The two paced around most of the time to keep their feet warm. Meanwhile they suffered much from hunger, realizing that a lack of sufficient food was rapidly telling on their ability to stand the exposure. This inspired Guy with a suggestion that they utilize their time to double advantage by fishing.
“You’ve often heard that fish bite better at night than in the daytime,” he said. “Let’s set the lines and see if we can’t surprise the others with a big catch in the morning.”
“That’s a good idea,” agreed the other sentinel. “Do you know, I believe that very suggestion is going to prove our salvation.”
Watson “made a dive” for the niche in which the fishing tackle had been pocketed, and soon returned with the four lines and a small piece of dog meat. In a few minutes they had baited the hooks and sunk them into the water, fastening the other ends of the lines to large “boulders” or projections of ice.
Scarcely were all the lines set, it seemed, when a fierce tugging was observed at one of them; then, a moment later, at another. Eagerly they tried the first one and had all they could do to pull in a magnificent herring. The other held a smaller fellow of the same kind.
But this was not all. The second fish was hardly dragged back on the ice when a violent jerking was observed on another line, and then on the fourth. Their luck continued thus for an hour or more until they found themselves almost exhausted with hard work in a weakened physical condition. Then Guy counted their catch, and found they had twenty-six magnificent fellows, principally cod. At first it seemed that there was a school of king herring near the iceberg, but after half an hour’s fishing, only cod took the hooks.
Two happier persons than these ocean anglers could hardly have been found anywhere. They forgot the other dangers that threatened them, for the immediate problem of life on the iceberg had been solved.
They continued to sink their baited lines with gratifying success until after midnight. Then their bait gave out, and they cut a small herring into bits and used these on the hooks. It is proverbial that codfish will swallow almost anything, even rivaling in this respect the goat of tin-can fame; and they surely lived up to their reputation so far as the herring bait was concerned.
As an experiment, Guy put a piece of serrated backbone on one of the hooks and a “great-big” cod promptly swallowed it.
They were undisturbed in their occupation. The would-be invaders of the Eskimo camp did not reappear. Apparently they had decided that another attempt would prove as futile as the first and gave it up as a bad job. In the early hours of the morning the fish did not bite so eagerly, but Guy and Watson angled until daybreak, resolving not to be satisfied with any degree of success as long as there was hope for more.