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His long, soft-feathered wings moved lightly as a ghost, and almost touched the ice-cakes now and then as his round, yellow eyes, savagely hard and brilliant, searched the dark crevices for prey.

Billy's voice answered; and the fires were left behind, and Smoke was again flying through the wall of blackness. In the jams of that relay, where the way led across a chaos of up-ended ice-cakes, and where Smoke slipped off the forward end of the sled and with a haul-rope toiled behind the wheel-dog, he passed three sleds.

But Nan drew him quickly through the shattered ice-cakes to the edge of the firm crystal where she knelt. "We have him! We have him!" she cried, in triumph. "Give me your hand, boy! I won't let you go down again." But to lift him entirely out of the water would have been too much for her strength. However, several men came running now from the stalled passenger train.

It was terrible that they, as yet, saw no land. How would it go with them if they were forced to stay out on the sea all night? They would either be crushed between the ice-cakes or devoured by seals or separated by the storm. The heavens were cloud-bedecked, the moon hid itself, and the darkness came quickly.

The air was cold; the sky was filled with hurrying clouds, whose large, white flakes drifted one upon another like the breaking up of river ice after the winter. The crescent of the moon, stranded in the midst of the clouds, seemed a celestial vessel caught in the ice-cakes of the air.

But before that second passed he was in mid-air, his legs spread wide like those of a squirrel, falling to the ice-cakes of the swollen river. From the brink above, the grim eyes of the baffled pack flamed down upon him for an instant, and then withdrew. What was a drowned wolf, when there was a winded buck not far ahead? But the black-shouldered wolf was not drowned.

Next morning Carl and the Turk enrolled in Frazer's optional course in modern poetry, a desultory series of lectures which did not attempt Tennyson and Browning. So Carl discovered Shelley and Keats and Walt Whitman, Swinburne and Rossetti and Morris. He had to read by crawling from word to word as though they were ice-cakes in a cataract of emotion. The allusiveness was agonizing.

"Now see here," he said to me; "I've got a great idea. How's Buddy about water?" "He's partial to it," I admitted, "for drinking, or for lying down and rolling in it, especially when I am on him. Why?" "Well, it's like this," he observed: "I'm set up on the bank of the lake. See? And you ride him into the water and get him to scramble up on one of those ice-cakes. Do you get it?

The ice-cakes ground unpleasantly against each other and had things pretty much their own way. One of them grated rather roughly upon our sides. I do not know there was any danger, but I certainly thought I had seen places of greater safety than that. When we were in the worst part of the stream two of the ferrymen rested their poles and began crossing themselves.

To the south and east, about a quarter of a mile from the tent, the pressure of the floes had thrown up an enormous ridge of shattered ice-cakes, a mound, a long hill of blue-green slabs and blocks huddling together at every conceivable angle. It was nearly twenty feet in height, quite the highest point that Bennett could discover.