And why, Philip asked himself, did these savage little barbarians of the north want her?  The fighting she had pictured for him had not startled him.  For a long time the Kogmollocks had been making trouble.  In the last year they had killed a dozen white men along the upper coast, including two American explorers and a missionary.  Three patrols had been sent to Coronation Gulf and Bathurst Inlet since August.  With the first of those patrols, headed by Olaf Anderson, the Swede, he had come within an ace of going himself.  A rumor had come down to Churchill just before he left for the Barrens that Olaf’s party of five men had been wiped out.  It was not difficult to understand why the Eskimos had attacked Celie Armin’s father and those who had come ashore with him from the ship.  It was merely a question of lust for white men’s blood and white men’s plunder, and strangers in their country would naturally be regarded as easy victims.  The mysterious and inexplicable part of the affair was their pursuit of the girl.  In this pursuit the Kogmollocks had come far beyond the southernmost boundary of their hunting grounds.  Philip was sufficiently acquainted with the Eskimos to know that in their veins ran very little of the red-blooded passion of the white man.  Matehood was more of a necessity imposed by nature than a joy in their existence, and it was impossible for him to believe that even Celie Armin’s beauty had roused the desire for possession among them.

His attention turned to the gathering of the storm.  The amazing swiftness with which the gray day was turning into the dark gloom of night fascinated him and he almost called to Celie that she might look upon the phenomenon with him.  It was piling in from the vast Barrens to the north and east and for a time it was accompanied by a stillness that was oppressive.  He could no longer distinguish a movement in the tops of the cedars and banskian pine beyond the corral.  In the corral itself he caught now and then the shadowy, flitting movement of the wolves.  He did not hear Celie when she came out of her room.  So intently was he straining his eyes to penetrate the thickening pall of gloom that he was unconscious of her presence until she stood close at his side.  There was something in the awesome darkening of the world that brought them closer in that moment, and without speaking Philip found her hand and held it in his own.  They heard then a low whispering sound—­a sound that came creeping up out of the end of the world like a living thing; a whisper so vast that, after a little, it seemed to fill the universe, growing louder and louder until it was no longer a whisper but a moaning, shrieking wail.  It was appalling as the first blast of it swept over the cabin.  No other place in the world is there storm like the storm that sweeps over the Great Barren; no other place in the world where storm is filled with such a moaning, shrieking tumult of voice.  It was not new to Philip.