Leading the party was Amaluk, with his sledge laden with necessities, the men’s personal belongings, food, and supplies. Behind him came team after team and the schooner’s men and officers. In the rear were the two boys with their own dog team, their sledge laden with their trophies, and with Unavik a few paces ahead of them.
Although the snow had been softened by the warm spell, the change in wind and temperature had frozen a hard crust upon it, and sledding was easy and rapid. But the heavily loaded sledges broke through here and there and the boys, bringing up the rear, found that they could travel far easier by swinging to one side on to the unbroken crust. Often, for several miles, they were out of sight of the others, for they made detours around hills and deep drifts and once or twice stopped to shoot game. They had no fear of going astray for the shrill shouts of the Eskimos, the cracking of whips, and the yelps of the dogs were borne plainly to them on the strong easterly wind.
They had traveled in this way for several hours when Tom, who was running ahead, halted and signaled the dogs to stop. “Look here, Jim,” he cried, “there are reindeer near. See, here’s where they’ve been scraping away the snow and feeding.”
“Golly, that’s so,” assented Jim as he saw the bits of moss on the white surface and the bare spots where the animals had pawed away the snow from a deep bed of moss.
“Let’s go after them!” suggested Tom. “They may be near, and Captain Edwards said to get meat if we could, to help out the provisions.”
“Better not,” cautioned Jim. “You know he told us not to go off alone.”
“But that was different,” argued Tom. “He meant not to go off on long trips. There’s no danger in this. We can’t get lost. It’ll be dead easy to find the others’ trail, or follow our own back. See, it’s plain as can be.”
“No, I guess there’s no danger of that,” admitted Jim. “All right, come on, but if we don’t find the deer soon, we’ll have to come back.”
Urging their dogs forward, the boys followed the deer’s trail and presently, by the dogs’ yelps and growls and the way they strained at their traces, the boys knew they were on a fresh scent, and that the deer could not be far away. The trail led up a narrow circuitous valley, and as the marks of the reindeer’s hoofs became more and more distinct, and the bits of moss where the animals had stopped to feed were fresher, the boys knew they were nearing the herd, and halted their dogs.
“Let’s look over that ridge before we go farther,” suggested Tom. “They may be in the next hollow.”