During the first period of the night, and after Ootah’s first capture, several prowling bears were shot.  The howl of occasional wolves was heard in the mountains; then all the bears disappeared, the hunger of the wolves was stilled.

When the third moon rose not a thing stirred outside the igloos.  A glacial silence gripped the northern world.  In their shelters the natives clustered together, warming one another with their breathing and the heat of their bodies.  They lacked the courage even to speak.

Day by day their supply of food had run low.  Day by day they decreased their portions; their cheeks sunk, hunger burned in their eyes.  To save the precious fuel they burned only one lamp in their houses; they were unable to sleep because of the intense cold.  Finally their food gave out.  From his store Ootah silently doled out allotments until starvation confronted him.  One by one the dogs were eaten.  And this caused a dull ache, for the men loved their dogs only a little less than they did their wives and children.  The quaking fear of the long hours slowly gave way to a dull lethargy.  In their igloos, where single lamps smoked, they sat, and to keep up their circulation and to prevent themselves from falling into a coma, they rocked their bodies like things only half alive.

The black days and black nights slowly, tediously, achingly passed.  One day was like another—­one night seemed to mark no progress of time.  Only the children, to whom parents gave the last bits of food, showed some animation.  They played listlessly with one another.  For toys they had crude carvings of soapstone—­tiny soapstone lamps and pots with which they made pitiful mimicry of cooking.  The little girls played with crude dolls just as do little girls in more southern lands—­but they were grotesque effigies, made of skin roughly sewn together.  The boys found brief zest in a game which was played by sticking ivory points in a piece of bone, hanging from the roof of the igloo, and which was perforated with holes.  Finally, as the night wore on, the children lost interest in their games, and with aching stomachs, lay silent by the fires.  Starvation steadily claimed its toll.  Death, slowly, surely, laid its grim and terrible hands upon that pitiful fringe of earth’s humanity on the desolate star-litten roof of the world.  One by one a stark body would be carried from an igloo into the black, bitter cold silence without and buried under blocks of snow.  And above, intense and incandescent, the Pole Star—­that unerring time mark of God’s inevitable and unerring laws—­burned like an all-seeing, sentient and pitiless eye of fire in the heavens.

Annadoah lay upon her couch of furs.  Her face was thin, and white as the snows without.  The flame in her stone lamp was about to flicker into extinction.

Ootah, entering the igloo, sprang quickly to her side.  Her breath came very faintly.  He seized her hands.  He breathed on her face.  He opened her ahttee and rubbed her little breasts.  He felt something very strange, and wonderful, stirring within him.  And with it a ghastly fear that the thing he loved was dying.