A STORM AND A CATASTROPHE
True to his promise, Bobby was up the next morning bright and early, and
awoke Skipper Ed as he moved about, lighting the lamp and hanging the
kettle of snow to melt for tea, and the kettle containing cooked seal
meat, to thaw, for it had frozen hard in the night. Then, while he
waited for these to heat, he crawled back into his sleeping bag.
"How are you feeling after your Arctic dip?" inquired Skipper Ed.
"As fine as could be!" answered Bobby. "My fingers were nipped a little,
and they're a bit numb. That's the only way I'd know, from the way I
feel, that I'd been in the water."
"You're a regular tough young husky!" declared Skipper Ed. "But it was a
narrow escape, and we can thank God for the deliverance of you two
chaps. You mustn't take those risks again. It's tempting Providence."
"Why, I didn't think we were careless," said Bobby. "It was the sort of
thing that is always likely to happen."
Jimmy lifted his head.
"Hello!" drowsily. "Is it time to get up? I've been sleeping like a
stone."
"It isn't time for you to get up," cautioned Skipper Ed. "You stay right
where you are today."
"I'm all right, Partner!" Jimmy declared.
"Well, you've got to demonstrate it. We don't want any pneumonia cases
on our hands. Just draw some long breaths, and punch yourself, and see
how you feel."
"I feel fine," insisted Jimmy, after some deep breaths and several
self-inflicted punches. "It doesn't hurt a bit to breathe, and I don't
feel lame anywhere. The only place I feel bad is in my stomach, and
that's just shouting for grub."
"Very well," laughed Skipper Ed, "that kind of an ache we can cure with
boiled seal and hardtack."
And so, indeed, it proved. Their hardihood, brought about by a life of
exposure to the elements, and their constitutions, made strong as iron
by life and experience in the open, withstood the shock, and, none the
worse for their experience, and passing it by as an incident of the
day's work, they resumed the hunt with Skipper Ed.
All of that day and the next, which was Thursday, they hunted with great
success, and when Thursday night came more than half a hundred fat
seals, among which were three great bearded seals--"square flippers,"
they called them--lay upon the ice as their reward. They were well
pleased. Indeed, they could scarcely have done better had Abel Zachariah
been with them.
"Tomorrow will be Friday, and we had better haul our seals to Itigailit
Island to the cache," Skipper Ed suggested that evening as they sat snug
in the _igloo_, eating their supper. "We have all we can care for."
"I hate to leave with all these seals about, but I suppose we'll have to
go some time," said Bobby regretfully.
"Yes, and I'm wondering what I'll find in my traps when we get home,"
said Jimmy.
"You may have a silver fox, Partner," laughed Skipper Ed.
"I've been looking for one every round I've made this winter," Jimmy
grinned.
"That's the way with every hunter," said Skipper Ed. "He's always
looking for a silver, and it makes him the keener for the work, and
drives away monotony. He's always expecting a silver, though year in and
year out he gets nothing but reds and whites, with now and again a
cross, to make him think that his silver is prowling around somewhere
close by."
"I'd feel rich if I ever caught a silver!" broke in Bobby. "And wouldn't
I get some things for Father and Mother, though! A new rifle and shotgun
and traps, and--loads of things!"
"So you're looking for a silver, too," said Skipper Ed, all of them
laughing heartily. "That's the way it goes--everyone is looking for a
silver fox, and that keeps everyone always hopeful and gives vim for
labor. When they don't have silvers or don't hunt and trap, they're
looking for something else that takes the place of a silver--some great
success. It's ambition to catch silvers, and the hope of catching them,
that makes the world go round."
"Well, I never got one yet," said Bobby, "and there's one due me by
this time. Every one gets a silver some time in his life."
"Not every one," corrected Skipper Ed. "Well, shall we haul the seals
over in the morning, and then go home to see if we've got any silvers in
the traps?"
"I suppose so," agreed Bobby, regretfully. "It's hard to leave this fine
hunting, but I suppose there'll be good hunting till the ice goes out,
and anyway we've got all we can use."
So with break of day on Friday they loaded their sledges, and all that
day hauled seals to their cache, and when night came and they returned
in the dark to the _sena igloo_, some seals still remained to be hauled
on Saturday.
But the sun did not show himself on Saturday morning, for the sky was
heavily overcast, and before they reached Itigailit Island with the
first load of seals snow was falling and the wind was rising. They
hurried with all their might, for it was evident a storm was about to
break with the fury of the North, and out on the open ice field, where
the wind rides unobstructed and unbridled, these storms reach terrible
proportions.
So they pushed the dogs back to the _sena_ at the fastest gait to which
they could urge them. Skipper Ed and Jimmy were in advance and had
Skipper Ed's _komatik_ loaded with the larger proportion of the
remaining seals, and were lashing the load into place, when Bobby
arrived.
"I've got a heavier load than yours will be, so I'll go on with it,"
Skipper Ed shouted as Bobby drove up. "There are only two small ones
left for you, and the cooking outfit and your snow knives in the
_igloo_. Don't forget them. You and Jimmy will likely overtake me. Hurry
along."
"All right," answered Bobby. "We'll catch you before you reach smooth
ice."
So Skipper Ed drove away with never a thought of catastrophe, and was
quickly swallowed up by the thickening snow, while Bobby and Jimmy
loaded the seals and the things from the _igloo_ upon the sledge, and,
spurred by the rising wind and snow, hurried with all their might.
Already great seas were booming and breaking with a roar upon the ice,
and as the boys turned the dogs back upon the trail they observed a
waving motion of the ice beneath them, which was rapidly becoming more
apparent. At one moment the dogs would be hauling the sledge up an
incline, and at the next moment the sledge would be coasting down
another incline close upon the heels of the team, as the heaving ice
assumed the motion of the seas which rolled beneath.
As they receded from the ice edge, however, this motion diminished,
until finally it was hardly perceptible at all, and there seemed no
further cause for alarm or great speed, and the dogs, which were weary
with the two days' heavy hauling, were permitted to proceed at their own
leisurely gait.
At length through the snow they saw Skipper Ed waiting for them, but
when he was assured they were following he proceeded.
"_Ah!_" Bobby shouted to his dogs a moment later, bringing them suddenly
to a stop. "I've dropped my whip somewhere. Jimmy, watch the team while
I run back after it."
Twenty minutes elapsed before he returned with the whip, and they drove
on.
Skipper Ed, satisfied that Bobby and Jimmy were close at his heels, did
not halt again until well out over the smooth ice and near to Itigailit
Island, when he heard behind him a strange rumbling and crackling. He
halted and listened, and strained his eyes through the drifting snow
for a glimpse of the boys. They were not visible, and, springing from
his _komatik_, he ran back in the direction from which he had come and
as fast as he could run, and presently, with a sickening sensation at
his heart, was brought to a halt by a broad black space of open water.
The great ice pack upon which they had been hunting had broken loose
from the shore ice, and tide and wind were driving it seaward. Already
the chasm between him and the floe had widened to over thirty feet, and
it was rapidly growing wider. The minutes dragged and when at last Bobby
and Jimmy came into view on the opposite side of the chasm it was a full
two hundred feet in breadth. They shouted to the dogs and rushed to the
edge of the open water, but there was no hope of their escape. They had
delayed too long. They were adrift on the ice floe, which was steadily
taking them seaward.