In this way he got sufficient warmth to enable him to sleep. Towards morning he awoke with the idea that he must make something in the way of a flag to attract the notice of people on shore, and to show them that there was someone in distress on the ice.
The question was, how to make a flagstaff? I wonder whether a Boy
Scout could have seen a way?
Grenfell took the frozen legs of the three dead dogs, and bound them together with strips of raw hide, and thus manufactured a staff, on to which he then tied his shirt to act as a flag. It worked very well till the sun rose, and then the legs began to melt a little, and the flagstaff became a very wobbly one; and, as the Doctor describes it, "almost tied itself into knots."
Like a true Scout, Grenfell never despaired; he kept thinking out different ways by which he might survive the danger.
He thought of setting light to some unravelled rope by using a piece of ice to act as a burning glass. In this way he hoped to attract the attention of the people on shore by a smoke signal; but, while he was busy preparing it, he saw the distant sparkle of what looked like an oar from a boat, presently he saw it again, and soon he could see the boat itself.
His flag had been seen by the fishermen, and they pushed out in their boat through the frozen ice till they got him and his faithful dogs all safely aboard.
One man had seen him the night before just as it was getting dark, and had spread the news down the coast, so that all the time, though he did not know it, anxious eyes were watching him.
The only difficulty was to get a boat through the mass of broken ice-floes and drifting ice, which covered the heaving surface of the sea between him and the shore, but pluck and strong arms did it.
In the end his rescuers brought him safely ashore, where every man, woman and child in the settlement was on the beach to welcome him with cheers and—many of them—with tears of joy.
Doctor Grenfell says that during the whole of this terrible experience he did not once feel fear. He felt that he would probably lie down and sleep his last sleep on that ice-floe; the thought did not disturb him very much.