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Nazinred seated himself on one. Cheenbuk and the others jumped in, the whips cracked, and away they went amid the shouting of the drivers and the yells of children and women left behind. It did not take long to find one of those giants of the frozen seas. Some miles out on the ice they came to a place which the walruses had kept open as a breathing-hole.
Now, as his lungs were puffing like a blacksmith's bellows, his mouth flew open the moment the other breathing-hole was stopped, and Hawes got his bleeding hand away. He held it with the other and shook it, and moaned dismally, like a great girl; but suddenly looking up he saw a half grin upon the faces of his myrmidons.
Who has not, at some time or other in his life, watched the comings and goings of an ant, slipped straws into a yellow slug's one breathing-hole, studied the vagaries of a slender dragon-fly, pondered admiringly over the countless veins in an oak-leaf, that bring the colors of a rose window in some Gothic cathedral into contrast with the reddish background?
If it were entirely free, this opening would be dangerous: some plunderer might take advantage of it to enter the casket. The mother foresees the risk. She blocks the breathing-hole with a plug made of the ravelled vegetable fibres of the Cow-dung, a stopper which is eminently permeable.
After a short run the parties separated and went in different directions. Cheenbuk and his men drove in a southerly direction. Soon they came to a place which had been kept open by walruses as a breathing-hole. Here they got out, hid the sledge and dogs behind a hummock, and, getting ready their spears and harpoons, prepared for an encounter.
You hear the airs of opera sung as commonly upon the streets in Venice as our own colored melodies at home; and the street-boy when he sings has an inborn sense of music and a power of execution which put to shame the cultivated tenuity of sound that issues from the northern mouth "That frozen, passive, palsied breathing-hole."
And it's well this cord of Uncle Zack's was rotten, or the sail would have been too much for my pull. One of the ropes stretching the lower side of the blanket had snapped under the sudden pressure of Sam Holt's vigorous jerk round, and thereby lessened the forward force. They made a long circuit of the deadly breathing-hole, and then ran for the nearest shore on the farthest side.
Leaving the young men to skin and cut up the meat, Cheenbuk went on, with only Anteek to keep him company, in search of another breathing-hole. "You must harpoon the next one all alone, and kill him without help," said Cheenbuk to his companion soon after they had started.
As soon as the dog had scented a breathing-hole, Kotuko would reverse the sleigh, driving a couple of sawed-off antlers, that stuck up like perambulator-handles from the back-rest, deep into the snow, so that the team could not get away. Then he would crawl forward inch by inch, and wait till the seal came up to breathe.
Kotuko went out, day after day, with a light hunting-sleigh and six or seven of the strongest dogs, looking till his eyes ached for some patch of clear ice where a seal might perhaps have scratched a breathing-hole.
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