The task that these women were performing was one for the strength of
men; but as they worked now their merriment was loud. All their children
stood about them, shouting at play or at such work as was allotted to
them. Some four or five of the women, with Amazonian strength, were
hauling from one shed a huge kettle, in which it was evidently meant to
try the fat from certain portions of the seal.
Caius held his horse still upon the edge of the ice, too well diverted
with the activity on the shore to leave it at once. Behind the animated
scene and the row of gray snow-thatched sheds, the shore rose white and
lonely. Except for the foot-tracks on the road by which they had come,
and the peak of the lighthouse within sight, it would have seemed that a
colony had suddenly sprung to life in an uninhabited Arctic region.
It was from this slope above the sheds that Caius now heard himself
hailed by loud shouting, and, looking up, he saw that O'Shea had come
there to overlook the scene below. Some women stood around him. Caius
supposed that Madame Le Maitre was there.
O'Shea made a trumpet of his hands and shouted that Caius must not take
his horse upon the ice that day, for the beast would be frightened and
do himself harm.
Caius was affronted. The horse was not his, truly, but he believed he
knew how to take care of it, yet, as it belonged to a woman, he could
not risk disobeying this uncivil prohibition.
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