oppressed him like the voices of haunting ghosts.  In these long months, filled with the horror of the arctic night, the spirit of Tao whispered within him that somewhere there was light and sun, that somewhere there was warmth and flowers, and running streams, and voices he could understand, and things he could love.  And then Wapi would whine, and perhaps the whine would bring him the blow of a club, or the lash of a whip, or an Eskimo threat, or the menace of an Eskimo dog’s snarl.  Of the latter Wapi was unafraid.  With a snap of his jaws, he could break the back of any other dog on Franklin Bay.

Such was Wapi, the Walrus, when for two sacks of flour, some tobacco, and a bale of cloth he became the property of Blake, the uta-wawe-yinew, the trader in seals, whalebone—­and women.  On this day Wapi’s soul took its flight back through the space of forty years.  For Blake was white, which is to say that at one time or another he had been white.  His skin and his appearance did not betray how black he had turned inside and Wapi’s brute soul cried out to him, telling him how he had waited and watched for this master he knew would come, how he would fight for him, how he wanted to lie down and put his great head on the white man’s feet in token of his fealty.  But Wapi’s bloodshot eyes and battle-scarred face failed to reveal what was in him, and Blake—­following the instructions of those who should know—­ruled him from the beginning with a club that was more brutal than the club of the Eskimo.

For three months Wapi had been the property of Blake, and it was now the dead of a long and sunless arctic night.  Blake’s cabin, built of ship timber and veneered with blocks of ice, was built in the face of a deep pit that sheltered it from wind and storm.  To this cabin came the Nanatalmutes from the east, and the Kogmollocks from the west, bartering their furs and whalebone and seal-oil for the things Blake gave in exchange, and adding women to their wares whenever Blake announced a demand.  The demand had been excellent this winter.  Over in Darnley Bay, thirty miles across the headland, was the whaler Harpoon frozen up for the winter with a crew of thirty men, and straight out from the face of his igloo cabin, less than a mile away, was the Flying Moon with a crew of twenty more.  It was Blake’s business to wait and watch like a hawk for such opportunities as there, and tonight—­his watch pointed to the hour of twelve, midnight—­he was sitting in the light of a sputtering seal-oil lamp adding up figures which told him that his winter, only half gone, had already been an enormously profitable one.

“If the Mounted Police over at Herschel only knew,” he chuckled.  “Uppy, if they did, they’d have an outfit after us in twenty-four hours.”

Oopi, his Eskimo right-hand man, had learned to understand English, and he nodded, his moon-face split by a wide and enigmatic grin.  In his way, “Uppy” was as clever as Shan Tung had been in his.