o eat, and if Partner is willing we'll kill them, and
let you have the carcasses to feed to your teams. What do you say,
Partner?"

"We'll kill them." Jimmy agreed, regretfully.

Abel also decided that it would be wise to reduce the number of his own
dogs to fifteen, and thus the problem was solved.

Winter settled with almost unexampled cold, and with a succession of
fearful storms. It was a winter, too, of awful hardship and privation to
the people of the Coast. The Eskimos to the northward depended chiefly
upon seals for their own living as well as for dog food, and with them,
as with Abel Zachariah and Skipper Ed, the seal hunt was cut off by the
early blizzard, and few seals were killed.

Abel and Skipper Ed, however, relied more largely upon the cod fishing,
and it had been their custom for many years to barter away the fish they
caught to trading schooners which visited them for that purpose at their
fishing places before they returned to winter quarters. In this way they
usually purchased sufficient flour and pork, tea and molasses to do them
until the following spring, and when open water came again they would
sail to the mission station and purchase with the furs their traps had
yielded them, fresh supplies.

The attack of measles this year, however, had so interfered with their
fishing that their small catch had purchased from the traders scarcely
enough flour and pork and tea to last them until the new year. And so
one day late in December Abel and Skipper Ed drove the two dog teams
over to the Nain Mission, expecting to obtain there the supplies they
needed.

"I'm sorry," said the missionary, "but I can spare you very
little--almost nothing. The seal hunt was a failure with the people all
down north, and they are starving, and I must take care of them. This
year there are so many needy ones our stock will go only a little way.
I'll divide it the best way I know how, but, God help the poor folk, it
won't go far, and I'm praying God to send caribou or send seals."

"We'll get on somehow," said Skipper Ed. "The timber is back of us and
we'll get rabbits and partridges, and make out. Give the Eskimos what
you have. They're on barren ground and don't have the chance we have.
There'll be better luck for us all by and by. Better luck."

And with only a half barrel of flour and some tea they returned to
Abel's Bay to face the winter and make their fight against nature
without complaint. For no truly brave