If I'd a boat and a rifle, and it was
summer, I'd have pushed across for Alaska. You can eat birds and walrus,
and a man might eat a fur-seal if he'd had nothing else for a week,
though I've struck nothing that has more smell than the holluschickie
blubber. If it was winter, I'd have tried the ice. The Huskies make out
on it for weeks together, and quite a few of the steam whaler men have
trailed an odd hundred or two miles over it one time or another. They
hadn't tents and dog-teams either."

Wyllard's face grew anxious. He had naturally considered both courses,
and had decided that they were out of the question. Seas do not freeze
up solid, and that three men should transport a boat, supposing that
they had one, over leagues of ice appeared impossible. An attempt to
cross the narrow sea, which is either wrapped in mist or swept by sudden
gales, in any open craft would clearly result only in disaster, but,
admitting that, he felt that, had he been in those men's place, he would
have headed north. There was one question which had all along remained
unanswered, and that was how they had reached the coast from which they
had sent their message.

"Anyway," he said, after a long pause, "we'll stand on, and run into the
creek we've fixed on, if it's necessary."

Dusk had closed down on them, and it had grown perceptibly colder. The
haze crystallized on the rigging, the rail was white with rime, and the
deck grew slippery, but they left everything on the _Selache_ to the
topsails, and she crept on erratically through the darkness, avoiding
the faint spectral glimmer of the scattered ice. The breeze abeam
propelled her with gently leaning canvas at some four knots to the hour,
and now and then Wyllard, who hung about the deck that night, fancied he
could hear a thin, sharp crackle beneath the slowly lifting bows.

Next day the haze thickened, and there seemed to be more ice about, but
the breeze was fresher, and there was, at least, no skin upon the
ruffled sea. They took off the topsails, and proceeded cautiously, with
two men with logger's pikepoles forward, and another in the eyes of the
foremast rigging. They struck nothing, fortunately, and when night came
the _Selache_ lay rolling in a heavy, portentous calm. Dampier and one
or two of the men declared their certainty that there was ice near them,
but, at least, they could not see it, though there was now no doubt
about the crackling beneath the schooner's side. It was