It was four miles, he knew, to a rocky headland over yonder, if he ventured out on that uncertain field of ice. That would save several miles over the more prudent course alongsh.o.r.e.
As far as he could see, the ice looked as though it would hold up the sled. It was rough--but a hardened voyager with a dog-team is accustomed to a hummocky road. It looked as if the sea had torn it up, as men tear up the paving blocks in a city street, and then thrown the bits together to make a hard, cohesive ma.s.s that men and dogs could surely trust. The strong wind seemed to have packed it in and the intense cold of the night, he supposed, had frozen it solid.
The wind died down, and Grenfell found that he was deep in what is known as "sish"--soft ice as mushy as the name sounds. He compares it to oatmeal, and it must have been many feet deep. There was a thin coating of new ice on top of it, through which the whip-handle easily pierced.
The "sish" ice is composed of the small fragments chipped off the floes after the pounding and grinding between the millstones of the great winds and the heavy seas. The changing breeze now blew from offsh.o.r.e, and instead of packing the ice together it was driving it apart. The packed "slob" was "running abroad," as the fisher-folk say.
The ice-pans were so small that there was hardly one as large as a table-top.
By this time the team had come to a halt on one of these tiny pans, and with the other pans floating about as the entire sheet was breaking up the peril was evident. It was not possible to go back--the way was cut off by the widening s.p.a.ces between the pans. Only about a quarter of a mile was left between their pan and the sh.o.r.e.
Grenfell threw off his oilskins, knelt by the side of the komatik, and ordered the dogs to make for the sh.o.r.e.
It takes a great deal to "rattle" a husky. But the dogs, after about twenty yards of half-wading, half-swimming, were thoroughly frightened. They stopped, and the sled sank into the ice. With the sled in the freezing water, it was necessary for the dogs to pull hard, and now they too began to sink.
Not long before, the father of the boy to whom the Doctor was going was drowned by being tangled in the dog"s traces in just such a place as this. To avoid that danger, Grenfell got out his knife, and cut the traces in the water.
But he still kept hold of the leader"s trace, which he wound about his wrist.
In the water there was not a piece of ice to be seen in which dogs or driver could put their trust. The dogs were as eager as their master to find something to cling to. Care-free and jolly as they had been hitherto, they knew as well as he that death by drowning stared their little caravan in the face.
About twenty-five yards away there was a big lump of snow, such as children put up when they mean to make a snow-man. The leading dog, "Brin," as he wallowed about managed to reach it, at the end of his long trace of about sixty feet. "Brin" had black marks on his face, which made it look as though he were laughing all the time, like one who finds this world a grand, good joke. When he clambered out on the hummock he shook his coat and turned round and gazed calmly at his master.
"He seemed to be grinning at me," says the Doctor.
But it was no laughing matter for the other dogs, floundering about.
Grenfell hauled himself along toward "Brin" by means of the trace still attached to his wrist. But suddenly "Brin" stepped out of his harness, and then the Doctor found himself sprawling and struggling in the water, with no means of getting to the place where "Brin" had found temporary safety.
Grenfell thought this time it was all over. He had looked Death in the eyes before, but Death had decided to go by. This time, it did not seem possible to escape. He did not feel any great alarm--in fact, he became drowsy, and thought how easy it would be just to fall asleep and forget everything, as the icy water chilled and numbed his senses.
He was like the weary traveler who drops into the snow-bank, on whom the torpor steals by slow degrees.
Suddenly Grenfell caught sight of a big dog that had gone through the ice and was pulling the trace after him, in a desperate effort to reach the hummock on which "Brin" was sitting. Grenfell grabbed the trace, and hauled himself along after the animal. He calls this "using the dog as a bow anchor."
But the other dogs were following this poor beast"s example, and they crowded and jostled the Doctor so that it was hard for him to hold on.
One of them, in fact, got on his shoulder, very much as a drowning man in his desperation will throw his arms round the neck of someone who tries to rescue him, and drag him under. This pushed Grenfell still deeper into the ice, and it was a question whether his energy would hold out in that frigid water.
As they say on the football field, he now had only three yards to gain, and by a mighty effort he drew himself past his living anchor and climbed up on the piece of slob ice. He rested a moment to draw breath, and then began to haul his beloved dogs one after another up to a place beside him. They swam and panted through the lane in the ice that he had broken, and seemed to understand perfectly that their master was trying to save them, even though they had lost their heads and had almost drowned him.
It would not do for them all to remain on that small, treacherous lump of ice. It might break in two at any moment with the combined weight of dogs and driver. It was slowly drifting with the tidal current out to the open sea, where all hope would be lost. Grenfell knew that if he were to save his team and himself--they were always first in his thoughts--he must act instantly.
He stood up to survey the scene. About twenty yards away there was a good-sized pan floating about in the "sish" like a raft, such as that on which Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer floated down the Mississippi. To reach that raft would at any rate be to postpone death for a little while. But it was taking too much of a risk, to try to get from the little cake to the big one without a life line. How was he to make such a line, and then how was he to get it across the wide s.p.a.ce between?
Fortunately when the Doctor cut the dogs away from the sled he had not lost his knife: he had tied it to the back of one of the dogs. There it was still. It was the work of a joyful moment to untie it, and he fell to work cutting from the dogs" harness the sealskin traces that remained and stringing those together to make two long lines. His overalls, coat, hat and gloves were gone, but he still had his sealskin hip-boots. He took these off, shook them free from ice and water, and tied them on the backs of "Brin" and another dog. Then he fastened the lines to the two animals, tying the near ends round his wrists.
"Hist!" he shouted--the signal to go on: but the dogs refused to budge. They were setting their own wits against their master"s. Such dogs believe they know their business. They saw no proper place to go to. Why should they dash into the icy water for the sake of reaching another pan not much bigger than their own? If it were land--that would be another story. So they must have reasoned, in their doggish fashion. They had been devoted and obedient--but there were limits even to their faith.
Grenfell three times threw the dogs off the Pan. Each time they struggled back upon it: and their master could not blame them.
"This is really the end!" Grenfell told himself. "We never shall get out of this!"
Just as a boy sometimes comes up to the scratch where a man has failed, a small dog may play the hero when a big one quits. That was the case here. The smallest dog of the lot, "Jack," came to the rescue. He was so small that he was not taken very seriously for his hauling power--but when it came to hunting, he was there with all four paws, and he was used as retriever when Dr. Grenfell went out with a gun. Here was a chance for him to show the stuff that was in his black, rough hide.
"Jack!" said the Doctor. "Hist! Hist!" And he pointed to the other pan, and threw a piece of ice in that direction.
"Jack" understood and instantly obeyed. In little more time than it takes to tell of it, his furry paws had taken his small body through and over the rotten mush. Since he was the lightest of the lot, he scarcely sank below the surface as he went. "His frame was little but his soul was large."
When he got there he turned about, wagging his tail as a flag-signal, his tongue lolling out, his whole att.i.tude seeming to say, "Well, aren"t you pleased with me?"
"Lie down!" shouted Grenfell, and the dog at once obeyed--"a little black fuzz ball on the white setting."
That was an object lesson to "Brin" and the other dog. The next time he threw them off they made directly for the other pan. It was a hard fight to get there, but they must have said to themselves: "What dog has done, dog can do. If that little fellow can turn the trick, so can we." So they plashed and floundered through, their heads barely above the waves, and the salt spray in their eyes, till they had carried the lines across. The traces had been knotted securely under their bellies, so they could not come off when the Doctor pulled with the weight of his body against the lines.
He took as much of a run as he could get in the few feet from side to side of the pan, and dived headlong into the "slob." It was a long, hard pull, but the lines held, and the dogs too, so that presently he found himself scrambling up beside them on the other pan where they were waiting with little "Jack."
To his crushing disappointment, Dr. Grenfell found that the place where he now clung was if anything worse than the spot he had left. By this time all the other dogs but one poor fellow had made the distance, and were beside him, their eyes asking the piteous questions their tongues could not utter.
"What does this mean, master? What are you going to do with us now?
Which is the way home? Why don"t we start? How soon are we going to have our suppers?"
The pan was sinking: it could not hold them all. They must get off it at the earliest possible moment. This pan was nearer the sh.o.r.e than the one they had left, but all the time an offsh.o.r.e wind was shoving the entire ice-pack steadily out toward the open sea, so that, like the frog in the well, for every foot they gained they were losing two or three. All this time, Grenfell was longing for a chance to swim ash.o.r.e--and the dogs would have followed him in that. Grenfell doesn"t in the least mind a bath in icy waters. I remember one nipping day on the _Strathcona_ I came out on deck to find that he had just been taking his bath in the open by emptying the bucket over himself in the biting wind. "You could have had one too," he said, "but I"ve just lost the bucket overboard." I wonder that he didn"t dive for it, as he dived for the cricket-ball on that earlier occasion.
It was impossible to swim ash.o.r.e from the pan--because there was that slushy "sish" filling all the gaps. The tiny table-top on which they were now crowded together measured about ten by twelve feet. It was not even solid ice--it was more like a great s...o...b..ll loosely packed by the cold wind--and at any moment under the extra strain of the weight of men and dogs it might break up and let them all down into a watery grave. As the wind became more brisk and the sea grew rougher, the pan rocked about and bent and swayed, and the risk of its parting in the middle increased.
The pan headed toward a rocky point, where heavy surf was breaking: and a hope sprang up in Grenfell"s heart that he might get near enough to swim ash.o.r.e after all. But then the worst possible thing happened, short of an utter break-up. The pan hit a rock, and a large piece of it broke off. Then the rest of it swung round and the wind took hold of it, like a fiend alive, and started to push it steadily out to sea again.
The sea has been compared to a cat, which in calm weather purrs at your feet and in a storm will reveal its true nature and crack your bones and eat you. Now it was cruelly teasing Grenfell and his four-footed comrades as a cat tortures a mouse before it kills. The last hope seemed to have gone--unless someone by a miracle should pa.s.s along the sh.o.r.e and spy that tiny object on the horizon, and summon others to help him launch a boat to the rescue.
But no one lives on the sh.o.r.e of that huge bay. The other sled by now was so far ahead that it would be a long time before those with it could come back to make a search, even after they felt sufficiently alarmed to do so.
Cold and keen and marrow-searching, the brutal west wind--the worst of all in the spring of the year--moaned and whistled over the ice to the benumbed Doctor, and an additional exasperation was the fact that the komatik, from which he had been compelled to cut the dogs loose, had bobbed up to the surface again, and could now be seen not fifty yards away, but just as un-get-atable as if it were a mile off. There it stood to tantalize him, in the slush, and he knew that it had aboard everything he now wanted so acutely. There were dry clothes, wood and matches to make a signal fire, food and even a thermos bottle with hot tea!
The slender hope of being seen from the sh.o.r.e diminished as Grenfell thought of how inconspicuous he was, nearly naked, his dogs about him.
Crusoe alone on his isle of solid ground was a king of s.p.a.ce by comparison. Should he escape it would be the first time that a man adrift on the offsh.o.r.e ice had come ash.o.r.e to tell the tale. Nearly anybody gazing seaward--even if anybody saw--would say: "Oh, that"s just a piece of kelp or a bush!" The wiseacres refuse to be fooled by such sights. They are like the Arabs of the desert, who refuse to get excited over a mirage.
That he might not freeze to death before he drowned, Grenfell cut off those long top boots down to their moccasin feet, split the legs, and managed to tie them together into a makeshift for a jacket which at least protected his back from the fiercest biting of the wind.
Presently as Grenfell watched the widening interval between himself and the island he had left so comfortably a few hours before, he saw the komatik with its load up-end and vanish through the ice, as though it grew tired of waiting for him to make a try for it. The disappearance was one more sign of the general break-up of the ice on all sides of him, as his frail ice-pan neared the wide-open mouth of the bay. The white plain over which he had trudged from the island with the dogs had almost disappeared. The island was evidently surrounded on all sides by water and "sish," so that even if he could get back to it he would be cut off from the sh.o.r.e.
There were eight dogs on the pan. Slowly, slowly he was making up his mind to the hardest of all decisions. It was a choice between his own life and the lives of some of the animals he loved so well.
X
A FIGHT WITH THE SEA