"No, sir!" the trader said. "I didn't want to be caught out there in the dark.
"By good luck, I struck some big pans about half-way over. Then I took to a dog-trot, and left the yards behind me in a way that cheered me up. Just before dusk I got near enough to the other side to feel proud of myself, and I began to think of what a fool I'd have been if I'd taken the shore route. A minute later I changed my mind. I felt the pack moving! Well, in a flash I said good-bye to Cherry Hill and the boys. Not many men are caught twice in a place like that. They never have the second chance.
"There I was, aboard a rotten floe and bound out to the big, lonely ocean at the rate of four miles an hour.
"'Oh, you might as well get ready to go, Jim,' thinks I. But I didn't give up. I loped along shoreward in a way that didn't take snow crust or air-holes into account. And I made the edge of the floe before the black hours of the night had come.
"There was a couple of hundred yards of cold water between me and the shore.
"'This is the time you think more of your life than your fur,' thinks I.
"There was a stray pan or two—little rafts of things—lying off the edge of the floe; and beyond them, scattered between the shore and me, half a dozen other pans were floating. How to get from one to the other was the puzzle. They were fifty or sixty yards apart, most of them, and I had no paddle. It was foolish to think of making a shift with my jacket for a sail; the wind was out, not in, and I had no rudder.
"What had I? Nothing that I could think of. It didn't strike me, as you say. I wish it had.
"'Anyhow,' says I to myself, 'I'll get as far as I can.'
"It was a short leap from the floe to the first pan. I made it easily. The second pan was farther off, but I thought I could jump the water between. So I took off my pack and threw it on the ice beside me. It almost broke my heart to do it, for I'd walked five hundred miles in the dead of winter for that fur; I'd been nearly starved and frozen, and I'd paid out hard-earned money. I put down my pack, took a short run, and jumped like a stag for the second pan.