“And oh!” cried Joe. “Here’s another one. See!” This other one was a little brown butterfly that flitted gayly along in the warm breeze. Thus the two worshiped these spirits of sunshine, translated to their desolate northern wilderness for its brief summer festival. The snow-buntings and Arctic sparrows, already happy with nests and eggs, sang rapturously, and the ground squirrels sat at the mouths of their burrows and wrinkled their rat-like noses at the voyagers. It was a happy season, coming so soon after struggle, death, and disaster. The Eskimo boys and girls had lost that look of stolid misery which their life under the rule of the highbinders had given them, and blossomed into joyous, playful children. Even the river seemed to dance and dimple along its shallows.
Perhaps the daintiest spirit, the most chastely exquisite creature of the whole Arctic summer, is the little bird known to the naturalists as the hyperborean snowflake. Verily, a snowflake it is as it flits through the rosy glow of misty mornings over the tundra bog so richly carpeted with purple, yellow, and white. Here, in a fairy garden, grow the purple primrose, the golden cowslip, and the white-cupped dryas, and here flits and sings its dainty song the snowflake bird. Its plumage is as pure as a newly opened lily, the spotless white showing more perfectly by contrast with the jet-black bill and wing tips. At the edge of its snowy tail are two black dots. All else is a fluttering flake of purest snow, and it seemed to the boys as if in it summer had transformed the frost-flakes into a living, breathing spirit of melody.
Thus for many days they glided along the placid shallows of this winding river, content in freedom, sunshine, and bits of summer, that reminded them of home. Yet by and by Harry became uneasy.
“Joe,” he said one day, “it seems to me we have traveled far enough to reach the sea. Where do you suppose this river empties? Its course winds so that it is hard to say just which way it carries us, though, to be sure, the general direction is northerly, but don’t you think it is pretty well to the east of north?”
“That’s what is worrying me,” confessed Joe. “In the nature of things we must come out north of our old camp at Icy Cape, but I had hoped for no great distance north of that. Yet no man knows what river’s headwaters we struck. I hope it is not the Colville. That would land us a couple of hundred miles to the east of Point Barrow, and unless we had phenomenal luck we’d have to winter up here again.”
“I wouldn’t do it,” cried Harry hotly. “I’d sooner turn and tramp south across the tundra. We’d at least be headed toward home, and every mile we made would be sure gain.”
Thus anxiety came to them again, and they began to watch with care the general direction in which they were floating. It proved to be, as near as they could guess, northeast.
“This won’t do,” said Joe, “northeast is the trend of the coast up here; we’re not getting much nearer the sea. However, we’ll hold on a few days longer.”
Neither Harluk nor the other Eskimos could help their knowledge of the river. The Eskimo knows the coast well and the streams for a few miles back of it. Beyond that, except in particular instances, the land is unknown to him. After another week, and just as they were about decided to camp and make a land reconnoissance to the westward, their stream took a turn to the northwest and they paddled on merrily. The course lay through low bluffs that bordered the river on either hand, and in these bluffs, one day, Harry noted strata of dark stone. They landed, out of curiosity, and examined these black veins.