They found shelter behind a friendly precipice, creeping as closely together—men and beasts—as possible, for warmth and protection. The storm, which at times blew with hurricane force, delayed the advance for four and twenty hours.
Most of the time was spent in bag.
Honest MacDonald — Captain X—— —pooh-poohed the blast. He would not turn into his bag.
“It’s a bit kittle storm,” he admitted; “but, losh! lads, I’ve seen mony a waur in the Hielan’ hills, when tending my father’s bits of sheepies.”
MacDonald had Bobbie Burns’s poems to comfort him, and he drank coffee and spun yarns the whole day long. He was a rare hand at telling a story—especially a fish story—but they couldn’t have been all true. He generally ended every yarn with the words, “But that’s nothing. I’ll gi’e ye anither.”
And each fresh story had a broader base than the previous. Not that they were based on the solid truth.
That day he put a climax to his yarns by telling his listeners seriously that, one morning in the Arctic regions, while on shore in Yak Land, he found a stranded whale. He was looking at it when, “without a moment’s warning, the sky became overcast, and a blizzard, boys, ten times wilder than this, came on to blow.
“A blizzard,” he said, “that would have killed a regiment of Gordon Highlanders!”
“And how did you escape?”
“Crept into the whale’s mouth, of course, and quickly too. But the beggar wasna dead ava. The jaws closed, and I was a prisoner.