All through the night they slept there with the Great Dipper circling around the North Star above them, and with the ice-floe carrying them, who could tell where?
The two following days were spent in fruitless hunting for wild duck and in making trips to the rubbish pile. These trips netted nothing of use save armfuls of wood which helped to add a cheery tone to their camp. Though the fog held on, the nights grew bitterly cold. They were glad enough to creep into their sleeping-bag as soon as it grew dark. There for hours they lay and talked of many things: Of the land to which the ice-floe might eventually bring them, the people who would be living there, and the things they would have to eat. Then, again, they would talk of school days, and the glad, good times that now seemed so far away. Of one subject they never spoke; never once did one wonder to the other what their families were doing in their far-away homes. They did not dare. It would have been like singing "Home Sweet Home" to the American soldiers on the fields of France.
The second day's tramp to the rubbish pile brought them a great surprise. They were busily searching through the piles of cans for a possible one that had not been opened, when Lucile, happening to hear a noise behind her, looked up. The next instant, with a startled whisper, which was almost a cry, "Marian! Quick!" she seized Marian by the arm and dragged her around an ice-pile.
"Wha—what is it?" whispered the startled Marian.
"Bear!"
* * * * * *
At this very moment, on another section of that same vast floe, Phi lay flat on his stomach, his eye traveling the length of his rifle barrel. His brow was wrinkled. He moved uneasily, as a gambler moves who would risk all on one throw of the dice but does not quite dare.
He shook the benumbed fingers of his right hand, then gripped the rifle once more. His forefinger was on the trigger. He had arrived at a crisis. He was half starved and freezing. For three days now he had wandered over the vast expanse of ice-pans that covered the waters of Bering Straits. During that three days he had secured only two small birds, dovekies they were, birds who linger all winter in the Arctic. These he had shared with Rover.
From the moment the snow-fog had settled down upon him and the break in the ice-floe had blocked his way so effectively, he had wandered about without knowing where he was going. The ice-floe constantly drifting, first this way, then that, may have carried him east, west, north, south. Who could tell where? Who could guess his position on the surface of the ocean at the present moment?
A brown seal was the cause of his excitement now. The seal, lying asleep upon the ice-pan before him, must weigh something like seventy pounds. This was meat enough to last him and his dog many days.