All was over at last. The shrieks, the growls ceased, and the dead bear lay among the ruins of the igloo.
The next day Anvik stayed away from school to help build a new igloo. His father and Tanana did not talk much, from the time when they laid the blocks of extremely hard snow in a circle till the time when the inwardly-slanting snow walls had risen to the topmost horizontal block that joined the walls. But, once during the building, when the three workers had taken great flat shovels, made of strips of bone lashed together, and were throwing loose snow against the sides of the new igloo to protect its future inhabitants from the cold, the father stopped, and turning to Tanana said:
"My heart is ashamed! The hot water made us forget to hide the way to the igloo, and when the bear came to kill my wife and children, the hot water made us sleep. My heart is ashamed."
And Tanana, keenly humiliated that his younger brother and not himself had killed the bear, answered, "My heart is ashamed, also."
"The hot water bottle shall not come to my mouth again," resolved the father, with determination.
And Tanana promised the same. The bottle had been broken in the scuffle, but Tanana knew his father's and his own promise included any other bottle of liquor.
"You shall go to the teacher's school with Anvik," decided the father. "The teacher speaks well when he tells the boys that the hot water will steal their souls. If Anvik had drank it, we should all have been killed."
Anvik jumped up from chinking a crack between two snow blocks. He remembered his prayer, and he laughed aloud now with joy for the answer.
"The new igloo is better than the old!" he cried. "The hot water will never go in at the door of our new igloo!"
And in his heart the boy added, "May the dear Lord Christ come into our new home!"