And Jack heard and saw everything, down to the last shriek and the last clutch; and to the very end they never ceased reproaching him for bringing them into such misery, and bewailing their sad lot.
"I must hold on tight now," said Jack to himself, for he was better even where he was than in the sea.
And so he tightened his knees on the keel, and held on fast till he had no feeling left in either hand or foot.
In the coal-black gusty night he fancied he heard yells from one or other of the remaining boats' crews.
"They, too, have wives and children," thought he. "I wonder whether they have also a Jack to lay the blame upon!"
Now while he thus lay there and drifted and drifted, and it seemed to him to be drawing towards dawn, he suddenly felt that the boat was in the grip of a strong shoreward current; and, sure enough, Jack got at last ashore. But whichever way he looked, he saw nothing but black sea and white snow.
Now as he stood there, speering and spying about him, he saw, far away, the smoke of a Finn Gamme,3 which stood beneath a cliff, and he managed to scramble right up to it.
The Finn was so old that he could scarcely move. He was sitting in the midst of the warm ashes, and mumbling into a big sack, and neither spoke nor answered. Large yellow humble-bees were humming about all over the snow, as if it were Midsummer; and there was only a young lass there to keep the fire alight, and give the old man his food. His grandsons and grand-daughters were with the reindeer, far far away on the Fjeld.
Here Jack got his clothes well dried, and the rest he so much wanted. The Finn girl, Seimke, couldn't make too much of him; she fed him with reindeer milk and marrow-bones, and he lay down to sleep on silver fox-skins.
Cosy and comfortable it was in the smoke there. But as he thus lay there, 'twixt sleep and wake, it seemed to him as if many odd things were going on round about him.