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
holluschack 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 grave. 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 only result 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, "we'll stand on, and run into the creek we've fixed
on, if it's necessary."

In the meanwhile, dusk had closed down on them, and it had grown
perceptibly colder. The haze crystallised on the rigging, the rail was
white with rime, and the deck grew slippery, but they left everything
on her 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 the topsails off her, and proceeded cautiously,
with two men with logger's pikepoles forward, and another in the eyes
of the foremast rigging. As it happened, they struck nothing, and when
night came the _Selache_ lay rolling in a heavy, portentous calm.
Dampier and one or two of the others 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 a so