After eating the eggs, one of the geese, which Donovan and Raed had dressed, was cut up raw, and fried on the spider. We had sharpened appetites; and, had the morsels been flavored with salt, it would not have tasted bad. Wade tried dipping his in the bumper of sea-water,—with no great satisfaction to his palate, I inferred; for he did not repeat the experiment.
"How about drink?" Kit observed at length. "I don't suppose there's a spring on the island. I'm getting thirsty. What's to be done for water?"
"Have to melt ice," Raed replied. "There's ice along the shore, among the rocks."
Kit started off, and presently came back with a large lump. Bits of it were broken off and put in the bumper, and held over the fire. The water thus obtained and cooled with ice was not salt exactly. Still it was not, as has sometimes been affirmed, pure fresh water, by any means: it had a brackish taste.
The weather, which had been clear during the day thus far, began to foul toward evening. It was now after six. The wind had veered to the south-west. Wild, straggling fogs, with black clouds higher up, were running into the north-east. Damp, cold gusts blew in from the water.
"We shall have a chilly night," Wade said, shivering a little. "Rain and sleet before morning, likely as not."
We set about preparing for it. A little back from the fire a wall of rough stones was hastily thrown up to the height of three feet or over, and continued for ten or twelve feet, with both ends brought round toward the fire. We then got the boat up out of the water, and, by hard lifting, raised it bottom-up, and laid it on our semicircular wall. It thus formed a kind of shed large enough to creep under. But, not satisfied with this, Donovan fell to work with his butcher-knife, and, in the course of an hour, had cleaved the skin off both sides of the walrus down to where it rested on the rock. Then, using the hafts of the oars as levers, we rolled the carcass on one side. The hide was then skinned off underneath; when, on rolling the carcass clean over, we had the hide off in one broad, immensely-heavy sheet. Raed estimated it to contain twenty square yards, reckoning the average girth of the walrus at twelve feet, and its length at fifteen feet. By means of the oars and thwarts as supports, the skin was then raised with the raw side up in tent form over the wall and boat, making shelter sufficient for us all to get under with comfort.
"Now let it storm, if it wants to!" cried Weymouth: "we've got a water-proof seal-skin at least!"
An arch of stones, with our spider set in the top, was then built over the fire to protect it from the weather.
"How long will this walrus last for firewood, suppose?" I asked.