"Sure," said the helmsman. "If I'd a boat and a rifle, and it was summer, I'd have pushed across for Alaska. You can eat birds and walrus, and a man might eat a fur-seal if he'd had nothing else for a week, though I've struck nothing that has more smell than the holluschack blubber. If it was winter, I'd have tried the ice. The Huskies make out on it for weeks together, and quite a few of the steam whaler men have trailed an odd hundred or two miles over it one time or another. They hadn't tents and dog-teams either."
Wyllard's face grew grave. He had naturally considered both courses, and had decided that they were out of the question. Seas do not freeze up solid, and that three men should transport a boat, supposing that they had one, over leagues of ice appeared impossible. An attempt to cross the narrow sea, which is either wrapped in mist or swept by sudden gales, in any open craft would clearly only result in disaster, but admitting that he felt that had he been in those men's place he would have headed north. There was one question which had all along remained unanswered, and that was how they had reached the coast from which they had sent their message.
"Anyway," he said, "we'll stand on, and run into the creek we've fixed on, if it's necessary."
In the meanwhile, dusk had closed down on them, and it had grown perceptibly colder. The haze crystallised on the rigging, the rail was white with rime, and the deck grew slippery, but they left everything on her to the topsails, and she crept on erratically through the darkness, avoiding the faint spectral glimmer of the scattered ice. The breeze abeam propelled her with gently leaning canvas at some four knots to the hour, and now and then Wyllard, who hung about the deck that night, fancied he could hear a thin, sharp crackle beneath the slowly lifting bows.
Next day the haze thickened, and there seemed to be more ice about, but the breeze was fresher, and there was, at least, no skin upon the ruffled sea. They took the topsails off her, and proceeded cautiously, with two men with logger's pikepoles forward, and another in the eyes of the foremast rigging. As it happened, they struck nothing, and when night came the Selache lay rolling in a heavy, portentous calm. Dampier and one or two of the others declared their certainty that there was ice near them, but, at least, they could not see it, though there was now no doubt about the crackling beneath the schooner's side. It was a somewhat anxious night for most of them, but a breeze that drove the haze aside got up with the sun, and Dampier expected to reach the creek before darkness fell.
He might have done it but for the glistening streak on the horizon, which presently crept in on them, and resolved itself into detached grey-white masses, with openings of various sizes in and out between them. The breeze was freshening, and the Selache going through it at some six knots, when Dampier came aft to Wyllard, who was standing rather grim in face at the wheel. There was a moderately wide opening in the floating barrier close ahead of him. The rest of the crew stood silent watching the skipper, for they were by this time more or less acquainted with Wyllard's temperament.
"You can't get through that," said Dampier, pointing to the ice.
Wyllard looked at him sourly, and the white men, at least, understood what he was feeling. So far, he had had everything against him—calm, and fog, and sudden gale—and now, when he was almost within sight of the end of the first stage of his journey, they had met the ice.
"You're sure of that?" he said.
Dampier smiled. "It would cost too much, or I'd let you try." He called to the man perched high in the foremast shrouds, and the answer came down: