Quiquern by Rudyard Kipling

The People of the Eastern Ice, they are melting like the snow -- / They beg for coffee and sugar; they go where the white men go. / The People of the Western Ice, they learn to steal and fight; / "They sell their furs to the trading-post: they sell their souls to the white. / The People of the Southern Ice, they trade with the whaler's crew; / Their women have many ribbons, but their tents are torn and few. / But the People of the Elder Ice, beyond the white man's ken -- / Their spears are made of the narwhal-horn, and they are the last of the Men! / Translation.

"He has opened his eyes. Look!"

"Put him in the skin again. He will be a strong dog. On the fourth month / we will name him."

"For whom? " said Amoraq.

Kadlu's eye rolled round the skin-lined snow-house till it fell on / fourteen-year-old Kotuko sitting on the sleeping-bench, making a button / out of walrus ivory. "Name him for me," said Kotuko, with a grin. "I / shall need him one day."

Kadlu grinned back till his eyes were almost buried in the fat of his / flat cheeks, and nodded to Amoraq, while the puppy's fierce mother / whined to see her baby wriggling far out of reach in the little sealskin / pouch hung above the warmth of the blubber-lamp. Kotuko went on with his / carving, and Kadlu threw a rolled bundle of leather dog-harnesses into a / tiny little room that opened from one side of the house, slipped off his / heavy deerskin hunting-suit, put it into a whalebone-net that hung above / another lamp, and dropped down on the sleeping-bench to whittle at / a piece of frozen seal-meat till Amoraq, his wife, should bring the / regular dinner of boiled meat and blood-soup. He had been out since / early dawn at the seal-holes, eight miles away, and had come home with / three big seal. Half-way down the long, low snow passage or tunnel / that led to the inner door of the house you could hear snappings and / yelpings, as the dogs of his sleigh-team, released from the day's work, / scuffled for warm places.

When the yelpings grew too loud Kotuko lazily rolled off the / sleeping-bench, and picked up a whip with an eighteen-inch handle of / springy whalebone, and twenty-five feet of heavy, plaited thong. He / dived into the passage, where it sounded as though all the dogs were / eating him alive; but that was no more than their regular grace before / meals. When he crawled out at the far end, half a dozen furry heads / followed him with their eyes as he went to a sort of gallows of / whale-jawbones, from which the dog's meat was hung; split off the frozen / stuff in big lumps with a broad-headed spear; and stood, his whip in / one hand and the meat in the other. Each beast was called by name, the / weakest first, and woe betide any dog that moved out of his turn; for / the tapering lash would shoot out like thonged lightning, and flick away / an inch or so of hair and hide. Each beast growled, snapped, choked once / over his portion, and hurried back to the protection of the passage, / while the boy stood upon the snow under the blazing Northern Lights and / dealt out justice. The last to be served was the big black leader of / the team, who kept order when the dogs were harnessed; and to him Kotuko / gave a double allowance of meat as well as an extra crack of the whip.

"Ah! " said Kotuko, coiling up the lash, "I have a little one over the / lamp that will make a great many howlings. SARPOK! Get in!"

He crawled back over the huddled dogs, dusted the dry snow from his / furs with the whalebone beater that Amoraq kept by the door, tapped the / skin-lined roof of the house to shake off any icicles that might have / fallen from the dome of snow above, and curled up on the bench. The / dogs in the passage snored and whined in their sleep, the boy-baby in / Amoraq's deep fur hood kicked and choked and gurgled, and the mother of / the newly-named puppy lay at Kotuko's side, her eyes fixed on the bundle / of sealskin, warm and safe above the broad yellow flame of the lamp.

And all this happened far away to the north, beyond Labrador, beyond / Hudson's Strait, where the great tides heave the ice about, north of / Melville Peninsula -- north even of the narrow Fury and Hecla Straits -- on / the north shore of Baffin Land, where Bylot's Island stands above the / ice of Lancaster Sound like a pudding-bowl wrong side up. North of / Lancaster Sound there is little we know anything about, except North / Devon and Ellesmere Land; but even there live a few scattered people, / next door, as it were, to the very Pole.

Kadlu was an Inuit, -- what you call an Esquimau, -- and his tribe, some / thirty persons all told, belonged to the Tununirmiut -- "the country lying / at the back of something. " In the maps that desolate coast is written / Navy Board Inlet, but the Inuit name is best, because the country lies / at the very back of everything in the world. For nine months of the year / there is only ice and snow, and gale after gale, with a cold that no / one can realise who has never seen the thermometer even at zero. For six / months of those nine it is dark; and that is what makes it so horrible. / In the three months of the summer it only freezes every other day and / every night, and then the snow begins to weep off on the southerly / slopes, and a few ground-willows put out their woolly buds, a tiny / stonecrop or so makes believe to blossom, beaches of fine gravel and / rounded stones run down to the open sea, and polished boulders and / streaked rocks lift up above the granulated snow. But all that is gone / in a few weeks, and the wild winter locks down again on the land; while / at sea the ice tears up and down the offing, jamming and ramming, and / splitting and hitting, and pounding and grounding, till it all freezes / together, ten feet thick, from the land outward to deep water.