STARTING HOME 



complacently puffed at their pipes, that they felt the 

 elation as much as I did myself. 



Our helpers dropped off one by one, and with a 

 last wave of the hand we turned out of the bay and 

 left Hebron hidden behind the rocks. 



For nine hours we jogged on in the usual style of 

 an Eskimo sledge journey : that is to say, the drivers 

 shared the tasks as drivers do, one looking after the 

 dogs while the other guided the sledge, and some- 

 times changing places for a little variety ; the dogs 

 played their usual trick of getting all tangled up, and 

 compelling us to stop every ten miles to disentangle 

 them ; and I trotted and sat still by turns, flicking 

 the long whip-lash to and fro, and listening to the 

 chatter of the men as they talked of the landmarks 

 we were passing. We only saw one sign of life the 

 whole day long, and that was when we met a boy 

 with a sledge and six dogs twenty miles out of 

 Hebron. He was taking home a load of firewood, 

 and had come all that way because there are no trees 

 so far north as Hebron itself. He did not stop, but 

 just wheeled his dogs out of the way so as to keep 

 the two teams from getting tangled, and shouted 

 " Aksunai " as he passed. I suppose he had spent the 

 night in the woods. 



Late in the afternoon we reached the frozen 

 river down which we had come from our crossing 

 of the headland, and the men became eager and 

 excited. In front of us was a smooth sheet of dark 

 grey ice, covering what had been black water when 

 we passed it a couple of days before. We halted 

 at the lumpy joining of new ice and old, and the 

 men went cautiously forward to try it. They walked 

 twenty or thirty yards, and then stopped and 



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