When the Czar first felt the icy water on his shaggy legs he was glad. A sense of life and freedom thrilled him.
This freezing water was his native element. True he was still surrounded by this hateful cage, which narrowed his world down to twelve feet in one direction and eight in the other, but he felt certain that it would float away. The waters which had always befriended him would help him. Then he remembered with a shudder his last experience in the water—the men and the motor boat and the rope that had nearly strangled him, and the courage in his great stout heart wavered. Perhaps he was not going to escape after all.
The bottom of his cage had been made perfectly tight, so that it now acted as a raft. The water was two feet deep in the cage due to the weight of the bear and the top of the cage, but that was no hardship to him. But the clumsy cage did not keep facing the seas as did the motor boat a mile away, so when it came into the trough, the water was four feet deep instead of two. Even so it would have gone rolling over and over but that the great shaggy beast inside trimmed it and steadied it just as cleverly as a man would have a fractious canoe.
The art of balancing he was master of. He had learned it by sailing for miles upon rocking cakes of ice. What brute cunning could do to keep the cage right side up and from swamping, he could be trusted to do. But gradually it water soaked and came up from the wettings in the trough of the sea less and less buoyantly. Finally the water in the cruel cage was up to the bear's sides. Truly his plight was getting desperate. At last when the water came up to his shoulders and he even had to swim a few strokes occasionally in the cruel cage, Eiseeyou's prophecy seemed about to be fulfilled. It certainly looked as though he would sleep in the Atlantic. Meanwhile the motor boat was having her troubles. The man at the wheel did not try to make any particular direction, but simply kept her headed towards the regularly rolling waves. He knew if she once got in the trough she might be capsized. So all the power was used to keep her facing the sea. Every time she rose on the top of a high wave, the propeller would be out of water and would spin like a top.
Then she would come down into the water again and the engine would resume its labored panting.
The men talked but little. No one knew what the outcome of this disaster might be. Eiseeyou sat in the stern of the boat with Oumauk in his arms, listening for the regular resounding slap of each succeeding wave on the bows of the little craft.
As the hours wore wearily on, he noted that the swells were getting higher and higher and the sound when they struck the boat louder. Their plight was certainly desperate.
It was just a gamble whether they would be picked up before the seas engulfed them.