SIPSA VANISHES
It was two days before the blizzard died down and the little snowbound
company were permitted to leave their Eskimo houses for any length of
time. Dick and Sandy found almost a new world awaiting them when they
burrowed like two badgers out of their snug retreat into the polar
sunlight.
“Where are the sledges and dogs?” Sandy wanted to know.
“Can’t you see everything has been buried?” Dick retorted. “We’ve got
some tall snow shoveling to do before we can get at our supplies.”
Constable Sloan soon found the dogs. Each of the faithful creatures was
deep in a nest of snow, with only a tiny hole to breathe through. The
beasts were gaunt with hunger, and whined and slavered at the mouth
while the policeman began digging out the supplies.
It took several hours of hard work to dig out the camp, and when
everything was in good shape, Corporal McCarthy drew the boys aside:
“Constable Sloan and myself are going back on the glacier with ten days’
supplies to see if we can’t pick up Mistak’s trail again. We’ll leave
you with Sipsa to take care of the camp and do some hunting. Sipsa will
show you how to kill and cut up seals and walruses, which we’ll need for
dog meat if we don’t have to eat them ourselves before we finish our job
up here. Don’t overlook the musk-oxen. We saw signs of them on the
island and they’re about the best eating a white man can find up here.”
“Suppose we see Mistak. What do you want us to do?”
“Lay low and keep out of trouble,” cautioned the policeman. “We’ll be
back in ten days at least and whatever you’ve discovered about Mistak’s
whereabouts we’ll put to good use.”
The policemen soon had a sledge of supplies and one dog team ready for
the trail. Waving farewell to the boys they started out, disappearing up
the long slope that led to the glacier. In one way Dick and Sandy were
glad to be free to command their own movements, yet again, with the
experienced policemen gone, the vast frozen land presented an even more
sinister appearance. A hundred forebodings surged up in the breasts of
Dick and Sandy, but they manfully fought them down, preparing
immediately to go seal hunting.
Sipsa had brought along several harpoons, and he began working on these
diligently. He made the boys understand by signs that he was not yet
ready to go seal hunting, and they left him alone after growing tired of
watching the Eskimo’s deft fingers manipulating a whetting stone.
Dick suggested that they go down to the sea shore, and all three of the
boys set off in that direction. They found the tide rising, and for half
an hour amused themselves by skipping stones across the shallow water,
and throwing at the small ice cakes floating farther out. Dick and Toma
were about tied at hitting their mark, but Sandy was far the more expert
at skipping stones. The Scotch lad could skip a choice flat stone as far
again as he could throw it, and though Dick and Toma tried again and
again to equal Sandy’s prowess, they finally were forced to give up, so
tired were their arms.
“Let’s walk along the shore a ways,” said Dick. “We may find something
interesting.”
A hundred yards farther on they passed out of sight of the camp, and ran
into a flock of eider ducks who took to the water upon their approach
with the prettiest nose dives they had ever seen. Toma’s sharp eyes
located some nests on the shore, and they procured a few fresh eggs and
a good many old ones.
“Leave the old eggs where they are,” Dick said, as Sandy was about to
see how far he could throw one. “We don’t want to destroy what will be
little eider ducks some day.”
“You’re right, Dick,” Sandy agreed. “I just didn’t think.”
“Him nice an’ soft—make um warm nest,” Toma spoke up, running his
fingers around in one of the duck nests.
Dick picked up some of the fine, white feathers with which the nest was
lined. “Yes, these are about as soft feathers as are known. The Eskimos
gather and trade them to the white men for tools and things. In the
United States we call it eiderdown.”
They wandered on down the shore to the point where the great glacial
ridge west of their camp extended into the sea. The ridge sloped off
into the water in a long slope at the foot of which the waves rumbled
and thundered, dashing the huge icebergs this way and that as if they
were toys. Occasionally they could hear the distant noises of the
glacier as fragments of it fell into the sea, or when its slow movements
caused huge cracks to form in its depths.
Dick led the way a short distance up the slope toward a dark knob that
was sticking up through the snow and ice.
“I wonder if that isn’t one of the meteors they say are in the polar
regions,” he said. “Robert Peary, the great explorer, brought back some
fine specimens to American museums. This does look like it might be a
very small one.”
They stopped at the protuberance and inspected it curiously.
“It looks like melted iron to me,” Sandy declared. “Is that what meteors
are made of?”
“Yes, a form of iron,” Dick replied. “It’s called meteoric iron.
Scientists claim it is about the hardest iron which has been found in a
natural state. In the sky it is heated to a liquid state by the friction
of falling through the air, then when it strikes the earth’s atmosphere
it cools suddenly and explodes with a loud report, lighting up the
country for miles and miles.”
“Why do more meteors fall in the polar regions than in the other zones?”
inquired Sandy, meditatively fingering the meteoric rock.
“I don’t remember having read the exact reason, and I’m not sure that
more do fall up here, but if there are more it must be because the
atmosphere is so much colder. The meteors explode much higher in the
sky, then lose their velocity and so fall to the earth’s surface near
the pole.”
“Well, the glacier seems to have pushed this meteor up here,” said
Sandy, “so there’s no telling where it actually fell.”
“That’s true,” replied Dick, “but say, this big stone gives me an idea.
Let’s gather some big rocks and build a monument here, leaving some kind
of record inside of it. That’s the way all the Arctic explorers did.
They called them cairns.”
Sandy and Toma quickly showed how enthusiastic they were by starting to
gather stones of a good size. These they built up in a solid circle near
the meteor until they had an erection about a foot high.
“Now for the record,” said Dick, and drew from his pocket a small
calendar with which he had been keeping track of the days. Sandy dug
down in the ample pockets of his caribou hide shirt and found a
soft-nosed rifle cartridge. With a hunting knife they trimmed this to a
point, improvising a crude lead pencil. Then on the back of the card
board that had supported the calendar leaves, Dick wrote under the day
and year:
“We are on an uncharted island, a few hundred miles west of Greenland,
near the Arctic Circle. This is the farthest north we have ever been
in the service of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, or the Hudson’s
Bay Company. If something happens and we never return, anyone who
reads this will know just about where we were when we disappeared.”
Under this, all three of the boys proudly signed their names, Toma
painfully inscribing his to the accompaniment of a twisting tongue,
which he chewed industriously at every move of the pencil.
When the record was finished Dick folded it carefully and stowed it in
the center of the cairn, placing a heavy stone upon it. Then they
gathered more stones and built up the cairn to a height of about five
feet, rounding it off nicely at the top, forming a receptacle for the
record that would stand for years and years.
“It’s about time we were getting back to camp the way my stomach feels,”
Dick said when they had finished, and were standing off at a distance
appraising their handiwork.
Sandy’s and Toma’s stomachs seemed to agree perfectly with Dick’s and so
they started off on the back trail, glancing over their shoulders every
now and then at the cairn.
By the time they reached camp their appetites had grown immensely, and
they voiced the hope that Sipsa would have something prepared to eat.
But there was no smell of hot tea or frying meat. In fact, as they
approached they could see no sign whatever of the Eskimo guide.
“He must be in one of the igloos,” Dick hazarded.
But a search of the igloos disclosed no Sipsa. The boys shouted his
name, but only a faint echo from the wall of the ridge answered them.
“Here are the harpoons he was working on when we left,” Sandy announced
presently, after they had looked more carefully about the camp.
“Yes, he must not be far away, but still——” Dick’s mind turned to the
trouble they had had with Okewah and Ootanega. “I wonder if he found
some sign of the white Eskimo and was frightened away like the others.”
“But Sipsa didn’t seem so superstitious as those two,” Sandy contended.
“I thought so, too, until now. Anyway, we’ll not worry about it until we
get something under our belts to worry on.”
Sandy volunteered to act as cook and with the addition of the fresh
eider duck eggs he had gathered, a very satisfying meal was prepared.
Sipsa had not yet put in an appearance when the boys finished the last
scrap of food, and Dick suggested they search farther for him.
“Maybe um white Eskimo git him,” Toma suggested gruesomely.
“You might be right,” Dick replied. “It would be just like that villain
to ambush our guide. But I believe Sipsa was pretty well able to take
care of himself. He seemed much smarter than the average native, and I
believe he’s more civilized.”
Sandy chose to stay behind when Dick announced that someone must watch
the camp while they sought the whereabouts of Sipsa, and Dick and Toma
started off with their rifles. At first they circled the entire camp,
looking for the prints of Eskimo sealskin boots or his snowshoes. They
found no signs, however, and came to a halt on the sledge trail made by
the policemen hours before.
“Maybe Sipsa followed the sledge path,” Dick said, as Toma and he stood
there contemplating the next move. “You’re good at trailing, Toma; see
if you can’t find out whether three instead of two pairs of snowshoes
followed this sledge.”
Toma bent over, his keen eyes glancing hither and thither along the
packed snow. Only a moment he studied, then he straightened up. “Three
pair snowshoes go long here,” he declared positively.
Dick had perfect confidence in Toma’s judgment, and was sure they had
found just the direction taken by Sipsa when he left the camp. As the
policemen had departed over the same path over which they had crossed
the island, Dick believed it possible that Sipsa might have taken it
into his head to return to his people.
“We’ll follow his tracks for a ways,” he voiced his decision at last. “I
want to make sure that Sipsa stuck to the back trail. If he hasn’t
turned off half way up the glacier, then I’m pretty certain he’s decided
to go back to his people. In that case he has such a start on us that
about all we can do is let him go.”
With this purpose in mind Dick and Toma started out along the sledge
trail. An hour’s steady travel without mishap failed to discover any
deviation in Sipsa’s progress.
“He may run into the policemen,” Dick finally spoke. “If he does,
they’ll send him back in a hurry.”
“I think him go home alright,” was Toma’s brief reply. “Mebbe him no
like work for white man.”
“Well, that was a good one, Toma,” Dick grinned. “I suppose you’ll be
quitting us next.”
The young Indian turned a pair of black inscrutable eyes upon the white
lad, for whom he had risked his life so often. Dick could feel that he
was rebuked without hearing Toma say a word. He stretched out his hand
and placed it on the Indian boy’s shoulder. “I didn’t mean it, Toma,
honest I didn’t. I was only joking. I know you’d never desert Sandy and
me.”
The ghost of a smile traced the young Indian’s dark face and Dick knew
that Toma had forgiven.
“I don’t think there’s much use going any further,” Dick resumed after
an interval of silence. “I don’t want to leave Sandy alone too long.”
They were just about to turn back when something attracted Toma’s keen
eyes.
“Stop heap quick!” ejaculated Toma under his breath.
“What is it?”
“Think um fox. Him watch us from top big rock up there.”
“Oh, I see him now,” Dick replied eagerly. “He’s only about a hundred
yards off, too. We need that pelt. Let’s both get a bead on him.”
Quietly the two knelt on their snowshoes and leveled their rifles.
Crack! Crack! the rifle shots echoed in the hills.
The fox leaped high in the air, and ran like a streak toward the top of
the slope where he had been sighted.
“Let him have it again!” cried Dick, firing rapidly.
Toma’s reloading lever was working as fast as Dick’s and a veritable
hail of lead was kicking up the snow about the fleeing fox.
Just when the young hunters felt they had failed to bring down the fox,
the animal whirled and began to bite himself, as if something had stung
him.
“We got um,” grunted Toma.
Sure enough, the fox dropped to his side and after kicking spasmodically
for a few seconds remained still. One or more of their bullets had
reached the mark and together the boys hastened up the slope to examine
their kill.
They found the animal to be a fine specimen of the northern blue fox,
with whose skin the Eskimos trimmed many of their warmest fur garments.
Toma drew his hunting knife from its sheath and began methodically to
skin the fox, while Dick stood by admiring the beauty of the fur.
“I wish I could take that pelt home to mother,” he said half to himself.
Toma looked up and sniffed. “Huh, why you take um blue fox for your
mother? Wait till you ketch um seal. Him worth heap more. I give my
sister black fox skin robe one time. She use um for wipe feet on by
door. She like um red wool blanket best.”
Dick had a hearty laugh at Toma’s expense, but the young Indian could
not see anything funny in what he had said.
However, the lads started back to camp on the best of terms, carrying
the blue fox pelt with them.
When they came in sight of the igloos they were wholly unprepared for
what met their eyes. Speechless and terror stricken they stood and
stared.
Two huge polar bears were mauling and crushing the igloos and camp
paraphernalia, and Sandy was nowhere to be seen!
Even the dogs had run away before the attack of the ferocious brutes,
now apparently enjoying their game of destruction.