They first buried all the meat, except enough for four days’ rations, in a deep snow bank. Then, from a nearby patch of boulder strewn slope they carried a great many stones, erecting a sort of monument over the cache to prevent its being torn up by foxes. Over this cairn, they threw snow until it resembled, from a distance, the rest of the snowdrift. About a hundred feet north of the cache a small pile of stones was placed, as a landmark provided a storm came and obliterated all other signs of the cache.
The job of stowing the meat completed, the boys once more set out for the glacier. Driving fast, they reached the towering walls of ice and snow in about an hour. Calling a halt they surveyed with sinking hearts the tremendous task that lay before them.
“I wonder if this is the place where Mistak climbed the glacier with his prisoner,” Dick speculated.
“Looks to me like a mountain goat would have a hard time getting to the top from this point,” said Sandy.
“Heap big job get um sledge up ice from here. Look ’long wall. Maybe find easy place,” suggested Toma.
“I think that’s what we’d better do,” Sandy agreed with the young Indian.
Dick also thought it best they should look for an easier place to climb, and so they turned to the right under the walls of the glacier and drove the dog team slowly along, their necks craned upward.
The grumbling noises in the bowels of the glacier gave cause for grave concern in the minds of the boys and they fell silent, dreading more and more the peril of ascending that mountain of ice.
Not far from the place where they had first approached the glacier, they found the walls split as by a giant’s axe and a great gorge led upward at a slant which promised fairly easy climbing. Turning into this they started upward.
A quarter mile of steady climbing, covered by helping the dogs with the supply sledge, and they found themselves about a hundred feet above the tundra. Here, they paused for a much needed rest. Probably five minutes they had sat in the snow, gathering strength for the next lap of the climb, when a low rumble fell upon their ears which seemed nearer than any other noises they had heard from the glacier.