You would hardly know the use at first glance. Just two jawbones of some large animal, white and polished. But look closer at them. The outer side of the curve has been filed flat. There are holes drilled in the bone through which are rove leather strips. If with those strips the bones were laced to the bottom of your shoes, now—
"Skates!" you cry; and skates they were. Not keen enough perhaps to give a good honest stroke, yet speedy enough when used rightly in "roller-skate" fashion, and just as easy to get a fall with as any other kind. Ulf's nose tingled as he looked at them. It seemed to remember at least one bump.
Then Ulf fell to hammering again at his bits of steel, and presently those flat surfaces of bone were shod with something harder, with keen cutting edges of corners that would never slip, no matter how glassy the ice beneath.
Jarl Sigurd laughed when he heard of it and said that Ulf was still quite a boy. Edith was amazed, although that winter she took much pleasure in a pair of skates which were wondrous keen. But that was still in the future; meanwhile, Ulf said nothing, only smiled, and when he next sailed away he took his new toys with him.
* * * * *
Far up in the Arctic Circle, where the nights are six months long, day was fairly begun. That means, it had progressed till five or six weeks of our days might have been carved out of it, and the sun stood quite high above the horizon. It was so warm that the ice had begun to melt, and one great floe of it, ever so many miles wide, broke off from the rest and began to drift slowly southward. What made it break off was this:—here and there in the smooth plain great icebergs were frozen, huge mountains of ice, every one of them. The wind was blowing south, and each berg stood there like a great white sail. Underneath there was a current flowing southward; and every berg was many times larger under water than it was above, as you can see for yourself by dropping a piece of ice into a waterpail and measuring the difference. So the river of water flowing through the Arctic Ocean was pushing, pushing, and the wind above was pushing, pushing, until at last there came a thunderous crack, and the whole concern began drifting, drifting down to the warmer seas.
But where did the bergs come from? That, too, is very curious. Among the mountains in the far north, just as in Switzerland, there are great rivers of ice, called glaciers. They look like rivers frozen clear to the bottom, and the weight of the ice is forever pressing it downward toward the sea, sliding, squeezing, crushing itself into strange forms, and moving a few inches or a few feet or yards per year. Very slow progress, you will say. But then, it is enough. By and by a great mass of it will be shoved so far into the sea that it will break off, a whole mountain of it, and go wallowing away with perhaps twenty cart-loads of sand and gravel and great stones scooped up from the bottom into its crevices, or frozen fast to the ice. By-and-by that berg will drift down as far as Newfoundland, where it will meet the warm water of the Gulf Stream as it hurries northward. The ice will melt, the sand and stones will go silting downward, and by just so much the bottom of the ocean will be a little nearer to the surface. Already there are great banks of such deposits, many miles across, where a ship can anchor, although out of sight of land; and they are great places to go fishing on. More codfish and halibut are caught in such places than anywhere else.
Meanwhile the floe was drifting,—the one we started to write about. Right in the heart of it there was a round hole in the ice. A fat brown seal had made it when the ice was not so thick; and he kept it open, so that when the whole ocean was frozen he still could have a place to breathe through. There were other places now, but still he liked to come back home to this one. The snow had blown into the hole and formed a hard crust across it, which kept the colder air out; and after our seal had tired of fishing and felt air-thirsty, he would swim quickly to the place and blow warm breaths against the crust till a little airhole was melted right through it, which was quite enough for him. Just now the seal was not at home.
Close to the snow-buried hole lay a great yellowish-white heap, too yellow to be ice, too white to be noticed as different from any other hummock of ice. For hours it had crouched there utterly motionless, save now and then the silent quiver of a small ear hidden in the fur. All day it would stay if need be, patient as death and as sure—the great white polar bear, with claws like hooks of iron, and looked at with respect by Northmen, who gave scant respect to anything else on earth.
And good was their reason, for, as they knew, "He has eleven men's wit and twelve men's strength," and of all foes to meet, none was so terrible, none so full of craft. Men tell of two hunters who saw one by a pool and stole up behind a rock. When they peered over there was no bear there, nothing but a brown leaf drifting across the pool. Then, as they looked, the leaf disappeared behind the bank, and without a sound the head of that bear slipped out of the water right there, and rose inch by inch to get a good look at the watchers. Then back it slipped again, down, down, till only the tip of the nose was left, and once more there was nothing to be seen but what seemed a brown leaf drifting across the water.