Jack the Young Explorer: A Boy's Experiances in the Unknown Northwest

by George Bird Grinnell

Before leaving it they sat down under the lee of the ridge in the warm sun, and while Hugh smoked a pipe the others looked out over the wide white field before them.

Presently Joe called out, “Look at the sheep,” and pointed in front of him.

Jack looked, and at first could see nothing, but after Joe had told him where to look, he saw half a dozen tiny dark objects moving swiftly about without order over the ice a couple of miles away. Borrowing the glasses, he looked at them, and could plainly see that they were four-legged animals running to and fro over the ice field, apparently playing with each other.

Hugh looked at them and said that they were indeed sheep, as Joe had said, but confessed that he only called them sheep because he knew that no other animals could be found in such a place.

In the soil of the rocky ridge where they were sitting Jack discovered some beautiful pink flowers, but neither Hugh nor Joe could give them a name. They grew on exceedingly short stems from little round bunches of green leaves shaped like a pincushion and with the general aspect of what Jack remembered in Eastern gardens as phlox.

He would have liked to take some of these flowers back with him to have them identified, but had no way of carrying them.

Still roped together, the three once more descended to the ice, and started toward camp.

The walking was easier now, partly because it was down hill and partly because the snow had been softened by the sun’s heat and gave them a better foothold.

Hugh advised the boys to tie their handkerchiefs over the bridge of their noses, and to pull their hats well down on their foreheads to shield their eyes as much as possible from the glare of the sun.

As they went on down the glacier, they could see that even since they had passed up in the morning new cracks had opened in the ice and some that they had gone around on the way up had lengthened. Two or three of these were so narrow that they could step across them, but Hugh still kept as far from the rocks as the broken condition of the glacier would permit.