ur jackets again, Luka; my teeth are chattering,
and after working as hard as we have been doing for the last three or
four hours it won't do to get a chill. I am as hungry as a hunter; we
had breakfast at five o'clock by my watch, and it is three now."

Luka soon lit the fire in the boat. The provisions in the canoe had
been finished two days before, as they had been obliged to throw
overboard what they had not eaten owing to its having become unfit for
use. The food, however, wrapped up in furs in the boat was still solidly
frozen. They cut a couple of fish out of the mass and placed them in the
frying-pan; stuck a wooden skewer through some pieces of bear's meat and
held them in the flame, and hung the bear's hams, as they did each time
they cooked, in the smoke of the fire.

"We must try to get some more fish next time we set sail, Luka. I am
sure we passed through several shoals of fish by the swirling of the
water."

It was thirty-six hours before the fog cleared off, swept away by a
south-westerly wind. As they had nothing to do but to eat and sleep
during this time, they got up their anchor and hoisted their sail the
moment the fog cleared off, and in eighteen hours reached the sharp
point of the Cape. Rounding this, Godfrey said:

"Now, Luka, we are at the mouth of the Gulf of Obi. It is nearly two
hundred miles, according to this map, to the opposite side, and we
daren't try to make that; besides, the wind has been getting more to the
west and would be right in our teeth, for you see by this tracing the
opposite point of land is a good bit to the south of west. There is
nothing for it but for us to keep along this shore for something like a
hundred and fifty miles. We can lay our course well with this wind. The
gulf won't be more than eighty miles wide there, and we can strike
across and coast down the opposite bank. It seems a long way round, but
we shall do it as quickly as we should beating right across in the teeth
of this wind. I doubt if we could do that at all with this craft behind
us."

Fortunately the wind was not high, or they could not have ventured out,
as a heavy swell would have set in from the other side of the gulf.
They kept their course within half a mile of the shore.

"What are those black things on that low point?" Godfrey asked. "I can
hear them barking. They must be tremendously big dogs, if they are
dogs."

"They are seals," Luka said; "they go right up the rivers in summer, an