Then a wreath of smoke crowned the barricade, and they scattered like a handful of pebbles thrown at random.  Four went down, and four more, and they continued swiftly to fall, one and two at a time, till but one remained, and he in full flight with death singing about his ears.  It was Nok, a young hunter, long-legged and tall, and he ran as never before.  He skimmed across the naked open like a bird, and soared and sailed and curved from side to side.  The rifles in the pit rang out in solid volley; they flut-flut-flut-flutted in ragged sequence; and still Nok rose and dipped and rose again unharmed.  There was a lull in the firing, as though the Sunlanders had given over, and Nok curved less and less in his flight till he darted straight forward at every leap.  And then, as he leaped cleanly and well, one lone rifle barked from the pit, and he doubled up in mid-air, struck the ground in a ball, and like a ball bounced from the impact, and came down in a broken heap.

“Who so swift as the swift-winged lead?” Aab-Waak pondered.

Tyee grunted and turned away.  The incident was closed and there was more pressing matter at hand.  One Hungry Man and forty fighters, some of them hurt, remained; and there were four Sunlanders yet to reckon with.

“We will keep them in their hole by the cliff,” he said, “and when famine has gripped them hard we will slay them like children.”

“But of what matter to fight?” queried Oloof, one of the younger men.  “The wealth of the Sunlanders is not; only remains that in the igloo of Neegah, a paltry quantity—­”

He broke off hastily as the air by his ear split sharply to the passage of a bullet.

Tyee laughed scornfully.  “Let that be thy answer.  What else may we do with this mad breed of Sunlanders which will not die?”

“What a thing is foolishness!” Oloof protested, his ears furtively alert for the coming of other bullets.  “It is not right that they should fight so, these Sunlanders.  Why will they not die easily?  They are fools not to know that they are dead men, and they give us much trouble.”

“We fought before for great wealth; we fight now that we may live,” Aab-Waak summed up succinctly.

That night there was a clash in the trenches, and shots exchanged.  And in the morning the igloo of Neegah was found empty of the Sunlanders’ possessions.  These they themselves had taken, for the signs of their trail were visible to the sun.  Oloof climbed to the brow of the cliff to hurl great stones down into the pit, but the cliff overhung, and he hurled down abuse and insult instead, and promised bitter torture to them in the end.  Bill-Man mocked him back in the tongue of the Bear Folk, and Tyee, lifting his head from a trench to see, had his shoulder scratched deeply by a bullet.