Toma seemed willing enough to stay behind and take care of things in the absence of the boys, and so Dick and Sandy started out without him, carrying only their rifles and hunting knives, for they dared not go far away from camp. They knew that, while they had weathered one brief blizzard, they could not expect to be so fortunate next time.
Looking for musk-oxen, the boys climbed the high moraine east of the base camp and followed the top of the ridge southward until they reached an arm of the glacier on the other side.
They had gone upward of two miles when they came suddenly upon the print of a sealskin Arctic boot in the snow. The boys stopped and studied the track.
“This can’t be made by any of the policemen, or Sipsa either,” said Dick with bated breath. “They all had snowshoes.”
“And it can’t be Mistak either,” Sandy observed. “He’d be traveling on snowshoes too.”
The boys looked at each other significantly.
“Then it’s just about got to be Moonshine Sam,” Dick spoke slowly.
Again they bent over the boot track.
“You can see it was made before or during the blizzard,” Dick said. “It’s partly drifted full of snow. Let’s look for other tracks.”
Several feet away from the first, on the other side of a long, low, snowdrift they found the next track. It was raised up out of the snow, the wind having sucked away the loose flakes all around it. Another and another they found, as the trail grew hotter, but the tracks seemed to have been made by a person wandering aimlessly here and there.