“Hurrah, they can walk on it!” cried Tom and, followed by Jim, he clambered over the schooner’s rails and leaped on to the ice.
“Gee, we’re frozen in!” yelled Jim. “It’s really winter. Come on, let’s go and see what the Eskimos are doing.”
“Look out, ye young scallawags,” roared Cap’n Pem. “Ye’ll git lost.”
“No danger,” called back Tom. “We’ll get one of the Eskimos to go with us.”
Turning, he spoke to the fur-clad men in their own tongue and accompanied by one of them, the two boys pushed their way through the snow towards shore.
“Oh, they’re building igloos!” exclaimed Jim as they came in sight of the Eskimos. “And on the ice too.”
Interestedly the two boys watched the natives as they labored at their winter homes. With long-bladed snow knives carved from walrus tusks the men cut the blocks of frozen snow and piled them in a circle, tier on tier, each a little smaller than the one preceding. Rapidly the low-domed huts grew and took on form and soon the first one was completed. With yells of delight Tom and Jim crawled into the tunnel-like entrance and found themselves within the igloo.
“Say, isn’t this jolly!” cried Tom. “Come on, Jim, let’s make one for ourselves. It’ll be great sport having an igloo with the Eskimos.”
Enthusiastically the two set to work, borrowing snow knives from their Eskimo friends, but they soon found that building an igloo was an art and they joined heartily in the Eskimos’ merriment when the wall tumbled in and all their work came to nothing. They were not discouraged, and presently one of the Eskimo boys came to their aid. With his help the boys soon got the knack of the work and before it was time to return to the schooner for dinner their igloo was completed.
The night was almost as bright as day with the Northern Lights reflected from the vast stretch of spotless white. By midnight the storm was over; stars twinkled brilliantly in the deep purple sky, the little group of igloos rose above the flat, white plain of ice-like, snow-covered bee hives. The wind was so bitingly, intensely cold that the boys were glad indeed to seek shelter in the deck house with its cheery red-hot stove.