The sun meanwhile sank lower and lower; there were long hours of twilight; snow storms came; the cold increased.  Ootah felt the first whip of approaching winter.  Ootah’s spirit melted.  Disquieting messages came in the cold winds and darkening clouds.  His heart beat quickly at what the frightened birds told him.  Olafaksoah, they said, struck Annadoah.  As she lay on the ground he kicked her.  In the snow-driven wind Ootah heard the echo of her heart-broken weeping.  He revoked the curses he had uttered; he cursed his own weakness whereby he had invoked harm to her.  Then in the winds Ootah heard the beat of drums.  In the clouds he saw the white men dancing with the Eskimo maidens.  Day after day they danced—­day after day Annadoah wept.  Olafaksoah had become wearied.  Disappointed in the failure to secure greater supplies, he vented his impatience upon Annadoah.  Cruelly he bruised her little hands, he mocked and jeered her when she pleaded with him.  In fits of anger he often struck her.  Finally, one day, in the cloud phantasmagoria, Ootah saw Olafaksoah reeling from the strange red-gold water the white men drank.  He entered Annadoah’s tent.  She crouched, terrified, in a corner.  With him were three of his rough blond companions.  They staggered—­and in the winds they sang.  Olafaksoah pointed consentingly to Annadoah.  One of the men attempted to embrace her.  Then she rose defiantly and did what few Eskimo women ever dared.  She smote the man’s leering face and, sobbing, sank on her knees before Olafaksoah.  He roared out things the Eskimos do not understand. “Goddlmighty!” and more awful words.  His fist descended.  In the winds Ootah heard Annadoah scream and call his name.

That day he descended from the mountains.

Much that Ootah conjured in his mind, or imagined he saw in the clouds, really happened.  Whether he actually sensed these things by some wonderful power of clairvoyance, which the natives themselves believe—­or whether he just accurately guessed what occurred, I do not know.  But of this I can tell: 

By that strange contradictoriness of the feminine—­much the same all the world over—­by that inherent, inborn desire of subjugation to the brutal and domineering in the male, Annadoah had given herself unreservedly to Olafaksoah.  At the sound of his firm step she trembled.  His hard, brutal embraces caused her heart to flutter with joy.  At first he told her he would take her with him to the south.  Annadoah believed him.  Then he changed his mind, and said she must wait until the next season for him.  She silently acquiesced.  She called upon all her simple arts to please him.  Carefully she oiled her face and made the golden skin soft by rubbing it with the fur of animals; with a broken comb, left with her mother years before by a party of explorers, she combed her long, black and wonderful hair and elaborately arranged it behind her.  About her