“That story had a moral to it just like one of Aesop’s Fables,” Dick said sleepily, as he crawled into his sleeping bag. “Guess we can’t have our cake and eat it too. Right, Sandy?”
But a long, tuneful snore was the only reply Dick heard from Sandy.
The boys slept soundly for nearly ten hours, and when they awakened they felt equal to any task that might present itself. First, they visited the bear Dick and Toma had killed the day before, and brought back all the meat they could carry on their backs. Since this left them well supplied with meat for themselves, Dick decided they had better make an effort to procure some seal or walrus meat for the dogs.
Toma once more was elected to remain behind while Dick and Sandy went hunting. The boys found that the seal herd had moved a considerable distance eastward along the coast since they first had seen it. It took them an hour of climbing over rough shore ice before they reached a point opposite the seal herd. Even then, to their disappointment, they found that several large ice floes, jammed together, separated them from the seals.
After some minutes of deliberation, they decided to venture out upon the ice, and get nearer the seals by jumping from one cake of ice to another. Thus they began a dangerous adventure, destined from the beginning to end in ill fortune, for they had not gone a hundred yards across the treacherous ice before both Dick and Sandy had slipped and narrowly saved themselves from a bad ducking, if not drowning, by clutching the edge of the floe which had been their objective when they leaped the open water.
Resting on a large, secure floe, they noticed that the tide was going out and that frequently, from the outer edge of the ice-jam, a large fragment detached itself and floated out to sea.
“I think we ought to go back,” Dick said once, but they did not want to turn back empty handed after having gone so far, so they kept on until they were within fifty feet of the nearest seals.
“How tame they are!” exclaimed Sandy.
“They seem just like dogs,” Dick added. “Probably no one has killed any of this herd for a long time. It seems a shame to shoot such innocent looking creatures.”
“Well, you know we have to have food for the dogs,” Sandy argued with his tender heart. “In this country it’s eat or be eaten, and we need the dogs and not the seals.”