A thousand angry, choppy waves pitched alongside the dory, as though
reaching up and trying to come aboard. Time and again the boys thought
all was lost. Instead of passing through the tide-rips, the dory seemed
to be carried on with them as they shifted.
The tide, indeed, had now turned, and with its turn the fog began to
lift. Getting some idea of what now was happening, Rob undertook to make
back toward the shore, where they could hear the surf roaring heavily.
Perhaps it was lucky they did not succeed in this attempt, for the boat
would no doubt have been crushed like an eggshell on the rocks. Instead,
they began to float down parallel with the coast, carried on the crest
of the big tide-bore which every day passes down the east coast of
Kadiak between the long, parallel islands which make an inland channel
many miles in extent. As the boys called now they could hear an echo on
each side of them, and indeed could see the loom of the rock-bound
shore; but all about them hissed and danced these fighting waves,
tossing the dory a dozen ways at once, and all the time there came
astern the long roll of the mighty Pacific in its power, the Japan
current and the coast tide in unison forcing a boiling current down the
rocky channel. Escape was hopeless.
"Boys," said Rob, his face perhaps a trifle pale, "we can't get out of
this. All we can do is to run."
The others looked at him silently.
"She's a splendid boat," went on Rob, trying to be cheerful. "She rides
like a chip. I believe if we keep low down she'll be safe, for it
doesn't seem to be getting any worse."
A powerful steamboat, if it were caught under precisely these
conditions, could have done little more than drift down the channel. The
boys resigned themselves to their fate. Now and again the fog shut down.
Wild cries of sea-birds were about them. Now and then the leap of a
great dolphin feeding in the tide splashed alongside, to startle them
yet more. Each moment, as they knew, carried them farther and farther
from their friends, and deeper and deeper into dangers whose nature
they could only guess.
"I wish we'd never left Valdez," said Jesse, at last, his lip beginning
to quiver.
"That's no way to talk," said Rob, sternly. "The right thing to do when
you're in a scrape is to try to get out of it. This tide can't run clear
round the world, because your uncle Dick said this island wasn't over
one hundred and fifty miles long, and there must be any number of bays
and coves. Pull some crackers out of that box and let's eat a bite."
"That's the talk," said John, more cheerfully. "We'll get ashore
somewhere. It's no use to worry."
John was always disposed to be philosophical; but the great peculiarity
about him was that he was continually hungry. He found the crackers now
rather dry and hard to eat, so worried open a can of tomatoes with his
hunting-knife, complaining all the time that they had no water to drink.
Their hasty meal seemed to do them good. Finding that their dory was
still afloat, they began to lose their fears. Indeed, little by little,
the height of the waves lessened. The tide was beginning to spread in
the wider parts of the channel.
"Let's try the oars again," said Rob, at last.
To their delight they found that they could give the dory some headway.
But in which direction should they row? Small wonder that in these
crooked channels, with the wind shifting continually from the shore and
the veil of fog alternately lifting and falling again, they took the
wrong course.
They had now been afloat for some hours, although at that season of the
year there is daylight for almost the entire twenty-four hours, so that
they had no means of guessing at the time. They had passed entirely
across the mouths of two or three of the great inland bays, which make
into the east shore of Kadiak Island. At the time when they flattered
themselves they were making their best headway back toward town, they
were really going in the opposite direction, caught by the stiff tide
which was running between Ugak Island and the east coast of Kadiak. In
all, they remained in the dory perhaps ten or twelve hours, and in that
time they perhaps skirted more than one hundred miles of shore-line,
counting the indentations of the bays, although in direct distance they
did not reach a total of more than fifty or sixty miles. At the head of
one of these bays, had they but known it, there were salmon rivers where
fishing-boats occasionally stopped; but all that they could do was to
use the best of their wisdom and their strength, and they kept on,
steadily pulling, believing that the tide had turned, whereas in truth
they were going down the coast still with the tide and approaching the
mouth of the vast crooked bay known as Kaludiak, half-way down the east
coast of the great island. Thus they were leaving behind a possible
place of rescue. Although their first fright had in time somewhat worn
away, they were now tired, hungry, thirsty, and, in fact, almost upon
the point of exhaustion.
All at once, at an hour which in the United States would probably have
been taken to be just before sundown, but which really was nearly eleven
o'clock at night, a change in the contour of the coast caused the wind
to whip around once more. The fog, broken into thousands of white, ropy
wreaths, was swept away upward. There stretched off to the right the
entrance of a vast bay, with many arms, whose blue waters, far less
turbulent than these of the open sea, led back deep into the heart of a
noble mountain panorama of snow-covered peaks and flattened valleys.
"It's almost like Resurrection Bay, or Valdez Harbor," said Rob. "At any
rate, I'm for going in here. There will be streams coming down out of
the mountains, and we can stop somewhere and make camp."