CHAPTER XXIII

“A BEAR! A BEAR!”

In the meantime Joe Marion and Jennings were making their way over the treacherous ice floe toward the party of explorers who were battling for their lives against cold, hunger and ever perilous floes.

They had crossed a broad expanse of ice which, level as a floor, lay between the shore and a series of low, barren, sandy islands. Then for three miles farther they had traveled over ice which was frozen to the shore. This ice, piled as it had been by storms of early winter into fantastic heaps, here and there mixed with flat cakes and with narrow, tombstone-like fragments set on end, was nevertheless firmly united to the shore. Over this, winding back and forth on flat cakes and over tumbled piles of ice, they traveled without fear.

When they came to what lay beyond this, all was changed. They entered upon a new life with fear and trembling. True, the ice, pressed hard on shore by a north wind, was not at this moment moving, yet the slow rising and falling of a broad cake of ice here, the crumbling of a pile there, told them that they were now far out over the fathomless ocean; told them too that should the wind shift to south, east or west they might at any moment be carried out to sea, never to be heard of again.

“Can’t be helped,” Jennings said grimly, as Joe spoke of this. “When the lives of thirty of Uncle Sam’s brave citizens are at stake one does not think of personal danger. He goes straight ahead and does his duty. Our duty lies out there.” He pointed straight over the ice floes which lay far as eye could scan, out to sea.

“Right-o,” said Joe as he turned to urge his dogs forward.

It was hard on Joe, this urging of his faithful four forward over the difficult trail.

“’Twouldn’t be so bad,” he told them, “if I wasn’t driving you straight on to your own destruction. To think that after all this struggle your reward is being eaten by some starving explorers. That’s what breaks my heart.”

“Ho, well,” he sighed as he climbed a tumbled pile of ice fragments, “there may be a way out yet.”

Night came on, and still by the light of the moon they fought their way forward. Every moment counted. Their own lives as well as the lives of those they sought to rescue were at stake.

Only when the dogs, completely exhausted, lay down in the traces and howled piteously, begging for rest and food, did they pause and seek a camping place for the night.

A broad cake of ice some hundred yards wide from edge to edge was chosen. In the center of this they pitched their tent. No Arctic feathers for them that night, only the hard surface of the ice. But even such a bed as this was welcome after a day of heroic toil.

When the dogs had been fed and they had eaten their own supper they set up the radiophone, and braving the danger of being detected by the outlaw, sought to get into communication with the exploring party.

“Got to find out whether we are going right,” Joe explained.

In a surprisingly short time they received an answer and were cheered by the news that their course was correct, and that they were at this moment not more than seventy-five miles from the explorers. With good luck, did not the ice floe begin to shift, they might almost hope to meet the men they sought at the evening of the next day and to relieve them of their suffering from hunger.

After getting in touch with Curlie and rejoicing over the knowledge that he was alive and safe, they crept into their sleeping-bags and speedily drifted away to the land of dreams.

Joe was awakened some time later to hear old Major sawing at the chain which bound him to his sled and barking lustily.

Before his eyes were fully open he heard a ripping sound at the flaps of the tent. The next instant two great round balls of fire appeared at the gap made in the tent-wall.

“Jennings! Jennings!” he shouted hoarsely. “A bear! A bear!”

The polar bear, attracted by the sound of his voice, lunged forward, taking half the tent with him.

Joe had scarcely time to creep back into the depths of his sleeping bag when the bear’s foot came down with a thud exactly where his head had been a second before.

* * * * * * * *

What Curlie Carson saw as he plunged toward his reindeer there at the edge of the scrub forest was a spectacle which might well have staggered a person much older than himself.

The forest of scrub spruce was on fire. The fire was traveling toward him, seemed, indeed, to be all but upon him.

There was not a breath of air. The fire traveled by leaping from tree to tree. The very heat of it appeared to seize the dwarf trees and, uprooting them, to hurl them hundreds of feet in air.

It was such a spectacle as few are called upon to witness. A red column of flame rose a sheer hundred feet in air. Dry, rosiny spruce cones and needles rose like feathers high in air, to go rocketing away like sparks from a volcano. The sky, the very snow all about him, seemed on fire.

“And near! So near!” he muttered through parched lips as he tore at the thong which bound his terrified reindeer to the willow bush.

His thought had been to loose the reindeer, and clinging to the sled, attempt to escape.

It was fortunate that the thong resisted his efforts, for just as he was about to succeed in loosing it, he caught above the tremendous roar of the fire a strange crack-cracking. The next instant he saw a vast herd of wild and half tame things, all maddened by the fire, bearing down upon him. There was just time to flash his knife twice, to cut the thong and the sled strap, then to leap astride the white reindeer. Then the surge were upon him. Like a mighty flood they surrounded him, engulfed him, carried him forward.

He saw them as in a dream, reindeer by hundred, caribou by thousands, wolves, a bear, all struggling in a mad effort to rush down the narrow valley from the destroying pillar of fire.

He saw a wolf snap at a caribou’s heels. Saw innumerable hoofs strike the wolf and bear him down to sure destruction.

“Trampled him to death,” he shivered, “trampled him as they would me if I fell from my reindeer.”

He clung to the deer’s neck and to his harness with the grim grip of death.

“Sled’s gone, radiophone set gone. Everything gone but life and a reindeer. And thus far you are lucky.” So his mind seemed to tell him things as he felt himself floating forward as if on the backs of the innumerable host.