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Updated: May 2, 2025
M. Radisson did not hear or did not heed. An ice-pan pitched against La Chesnaye's place, and the merchant must needs thrust out to save himself. The only light was the white glare of ice.
A brown seal was the cause of his excitement now. The seal, lying asleep upon the ice-pan before him, must weigh something like seventy pounds. This was meat enough to last him and his dog many days. He was not a good shot and knew it. He had wandered over the ice-floes of the ocean at times with a rifle under his arm, yet never before had he stalked a seal.
Jumping from the side of the ship as she goes along, skurrying and leaping from ice-pan to ice-pan, and then having killed, "sculped," and "pelted" the seal, the exciting return to the vessel! But it has its tragic side, for it takes its regular tribute of fine human life. A Mr.
Boats were immediately lowered and nineteen persons, including two women and one baby, born on the ice-pan, came aboard amidst cheers renewed again and again. They had to be washed and fed, cleaned and clothed.
Five dogs, myself in colored football costume, and a bloody dogskin cloak, with a gay flannel shirt on a pole of frozen dogs' legs, completed the picture. The sun was almost hot by now, and I was conscious of a surplus of heat in my skin coat. I began to look longingly at one of my remaining dogs, for an appetite will rise even on an ice-pan, and that made me think of fire.
A strange, wild, weird sound came to them across the floe, a grinding, rushing, creaking, moaning sound that increased in volume as the voice of a cyclone increases. Only a second elapsed before they knew. Then with a cry of terror Marian dragged her companion to the center of the ice-pan and pulled her flat to its surface.
"The ice must be piling close to shore," said Lucile, "but we must try it. It's our only chance." After a hasty breakfast of tea and a last remaining bit of cold duck, they piled all their supplies and equipment into the kiak, then, bidding farewell to the humble ice-pan which had given them such a long ride, they began dragging the kiak toward the island.
Each time I sat down to rest, my big dog "Doc" came and kissed my face and then walked to the edge of the ice-pan, returning again to where I was huddled up, as if to say, "Why don't you come along? Surely it is time to start." The other dogs also were now moving about very restlessly, occasionally trying to satisfy their hunger by gnawing at the dead bodies of their brothers.
Racing across a broad ice-pan, now skirting a dark pool, now clambering over a pile of ice ground fine, they made their way slowly but surely toward their goal. "Listen!" exclaimed Marian, stopping dead in her tracks. "What is it?" asked Lucile, her voice quivering with alarm.
They were now ten feet in air; the shelf, a yawning distance still before them, appeared to frown down upon them. To the right of them an ice-pan half the size of the one on which they rode, having come within some ten feet of the wall, broke and crumpled down with a crash. Still their cake glided on. Now they were fifteen feet from the shelf, now ten.
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