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for months had been covered by snow or carried away by the shifting of the bay ice. Now he had located the remains of a caribou which the wolves had run down and killed that morning, and he was calling the other ravens to the feast. Three jet-black birds, among them Tullugak’s mate, were walking briskly about over the bay ice hunting a whale carcass. The whale had come ashore months before, providing almost a winter’s supply of food for Tullugak and his kin, who lived the year round in the vicinity of the bay. Now the storm had opened a channel into which the shifting ice masses had pushed the dead whale and closed over it. At the welcome food cry of Tullugak, the three ravens sprang into the air and followed him across the tundra to pick off the few shreds of meat that remained on the bones of the caribou.
    The next night the wind shifted and the thaw began.
    Day by day the blanket of snow grew thinner. Irregular holes rent the white covering—brown holes where the naked earth showed through, green holes where ponds that still held their hearts of ice were uncovered. Hillside trickles grew to rivulets and rivulets to rushing torrents as the Arctic sent its melted snows to the sea, to eat jagged cuts and gullies through the salt ice, to accumulate in pools along the shore. Lakes brimmed with the clear cold water and teemed with new life as the young of crane flies and May flies stirred in the bottom muds and the larvae of the northland’s myriad mosquitoes squirmed in the water.
    As the drifts melted away and the low-lying grasslands became flooded, the lemming burrows, which honeycombed the Arctic underworld with hundreds of miles of tunnels, became uninhabitable. The quiet runways, the peaceful grass-lined burrows that had been secure from even the fiercest blizzards of winter, now knew the terrors of rushing waters, of swirling floods. As many of the lemmings as could escape took refuge on high rocks and gravel ridges and sunned their plump gray bodies, quickly forgetting the dark horror from which they had lately fled.
    Now hundreds of migrants arrived from the south each day and the tundra heard other noises besides the booming cries of the cock owls and the bark of the foxes. There were the voices of curlews and plovers and knots, of terns and gulls and ducks from the south. There were the braying cries of the stilt sandpipers and the tinkling song of the redbacks; there was the shrill bubbling of the Baird sandpiper, akin to the sleigh-bell chorus of spring peepers in the smoky twilight of a New England spring.
    As the patches of earth spread over the snow fields, the sanderlings, plovers, and turnstones gathered in the cleared spots, finding abundant food. Only the knots resorted to the unthawed marshes and the protected hollows of the plains, where sedges and weeds lifted dry seed heads above the snow and rattled when the wind blew and dropped their seed for the birds.
    Most of the sanderlings and the knots passed on to the distant islands scattered far over the Arctic sea, where they made their nests and brought forth their young. But Silverbar and Blackfoot and others of the sanderlings remained near the bay shaped like a leaping porpoise, along with turnstones, plovers, and many other shore birds. Hundreds of terns were preparing to nest on near-by islands, where they would be safe from the foxes; while most of the gulls retired inland to the shores of the small lakes which dotted the Arctic plains in summer.
    In time Silverbar accepted Blackfoot as her mate and the pair withdrew to a stony plateau overlooking the sea. The rocks were clothed with mosses and soft gray lichens, first of all plants to cover the open and wind-swept places of the earth. There was a sparse growth of dwarf willow, with bursting leaf buds and ripe catkins. From scattered clumps of green the flowers of the wild betony lifted white faces to the sun, and over the south slope of the hill was a pool fed by melting snow and