“I don’t think you ought to feel that way,” replied Joe. “The tundra and the rivers are frozen, the dogs have come back, and I have a plan. We will not attempt to find a ship. I doubt if one is up as far as this this year. Nor will we try to meet one at Lisburne, the chances are too slim. We will pack up and start straight south. The traveling is good. The north wind will be at our backs, and we are used to the cold. It seems a bold scheme, but it has been done before. Funston made the trip north and back to the relief of shipwrecked whalers in the dead of winter, some years ago. He was no better fitted than we to endure the cold and the hardships. Come into the topek a minute and I’ll show you something.”
In the topek Joe unfolded the chart of northern Alaska, which was among the papers saved from the wreck of the Bowhead. He showed Harry the distance almost due south to the Yukon River, not five hundred miles. There they should strike the well-traveled Yukon winter trail from St. Michael to Dawson City and find civilized men. The very thought of it made them both wild, so weary were they grown of barbarism and the frozen wilderness.
“Strong and well as we are, with a good dog team,” said Joe, “we ought to be good for fifteen miles a day, even in poor traveling. Let us call it a hundred miles a week. It should take us not over five weeks to reach the Yukon. Then with a good trail we can go either to Dawson City or St. Michael. In any case, it means that we get out and get home. It is now September. If we could reach St. Michael before the last of November, we might catch a late steamer for San Francisco or Seattle. At any rate, we would be among white men. It is better than staying on this coast for another winter, which is just what we’ll have to do unless we start.”
It was rather a desperate venture, but neither was willing to live Eskimo fashion on Eskimo food for another eight months of terrible cold. It made their hearts sick to think of it. On the other hand, the thought of heading toward home, with a chance of reaching it, set the blood leaping in their veins again, and they went about preparation with feverish haste. Fortune favored them, as it does the brave. The very next day a school of belated beluga came puffing and plunging alongshore headed south through the mush ice, looking like a foam-crested wave as they rolled along.
The Eskimos seized this opportunity with keen delight, and Harry and Joe joined in the hunting. The beluga is the stupid little white whale of the Arctic, fifteen or twenty feet long and white as milk. The whole community hastened out on the floes and in the umiaks on the seaward side of the school. Here, suddenly, they attacked them with shouting and shooting, with beating of paddles and thrusts of lances. A part of the school got away, but a dozen or more were shot, lanced, or driven ashore, where they stranded in shallow water and were easily killed. It was a feast in store for the natives and provision laid up for the winter, but it meant much more for the boys. The flesh of the beluga is not bad eating for man or beast, and it furnished supplies for themselves and dogs, sufficient to undertake the trip.
They were not long in getting away. The gratitude of the natives still held good, and they could have anything they wished. They took five of the strongest dogs and a good sled. They loaded this with beluga meat, furs, a slab or two of whalebone slipped slyly in, “for a sample,” as Joe said, ammunition, their papers, and the two repeating rifles. They did not ask Harluk to accompany them. Such a trip meant taking him from his wife and children for a long time, and he was perhaps needed for their support. He and his Eskimo friends would work down the coast to Icy Cape and join the little village there.
Good-bys were said with genuine sorrow on both sides, and the boys set their faces to the south, toward new and stranger adventures.
CHAPTER XII
IN THE HEART OF BLIZZARDS
Joe estimated that they made their fifteen miles the first day. The tundra was smooth, and had just snow enough for good traveling. The next, the dogs, unused to their masters, balked, and they hardly did five, to their great vexation. The day after was better, and with patience and firmness they taught the animals that they must obey. Then some rough traveling bothered them. Still they got on, and at the end of the first week they had probably eighty miles to their credit. They were hopeful, and planned to do more the next, but they made Sunday a day of rest.