WHAT MANNER OF MEN?
Buried many feet in the snow, with the struggling mass of dogs above
and around them, Polaris and Rose Emer heard the muffled shock of the
mighty crag and felt the rock beneath them vibrate. Masses of ice
hurtled through the air and fell in the snow all about them, but they
were unscathed.
When they floundered with much effort to the surface of the snow the
crystal cliff that had been their home was gone. The waves were tossing
and eddying where it had plunged over. Where it had ground the side of
the point snow and ice had been torn away, leaving exposed the naked
gray rocks. Around the head of the promontory drifted a long, low mass
of yellow ice, water-worn and unlovely, that had been the bottom of the
berg.
About them the snow was crusted, and the crust was punctured with many
pits where fragments of the ice from the berg had fallen, and with
other pits where the seven dogs of the pack had pitched headlong. One
by one the gray runners crawled to the surface and emerged like rats
from their holes to sprawl upon the snow crust, looking exceedingly
foolish, as is the manner of dignified dogs when they are spilled
promiscuously into such a predicament.
A little way from where the man and woman stood the sledge was upended
in the drift. If walked over quickly the crust of the snow was firm
enough to offer footing.
Polaris soon righted the sledge, which had suffered no harm in its
fall, and inspanned the team. They set off for the shore over a
succession of dips and rises along the back of the promontory.
Where it was joined to the shore, however, they found an obstacle. The
land bristled with a bulwark of rocks, snow, and ice of a height to
make it impossible for the man to guide the sledge over it.
Rose Emer had come to look to Polaris in the face of each new
difficulty, finding in him an infinite resource and genius for
surmounting them. She turned to him now, and found that he had solved
the puzzle.
"We can scramble over this," he said; "you and I and the dogs, and we
will find a spot suitable for landing the sledge along the shore. Then
I will return and manage with the sledge across the drift ice. It is
wedged in the cove yonder so firmly that it will be no great task."
The girl glanced down into the cove, where the glittering scum of
fragments rose and fell with the swell of the waves, and her eyes
widened; but she offered no objection. She had yet to see this man fail
in what he attempted.
Using his spear for an alpenstock, Polaris took her by the arm, and
they made the ascent of the rocks. Sometimes he lifted her as lightly
as though she were a babe and set her ahead of him, while he climbed to
a farther projection of the crags. Sometimes he carried her bodily in
one arm and climbed on easily with the double weight.
So they reached the far side of the obstruction, and after them
scrambled and leaped the pack.
To the east a plain stretched away toward the hills and the mountain
wall--a plain rifted deeply with many gulleys and chasms, but passable.
They found with little difficulty a break in the rocky rampart that
fringed the bank of the cove where the sledge might be landed, and
there Polaris left the girl and the dogs. He leaped onto the drift ice
with a wave of his hand and set out across the cove for the point,
marking as he went the safest and easiest course for his return with
the sledge.
Rose Emer watched him cross and ascend the sloping side of the point. A
moment later he reappeared, dragging the sledge, and launched it on the
return trip. He disdained to lighten the load of it, in which manner he
might have made his transport much more easily in two journeys.
Leaping from one large cake of ice to another, he hauled and pushed and
dragged the entire load. Where dangerous intervals of small ice lay
between the larger pieces, he crossed over, and with a heave of his
magnificent shoulders pulled the sledge quickly across. What ten men
might well have hesitated to attempt he accomplished with seeming ease.
He was more than half-way across the cove when the attention of the
girl was distracted from him by a disturbance of the ice near the
cove's mouth. Where there had been little motion of the drift ice she
saw several of the fragments pitched suddenly from the water, and as
they fell back she thought she glimpsed beneath them in the water the
passing of a large, dark body.
As she wondered the ice was thrown violently aside in half a dozen
places, and in the eddying water she saw the rudderlike fins and
lashing tails of a school of some sort of monsters of the sea. They
were headed in the direction of the laboring man.
She called a warning to him, but in the midst of the grinding of the
drift and the noise of his own exertions he did not hear it. With no
warning the danger was upon him.
He had dragged the sledge to the center of one of the larger cakes of
ice, and paused to select his next objective. There was a rush in the
water under the ice, the drift was parted suddenly, and a monstrous
head with open mouth and a terrifying array of gleaming tusks rose
dripping from the gap.
Over the edge of the man's floating footing this dread apparition was
projected, a full eight feet of head and giant body thrust out of the
sea in an attempt to wriggle onto the ice cake. The big flake of ice,
perhaps fifteen feet across, tilted from the water under the weight of
the monster, and it seemed that the man and sledge would be pitched
straight into the yawning maw.
Then, with a clash of disappointed jaws, the head was withdrawn, the
monster sank from sight, and the ice raft righted.
Rose Emer sank on her knees in the snow. Around her crouched the dogs,
yelping, baying in fury at the sight of the diving danger. "Ah, Heaven
help him!" she gasped. "The killer-whales!"
* * * * *
Such were the monsters which beset Polaris. All around the piece of
ice on which he floated with the sledge the smaller drift was thrashed
by their plunging bodies. Again and again they thrust their frightful
snouts above the surface and strove to hurl themselves onto the ice
cake. Some of them were more than twenty feet in length.
When the first hideous head appeared from the deep and nearly
overturned his float Polaris stood as if frozen, staring at it in
amazement. Such a thing he had never seen. He crouched on the ice and
tightened his grip on his long spear. When he saw the number of his
enemies he realized the futility of an attempt at battle with such
weapons as he bore.
Immediately he became alert to outwit them. With his agility he might
have essayed to cross the ice and elude them safely were he unhampered
by the unwieldy sledge, but not for an instant did he consider
abandoning it.
In a glance he picked out the next resting-spot, some feet distant
across the drift. He pushed the sledge almost to the edge at one side
of the cake, and sprang to the other side, halting on the brink and
bracing himself, with his spear-blade dug deeply into the ice.
There was a rushing and thrashing of huge bodies as the killers piled
over one another in their eagerness to reach their prey. Several
frightful heads were thrust from the water, their dripping jaws
snapping within a few feet of the intrepid man. Quick as light he
dashed across the ice cake, snatched up the ends of the long harness,
and crossed the drift to the next large fragment. Watching his chances,
he yanked the sledge across to him.
A dozen times he repeated his tactics successfully and worked in near
to shore. If he could accomplish his ruse once more he would win
through; he would be above water so shallow that even the bold killers
would not dare to follow him for fear of being stranded there. But
nearer to the landing the drift had been ground finer, and there was
not between him and the shore another large piece. There he made a
stand and considered.
He heard the voice of the girl calling to him.
"Shoot!" she cried. "Shoot and wound one of them! If you maim it badly
the others will turn and attack it. Then you can get away!"
Polaris tossed his arm in sign that he had heard, and drew from their
holsters his brace of heavy revolvers. He had but an instant to wait.
One of the savage killers reared his immense and ugly snout from the
waters less than a rod away. Polaris fired both guns straight into the
gaping jaws.
That was nearly his undoing, for so mighty a plunge did the scathed and
frightened monster give that it shot nearly the whole of its ponderous
body across the edge of the ice where the man stood and cracked the
cake clean in two. Then it sank into the water, convulsively opening
and closing its jaws, as if it would eject the stinging pellets which
it had received. The water was dyed red around it.
In a trice the band of killers, which had dived at the report of the
shots, surrounded their wounded comrade, and the carnage began. All
thought of the man on the ice was abandoned for the moment as they rent
in fragments and devoured one of their own kind. Above their horrid
feasting the waves foamed crimson.
* * * * *
When he saw how things were faring below him the man lost not a moment
in crossing the remaining drift, dragging the sledge to the shore.
He turned and saw the baffled killers flock sullenly off to sea,
whipping the drift contemptuously from their wake with lashing tails.
"Rose Emer, I thank you," he said simply. "I was hard put to it to know
how to save the sledge, and you told me the right thing to do."
She smiled admiringly. A savage apparition to be feared; an instrument
of deliverance sent by Providence; a friend and comrade to be admired
and trusted--all of these things in turn had Polaris been to her. She
found him a man wonderful in all his ways--a child of the vast chaos,
yet gentle, fierce and fearless in the face of peril, but possessed
of a natural courtesy as unfailing as it was untaught--savage, savior,
friend. Was he not becoming more than a friend--or was it all a glamour
of the snows and seas and dangers which would fade and thrill no more
when she returned to the things of every day?
Eager to be on the march after the days of enforced inactivity, they
set off at once for the base of the mountain wall to the north, hoping
that somewhere in its curving length they might find a pass or a notch
in its face through which they might win the path to the far-away ship.
Under the cracking lash of the Southlander the dogs ran fast and true;
but ever the mighty wall of the mountains stretched on, unbroken by
notch or crevice, its side gleaming with the smooth ice of many thawing
torrents that had frozen and frozen again until it was like a giant's
slide.
If a man had many weeks to spare to the task he might cross it, cutting
his steps laboriously one by one. For them, with their dogs and sledge,
it was impassable.
The curve of the range pushed them relentlessly farther to the south as
they went on to the south where far away across the plains lay other
hills, above which cloud masses curled and drifted always.
On their third day's journey inland they found that which altered all
the course of their wanderings, and led them on to great new things.
They crossed the trail of the unknown.
Swiftly the seven gray coursers of the snows were speeding, noses down
and plumed tails awave in the breeze of their going. The girl sat on
the sledge, and beside it the man raced, light of foot as the dogs, and
never tiring.
Then, in the midst of his stride, Marcus, the leader, set his four feet
hard on the snow crust and slid on his hams, the six others piling up
at his back in confusion with sharp yelps of consternation. Over the
tangle of the pack whined and cracked the long whip of Polaris, and
cracked and whined vainly. Marcus would not budge. He lifted his gray
muzzle in a weird howl of protest and bewilderment, and the hair along
his spine bristled.
Behind him Octavius, Julius, Nero, and Hector took up the cry of
astonishment, and the mellower notes of Pallas and Juno chimed in.
Polaris straightened out, like the good driver that he was, the sad
kinks in the harness and ran forward; but he had gone but a few paces
when he, too, stopped in the snow, and stood staring ahead and down.
They were at the brink of a trail!
There it lay, stretching from somewhere near the base of the mountains,
away across the great plains--a broad, recently traveled path, with
footprints plain upon the snow--_the footprints of men!_