The cinema : 1952 (1952)

112 THE CINEMA the dogs/ my wife said. 'Ae,' I said, 'there are the dogs.' 'Ae,' said everyone. For one moon we were on the broken ice, drifting we drifted one way many days we drifted another way many days. It made us feel small to drift in this foolish way upon the sea. We shared with our dogs the dog meat upon which we lived. 'The meat of the dogs does not keep one warm like the meat of the seal,' someone said. 'Yes, and our dogs are no longer warm,' someone said. And then someone else said: 'They will bear watching, what with ail the children and we with no spears to kill.' 'I will make clubs,' I said. 'There are a few cross-pieces of the sledge that can be spared, and they will make clubs.' And we took the cross-pieces off our sledges and they made clubs. Besides these cross-pieces, I had my long whip I could kill ptarmigan with it, and on a dog, if I had to, I could split his ear in two. 'But the cross-pieces and the whip are not enough,' said my wife. 'There are some dogs we will have to tie up. The dogs upon which we live are the weaker dogs the dangerous are those that are strong.' 'We must have patience with the dogs,' I said, ' even if they try to kill, for we will need our dogs even more than fire if we ever come upon land again.' 'Yes,' said my wife, 'but what of the children, Comock? If they should stumble 1 get sick from watching.' There was another storm and for a long time we could not see. But when the smoke of the snow cleared from the sky we saw the edge of our ice breaking high upon something. It was land. This land was low like the sea, but we knew it was land because we could see black specks in the whiteness and these black specks in the whiteness were rocks sticking up through the snow. 'This must be the big island,' said my wife. 'Yes,' I said. When we got to this land we built an igloo, and in the