"Ung hi yah! ah-ha-yah! yah-yah-yah!" was the chorus to that deep, recurrent cry of the Shaman.  Its accompanying drum-note was muffled like far-off thunder, conjured out of the earth by the ivory wand.

Presently a scream of terror from the bundle of skins and bones in the corner.

“Ha!” Muckluck clasped her hands and rocked back and forth.

“They’ll frighten the old man to death if he’s conscious,” said the Boy, half rising.

She pulled him down.

“No, no; frighten devil.”  She was shaking with excitement and with ecstacy.

The sick man cried aloud.  A frenzy seemed to seize the Shaman.  He raised his voice in a series of blood-curdling shrieks, then dropped it, moaning, whining, then bursting suddenly into diabolic laughter, bellowing, whispering, ventriloquising, with quite extraordinary skill.  The dim and foetid cave might indeed be full of devils.

If the hideous outcry slackened, but an instant, you heard the sick man raving with the preternatural strength of delirium, or of mad resentment.  For some time it seemed a serious question as to who would come out ahead.  Just as you began to feel that the old Chief was at the end of his tether, and ready to give up the ghost, the Shaman, rising suddenly with a demoniac yell, flung himself down on the floor in a convulsion.  His body writhed horribly; he kicked and snapped and quivered.

The Boy was for shielding Muckluck from the crazy flinging out of legs and arms; but she leaned over, breathless, to catch what words might escape the Shaman during the fit, for these were omens of deep significance.

When at last the convulsive movements quieted, and the Shaman lay like one dead, except for an occasional faint twitch, the Boy realised for the first time that the sick man, too, was dumb.  Dead?  The only sound now was the wind up in the world above.  Even the dog was still.

The silence was more horrible than the hell-let-loose of a few minutes before.

The dim group sat there, motionless, under the spell of the stillness even more than they had been under the spell of the noise.  At last a queer, indescribable scratching and scraping came up out of the bowels of the earth.

How does the old devil manage to do that? thought the Boy.  But the plain truth was that his heart was in his mouth, for the sound came from the opposite direction, behind the Boy, and not near the Shaman at all.  It grew louder, came nearer, more inexplicable, more awful.  He felt he could not bear it another minute, sprang up, and stood there, tense, waiting for what might befall.  Were all the others dead, then?

Not a sound in the place, only that indescribable stirring of something in the solid earth under his feet.

The Shaman had his knife.  A ghastly sensation of stifling came over the Boy as he thought of a struggle down there under the earth and the snow.