“Ootah! aveq soah!  Hasten thou!  The walrus are drifting to sea.”

Attalaq rushed up to the village and paused at the tent of Annadoah.

“Ootah!” he called.

A voice from within replied.

“We start—­the wind drifts—­the walrus are carried to sea.”

“I come!” replied Ootah.

The flap of the tent opened.  The sunlight poured upon the face of the young hunter.  He smiled radiantly, with the self-assertion of youth, the joy of life.

Ootah was graced with unwonted beauty.  He was slight and agile of limb; his body was supple and lithe; his face was immobile, beardless, and with curving lips vividly red, a nose, small, with nostrils dilating sensitively, and eyebrows heavily lashed, it possessed something of the softness of a woman.  His glistening black hair, bound about his forehead by a narrow fillet of skins, fell riotously over his shoulders.  His eyes were large and dark and swam with an ardent light.

He turned.

“Thou wilt not place thy face to mine, Annadoah?  Yet I love thee, Annadoah.  My heart melts as streams in springtime, Annadoah.  My arms grow strong as the wind, and my hand swift as an arrow for love of thee, Annadoah.  The joy the sight of thee gives me is greater than that of food after starving in the long winter!  Yea, thou wilt be mine?  Surely for my heart bursts for love of thee, Annadoah.”

He leaned back, stretching his arms, but Annadoah shyly drew further inside her shelter.

With a sigh he flung his leather line over his shoulder, seized his harpoons, and stepped from the tent.  His step was resilient and buoyant, his slim body moved with the grace of an arctic deer.  He looked back as he reached the icy shore.  Annadoah stood at the door of her tent.  Her parting laughter rang after him with the sweetness of buntings singing in spring.

Ootah’s heart leaped within him.  Annadoah possessed a beauty rare among her people.  From her father, one of the brave white men who had died with the Greely party years before at Cape Sabine, Annadoah had inherited a delicacy and beauty more common indeed with the unknown peoples of the south.  Her face was fresh and smooth, and of a pale golden hue.  Her cheeks were flushed delicately with the soft pink of the lichen flowers that bloom in the rare days of early summer.  Her eyes played with a light as elusive, as quick as the golden radiance on the seas.  Her dark silken hair straggled luxuriantly from under the loose hood of immaculate white fox fur which had fallen back from her head.  The soft skins of blue foxes and of young birds clothed her.  From her sleeves her hands peeped; they were small, dainty, childlike.  Almost childlike, too, was her face, so palely golden, so fresh, so lovely, so petite.  There were mingled in her the coyness of a child and the irresistible coquetry of a woman.

She waved her hands joyously to the hunters leaving the shore.  They called back to her.  Some of the women frowned.  One shook her fist at Annadoah.