And when a man leaves a woman, like that, she naturally wants to know where the failure has been.”

“I was the failure,” Winslow asserted. His posture, as he sat studying the hands that drooped between his wide knees, was one of defeat touched with helplessness. But the grave-eyed woman confronting him refused to be swayed by the spirit of solitude that surrounded him.

“No,” she contended, “the failure was on my side of the fence. I felt, because you didn’t ask for much, that there wasn’t much to be given. But I realize now, when I think of Tooloona, how small and selfish and exacting I must have been.” She paused, for a moment, at his cry of protest, but her voice remained controlled as she went on: “It is Tooloona, I think, who has humbled us. She was ready to lay down her life for me. And she did it, for you.”

He rose to his feet and crossed to the window, where he stood looking out at the cairn in the snow.

“I was as unfair to her,” he finally said, “as I was to you.”

Celina, as she watched him, swallowed hard at a lump in her throat. But her voice, when she spoke, was entirely under control.

“Then it’s time, I think, for the two of us to turn over a new leaf.”

That brought him abruptly about where he stood.

“What does that mean?” he exacted, trying not to seem too hopeful.

“It means,” answered Celina, “that the one important thing is for us both to be fair to Tooloona’s memory. When she could give so much, it seems to me, we should surely meet her half-way along that trail of sacrifice.”

The hope, for some reason, went out of his eyes.

“Then it is sacrifice?” he questioned.

There was no bitterness in his wife’s smile.

“Can we escape that,” she asked, “after what happened?”

He returned to his chair and sat silent a moment.

“I suppose not,” he finally agreed. He looked down at an opened seam in his trail-worn mukluks. “You don’t know it, of course, but I still have a tremendous respect for you.”

“Respect?” she cried. And the note of bitterness, this time, was not absent from her voice.

“I can’t, naturally, hope for too much,” was his husky-noted rejoinder. “It would take time, of course, to build up what I destroyed.” His gaze went slowly up to her face again. He could see that her under-lip was trembling a little. And that seemed to give him the courage to say what he had hesitated over saying. “But I’m asking for the chance.”

She shut her eyes for a moment. Then she slowly moved her head from side to side.

“Now that I’ve thought things out,” she said with studied deliberation, “I realize the one unselfish thing I can do is to go back alone and leave you free.”

“Free?”

“Yes, leave you free. That, I think, is what you always wanted—just to be free.”

Those final words, as she had expected, brought the clouded look of pain back to his eyes.

“We’re never free,” was the embittered cry that broke from him.

“I think I am,” she asserted, “for the first time in my life. I’m free because I’ve learned, as you say up here, to travel light. And I want you to be equally unburdened.”

He seemed unable to follow her.

“But I owe you something,” he blunderingly proclaimed.

“I don’t think I want much,” she said with the ghost of a smile.

His cavernous eyes coasted the shack before coming to a rest on her face.

“Perhaps I too have learned something up here,” he said with a humility that was new to him.

“What?” she asked, noticing for the first time how grizzled with gray was the bowed head before her.

“How much I need you,” he answered out of the ruins of his pride.

She stiffened, at that, and sat silent a moment.

“I don’t think I mean much to you!”

He looked up at that Job-like cry from her slightly tremulous lips and seemed to find courage in the discovery that her eyes were not dry.

“You’re all I have,” he protested. “You’re all that’s left to save me—out of this wreck.”

Her laugh was neither curt nor unkindly. But it stood, for a moment, like a lifted shield between them.

“I’m the only wife,” she reminded him, “that you have left.”

If she regretted that speech, even before it passed her lips, she felt the need of purging her soul of the bitterness that could give birth to such words. She could even see how he steadied himself, as a surf-bather stiffens against the waves that must not overthrow him.

“I deserve that,” he agreed. “And I suppose I’m not worth what I’d cost you.”

She moved her head from side to side in dissent.

“I’m the worthless one,” she contended. She sat back, trying to picture him in that northern shack as the snows piled higher and the winter deepened about him. She saw him in his rough fur parka, dragging a caribou carcass home across the drifts. She saw him in sealskin mukluks, pacing the shoreline of the Inlet and waiting for the retarded spring and then for the brief Arctic summer when the sea-lanes would open up and a rusty-plated coasting steamer would come with his season’s supplies.

The forlornness of that picture took her gaze back to her husband’s face. The baffled look in her eyes did not escape him.

“I know,” he faltered, “that you’ve never understood. And I want you to understand.”

“Would that help any?” she asked. It sounded unkindly. But her gaze remained almost commiserative.

“I suppose not,” he admitted. “But you must have wondered why I went away like that.”

It struck her as odd that any such probing of so deep a wound could finally be without pain.

“I saw it coming,” she confessed. “I saw it coming, I think, before you did. But instead of facing it, I shut myself up with my shattered pride. And it wasn’t until you were gone that I realized how final it was.”

The disastrous light in her eyes brought his hand up in a gesture of protest.

“But I hadn’t intended it to be final,” he said in a voice heavy with perplexity. “About all I was looking for was to get away for a while, to think things out. I knew what would happen, if they went on as they were. And I didn’t want to lose you. All I wanted was an armistice to——”

“An armistice,” she reminded him, “between enemies.”

But he brushed that aside, as though the issue were too momentous to be tied up with the trivial meaning of words.

“I was my own enemy,” he went on, “but I didn’t know it. I thought I’d lost something, something that could be hung out in the sun like a wet blanket and brought in when the sourness was gone. I wanted roughness—something, I suppose, to shake me into sanity. But it came stronger than I’d counted on.” His clouded gaze went slowly about the shack. “And I thought you didn’t care.”

“Even when I came after you?” she found the courage to ask.

“I knew then that I was wrong,” he said as his haggard eyes studied her face. And in that face he must have seen some passing shadow of pity, for with a sound that was little more than a small moan he dropped on his knees in front of her, letting the tangled mat of his head rest between her knees.

“Can’t you take me back?” he pleaded.

“When it’s too late?” she parried, fighting against the perilous tide that was washing away her little sand-house of determination.

“We can keep it from being too late,” he contended. There was something almost childlike in his unstudied attitude of humility. It was so childlike that it brought her unsteady hand hovering for a moment over his meekly bowed head. But the hesitating hand was finally withheld. She was too afraid of herself.

“It could only be for another armistice,” she conceded, trying to control her quickened breathing. For she knew, in her heart, that her fear was too tragically well-founded. She was no longer the judge. There were left to her no rights to exact and no terms to dictate. But even in her woman’s helplessness she could only foolishly and forlornly repeat: “An armistice!”

“Isn’t that all the vanquished can ask for?” he triumphantly inquired.

To that she essayed no immediate answer. But as the clasp of his hungrily outstretched arms tightened about her body she turned her head away a little, so that the hot tears that ran down her face would not fall on the bent head held between her foolishly compassionate hands.

THE END

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

The misspelling of “Innuit” for “Inuit” is used consistently throughout the book and has been retained.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

[The end of The Wife Traders, by Arthur Stringer]