“Greedy, eh?  Well, we need the meat!  If we’re goin’ to stay here to chance hunting our dogs got to be fed!” More supplies were brought.  Still Ootah did not speak.

The white chief presently gazed hard at Ootah.  Then his eyes brightened with amused mirth.  He saw the despairing, yearning gaze of the youth toward the girl he had selected to favor.

“Ha, ha, ha!” he laughed good-naturedly.  “I see.  I’ve keel-hauled your Romeo stunt, eh?  Want the stuff?” He kicked the supplies interrogatively.

Ootah sadly shook his head.  He dully heard the vulgar gibes of the white men and the mocking laughter of Maisanguaq.

One of the natives began beating a drum.  Ootah giddily caught an evanescent vision of women dancing with reeling traders.  He heard Olafaksoah as he entered Annadoah’s tent laughing heartily.

The thought of Annadoah in the embrace of the big blond man, of her face pressed to his in the white men’s strange kiss of abomination, aroused in Ootah a sense of violation, an instinctive repugnance akin to the horror a native feels for the dead.  All the ardent hopes of his life for many moons had centered upon his bringing the results of a successful hunt to Annadoah and asking her to share his igloo, to become his wife.  And now, in his hour of high victory, after everyone had acclaimed him, he was crushed.

A fervid fever seemed to take fire in his forehead and flush his veins, yet his heart was colder than ice, his hands and feet were cold.  He felt as though someone were strangling him; he felt giddy, suddenly sick.  At that moment he was too stunned to realize fully the blighting tragedy which had annihilated his hopes.

Nearby in her tent he heard Annadoah’s voice, sweet as the song of buntings.

“Olafaksoah, Olafaksoah,” he heard her murmur tenderly, “thou art a great man.  Thou art strong.  Thy arms hurt me, thy hands make me ache.”  Then Ootah heard the man’s hard voice and Annadoah’s repressed murmurs of mingled pain and delight.  The day became black about him.  He felt that he must get away; a wild madness to run seized him.  He felt the impetus of the winds in his feet.  Turning on his heel, his face to the northwest, he fled.

In the sky overhead the black guillemot screamed.

III

“Her lips are red—­red as a wound in the throat of a deer.”

For seven weeks Ootah lived in the mountains.  The violence of his bitterness and grief scared away the wild hawks in whose high nesting place he found shelter.  At the door of that icy cave above the clouds, he called upon the spirits of the mountains for vengeance.

“Ioh—­ioh!” he wailed.  “Spirits of the glaciers, lift your hands—­strike!  Descend and smite Olafaksoah! carry him to the narwhals; let the whales feed upon his body.  May the soul of his hands, and the soul of his feet, and the soul of his heart, and the soul of his head struggle with one another.  May he never rest! Ioh—­ioh—­ioh—­ioh!”