Talking about impossible dreams as if they were bound to happen makes them seem jolly real. Kak managed to choke back his sorrow, and freshly convinced that life was a grand adventure, ran after the party who were already trekking north.
Crossing the prairies with all their gear and trade goods, the wooden dishes, pails, lamp supports they had made, and pieces of rough wood piled on the sled, proved an entirely different experience from their tiresome, hot, hungry tramp southward. The new sled ran lightly on snow ample to cover the ground and not too heavy for walking. Taptuna was careful to pack a good supply of food, and halfway across the tundra they found their old cache. All laughed heartily to think how much worse they had needed it in the summer than they did now.
With favorable weather and little time lost hunting they made a record trip. Spirits mounted at every mile. Guninana sniffed the ocean air joyfully and said how fine it would be to live in a comfortable snow house, away from buzzing flies and boiling hot sun, and that perpetual sense of work always awaiting them in the woods.
Frost made Kak feel like a war horse. He longed to have the flat ice under his feet again, with two dogs, perhaps three if he was lucky, harnessed to the sleigh, and run—run—run—abandoning himself to that glorious sense of space and motion which was his heritage.
The first person he hunted up at the cape was Kommana.
“Got that pup for me?” he shouted.
“Got that snow shovel?”
“Sure thing!”
Kak proudly produced their wonderful slab of spruce, and when everybody about had admired and praised it he was offered his choice of the six-months-old dogs.
The boys’ fathers were party to this trade, for a single piece of wood the width of the one they had brought was considered very valuable—worth almost as much as Taptuna’s new sled.