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Updated: June 2, 2025
We had to climb up the shoulder of the hill, now among tremendous rocks, now through water unfrozen, now upon wind-swept ice, but the snow the snow the heartless snow was our constant companion. It stood in walls before, it lay in ramparts round us, it wearied the eye to a most numbing pain.
Now that our troubles are over, and I sit by the mast of our late unhappy ship, not knowing if I am on earth or in paradise, but full-fed and warm in all my limbs, yea pierced and glowing with the love of Almighty God, I am resolved to take pen and use my unfrozen ink in telling out of what misery His hand hath led us to this present Eden.
The lake was still unfrozen, and its waters, which were of an azure blue, contrasted with the whole of the country covered with snow, and the spruce firs with their branches loaded presented an alternate layer of pure white and of the darkest green. Birds there were none to be seen or heard.
Rare white flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the north-eastward, the glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky and I could see an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice along the sea margin, with drifting masses further out; but the main expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was still unfrozen.
In this miserable condition the party reached, on September 26, the Coppermine river, to find it flowing still unfrozen in an angry flood which they could not cross. In vain they ranged the banks above and below. Below them was a great lake; beside and above them a swift, deep current broken by rapids. There was no crossing. They tried to gather willow faggots, and bind them into a raft.
There were only two things to be feared; one lest the rolls of snow above should fall in and bury us; the other lest we should rush too fast, and so be carried headlong into the black whirlpool at the bottom, the middle of which was still unfrozen, and looking more horrible by the contrast.
"That's the way I hears the Indians say 'tis," said Toby, "and that's the way 'tis with me. I wants to eat, but I'm not hankerin' after un the way I was first." Another morning brought a calm, though still unfrozen, sea. The boys were early by the shore to scan eagerly the waters. "She's smokin'!" exclaimed Toby. "She's smokin'! 'Tis a sure sign!" "What do you mean?" asked Charley excitedly.
We shall have to be content with a few scraps of German colony and the heavy-weight championship. But Russia? When will she say "Hold! Enough!" Suppose she wants not only Poland, but Baltic Prussia? Suppose she wants Constantinople as her port of access to the unfrozen seas, in addition to the dismemberment of Austria?
The water was, however, falling, and it became necessary to cut out the sneak-box, and slide her over the ice into the unfrozen Ohio. My host had become alarmed, and kept an anxious eye upon the boat. "De peoples knows de poat is here, and some of dem hab told others about it. If you don't hide her down de rivver to-night, she will be stolen by de rivver thieves."
But, this morning, the cheerful sunbeams, or the mere taste of his grandson's cordial that he had taken at bedtime, or the fitful vigor that often sports irreverently with aged people, had caused an unfrozen drop of youthfulness, somewhere within him, to expand. "Hem! ahem!" quoth the Doctor, hoping with one effort to clear his throat of the dregs of a ten years' cough.
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