Half way down, Ootah uttered a cry.

His quick ear detected a faint splitting noise, like the crack of young ice in forming, under his feet.  In an instant he realized their danger.

At the time he had reached a hollow in the perilous slope.  The dogs ahead, with quick instinct, retreated and crouched at his feet in the sheltering cradle.

Ootah saw Koolotah turn and look inquiringly upward.  The next moment, driven downward by the wind, a mass of clouds, glittering with bleached moonfire, rolled over the slopes and hid Koolotah.  Ootah only heard his voice.

Then the glacial mountainside to which he clung trembled.  A terrific crash, like that of cannon, followed.  The very mountain seemed to shake.  For a brief awful spell everything was still—­then, with an appalling thunder, the ice split and began to move.  The moon reappeared and Ootah—­in a tense moment—­saw chasms widening about him on the glistening slope.  He heard the deafening echoing explosions of splitting ice in the distance . . .  With fierce ferocity he instinctively fastened one bleeding hand to an icy projection above him, with the other he held with grimly desperate determination to the sled . . .  In the next dizzy instant he felt the icy floor beneath him lurch itself forward and downward . . . before his very eyes he saw Koolotah and his team—­not twenty feet below—­wiped from existence by the descending glacier to which he clung and in the hollow crevice of which he found security . . .  In a second’s space he caught a clear vision of tremendous masses of green and purple glaciers being ground to fine powder in their swift descent on all sides of him, . . . he saw the feathery ice fragments catch fire in the moonlight, . . . he heard the elemental roar and grinding crash of ice mountains sundering in a titanic convulsion . . . then he lost hearing . . .  In that same sick bewildering moment of preternatural consciousness he thought wildly of Annadoah . . . he saw her appealing wan face amid the blur of white moonlight . . . he knew she needed food . . . and he felt an ache at his heart . . . he called upon the spirits of his ancestors.  Then the silvery swimming world of white dust-driven fire became suddenly black—­and the earth seemed removed from under him.

In the village the natives were awakened from their lethargic sleep by the far-away crash of the avalanche.  Their faces blanched as they thought of the hunters.  “The hill spirits have smitten! Ioh! Ioh!” they moaned.  In her igloo Annadoah, who had waited with sleepless anxiety, wept alone.  Of all in the village only the heart of one, Maisanguaq, was glad.

VII

“The utter tragedy of her devotion to the man who had deserted her, and the utter hopelessness of his own deep passion, blightingly, horribly forced itself upon him . . .  Ootah asked himself all the questions men ask in such a crisis . . . and he demanded with wild weeping their answer from the dead rejoicing in the auroral Valhalla.  But there was no answer—­as perhaps there may be no answer; or, if there is, that God fearing lest, in attaining the Great Desire, men should cease to endeavor; to serve and to labor has kept it locked where He and the dead live beyond the skies.”