Chapter 22

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.