always done when, as little children, they had showed fear at the
thunder or the gale or the cry of a wild beast in the night, till they
had grown to look upon all Nature's phenomena as hiding a smile as
kindly as that of Old Tomah himself, who had a face wrinkled and
terribly grim, to be sure, but who could smile and tell a story so that
every child trusted him. The wolves were hungry, starving hungry, he
said, and wanted only a dog, or one of the pigs. And Mooka remembered
with a bright laugh the two unruly pigs that had been taken inland as a
hostage to famine, and that must be carefully guarded from the teeth of
hungry prowlers, for they would soon be needed to keep the children
themselves from starving. Every night at early sunset, when the trees
began to groan and the keen winds from the mountains came whispering
through the woods, the two pigs were taken into the snug kitchen, where
with the dogs they slept so close to the stove that she could always
smell pork a-frying. Not a husky dog there but would have killed and
eaten one of these little pigs if he could have caught him around the
corner of the house after nightfall, though you would never have
suspected it if you had seen them so close together, keeping each other
warm after the fire went out. And besides the dogs and the wolves there
were lynxes--big, round-headed, savage-looking creatures--that came
prowling out of the deep woods every night, hungry for a taste of the
little pigs; and now and then an enormous polar bear, that had landed
from an iceberg, would shuffle swiftly and fearlessly among the handful
of little cabins, leaving his great footprints in every yard and tearing
to pieces, as if made of straw, the heavy log pens to which some of the
fishermen had foolishly confided their pigs or sheep. He even entered
the woodsheds and rummaged about after a stray fishbone or an old
sealskin boot, making a great rowdydow in the still night; and only the
smell of man, or the report of an old gun fired at him by some brave
woman out of the half-open window, kept him from pushing his enormous