Many times before this, Scotty had seen service in the Arctic waters, and knew well enough about the killer whales. Like the wolf-pack of the snow barrens, these ferocious sea creatures hunted in bands. The man shuddered now when he remembered what he had seen of the killers on the trail. Sometimes these carnivori swallowed dolphins alive without even taking trouble to kill them. Sometimes the killer-pack attacked a huge bowhead whale, beat him into submission with leapings and poundings of their lithe, cruel black bodies, devoured him ferociously, first the lips, then the tongue, then the rest of the monstrous, helpless body.
Anxiously the marooned men watched the horizon for thunderhead and storm cloud. Suppose a tempest rolled up, drove their ice field hither and yon on the sea, smashed and ground it to pieces? It would mean a terrible end, with the killer-pack of the sea nosing in, ready to devour.
It was hard to set the thoughts on anything else save the sinister sea shapes that slunk away mysteriously for long stretches, then rolled back into view, to glide and blow and watch with evil, hungry eyes.
Somehow, though, Lee forced his mind and his hands to concentrate on the scattered debris of his broken radio. For hours he labored, repairing the condenser, straightening springs, connecting wires. “F-O-Y-N”—that one call had gone out on the air from his machine. Had anyone heard it? Would he ever be able to send another?
An hour, eight hours, for days, the struggle went on. A black-haired boy out on the bleak white of drift ice striving to rehabilitate a dead radio! No tools, no resources, no anything save some broken wires and metal pieces—and the eternal ice!
A wire bent here, a patient bit of soldering there—then all of a sudden he was in touch! He had done it, made the connection, fired again the spark of electricity that was the life of radio!
Something was coming in! A chitter-chatter of faint telegraphic code!
“Latitude 78—on the ice—drifting—”
That was all.
No matter how Renaud sent out an answering call, begged, pleaded, tapped out the code, nothing more came in.