Dick and Sandy barely escaped the flying ice and stones and with a cry of despair they saw Toma with the sledge and dog team vanish in a swirl of flying snow.
The avalanche thundered on, sight and sound of it dying away down the gorge as quickly as it had come. Dick and Sandy were left high on the wall of the desolate gorge, gazing with sad eyes at the point where Toma and the dog team had disappeared.
“It happened so suddenly I can hardly realize it,” Sandy spoke in a low voice. “Poor Toma.”
“I won’t give up hope yet,” Dick declared grimly. “Toma was not caught by the full force of the avalanche. You must remember he and the dogs were almost out of the way when they were hit. Let’s look along the slope.”
Sandy followed Dick to the bottom of the gorge, and the two began picking their way along the path of the avalanche. Every now and then huge masses of snow, left adhering to the walls of the gorge, loosened and fell, starting miniature snow slides in their wake, but Dick and Sandy kept their eyes open and managed to avoid these dangers by a wide margin.
They had retraced their upward trail about two hundred yards when there was borne to their ears the faint but unmistakable bark of a dog.
“Listen!” Dick grasped Sandy’s arm, as they stopped dead still.
Again there echoed in the canyon the sharp bark of an excited dog.
“It sounds like one of our Eskimo dogs,” Sandy spoke in a subdued voice, scarcely able to believe his ears. “But for the life of me I can’t tell where it comes from.”
“Let’s walk on a little further,” Dick suggested.