Kak’s was a very small house. It had no tunnel at all and no proper door—but why have a door when one does not want to go in and out? Kak only wanted to get in. During the building he had been compelled to cut a hole in the lower part of his wall so he could crawl out and get more blocks; for there had not been quite enough material in the floor to finish the roof. When all was ready he scrambled through this small hole, pulled the dogs after him, and then closed it with a block he had cut for that purpose. From the outside the architect had not been able to see all the chinks in his house, but it was so dark inside every least little one showed clearly against the night; so he filled his mitts with soft snow and plastered them up. Then he spread the sealskin from the sleigh over his floor. Now all was shipshape. But without door or window they had no air. The boy made a little round hole in the middle of his door-block, and another in the top of the roof, as he had seen his father do, and at last, feeling utterly safe and tremendously proud of himself, cuddled down with a large woolly beast on either side of him, and was soon fast asleep.
A long drawn thunder, followed by a tumbling, rending, grinding vibration roused Kak from his dreams. He felt cold. It was apt to be chilly at night if the lamp went out, so the boy sought his father’s hefty form to snuggle into. Eskimo families all sleep in a row in one big bed, and Kak’s place was beside his daddy. Drowsily he threw a hand across to feel for him and rapped Pikalu on the nose. The dog growled. Then his master woke up enough to find himself in his clothes and remembered.
Another rumble, more prolonged, more terrifying than the last, shook the whole house. Kak rose on his elbow and listened. He could hear the wind whistling around their shelter, while the smashing and bumping never ceased. You would have come out all over in goose flesh and popped your head under the blanket; but Kak only turned on his other side and lay up closer to Sapsuk. The row outside was no more alarming to him than taxicabs beneath your window, or a trolley car clanging across rails, for well he knew its meaning; a gale had driven the sea ice in on the landfast ice, and the two floes were grinding and groaning and churning against each other, with bolts of thunder when sometimes a great mass as big as a house toppled over another great mass, and vibration like an earthquake as it slid off again. This sort of show was fun to watch in the daytime, and nothing to be afraid of at night when you were safely camped in your own house which you had constructed all by yourself on the solid, landfast ice.
But while the lost boy slept so peacefully his father and mother and sister were very unhappy and anxious.
The seal hunters had returned at dark, each dragging a fine, fat seal and congratulating the other on a good day’s work. They parted with jests and laughter outside Hitkoak’s place; and Taptuna strode on cheerily to his own home. But before he had got within calling distance he knew something was wrong; even in twilight he missed his sled’s black bulk; and where were his dogs? They should have come bounding to welcome him, wagging their tails, asking for friendly pats, jumping up, frisking, romping. Instead of being the center of this lively scene the little white roof of his house humped itself out of the white ground like a solitary tomb.
Taptuna wasted no time on the seal. Letting it lie he strode inside, calling for Kak. Guninana raised an anxious face from over her cooking pot and told the worst:
“He has gone! That wild boy dashed off for one last load of whale meat after the sky had turned gray. I called, ‘It is too late!’ but the dogs were already galloping, the wind blowing—Kak did not hear.”
“How long?” demanded Taptuna.
“Long enough to be back now,” answered the mother shaking her head. Then she spoke her haunting fear: “There are bears all around and he carried neither spear nor bow.”
Guninana was horribly afraid of bears, more afraid of a polar bear than of anything else in the whole world.