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t me of sporting on the ice. There was head-money offered for all bears, foxes, seals, musk-oxen, and such like that were shot and gathered. So I went to the skipper, and he gave me a Henry rifle, well rusted, and eight cartridges. "Show me you can use those, McTodd," says he, "and I'll give you more." I made a big mistake with that rusty old gun. I may be a sportsman, but before that I'm an engineer, and it seemed to me that Heaven sent metal into this world to be kept bright and clean. So I took the rifle all to pieces and made the parts as smooth and sweet as you'd see in a gun-maker's shop, barring rust-pits, and gave them a nice daubing of oil against the Arctic weather. Then I put on some thick clothes I had made, and all the other clothes I could get loaned me, and climbed out over the rail on to the [v]floe. The _Gleaner_ lay in a bay some two miles from the shore, and let me tell you, if you do not know it, that Arctic ice is no skating-rink. There are great hills, and knolls, and bergs, and valleys spread all over, and even where it's about level, the underfoot is as hard going as a newly-metalled road before the steam-roller has passed over it. The air was clear enough when I left the bark, and though the [v]mercury was out of use and coiled up snugly in the bulb, it wasn't as cold as you might think, for just then there was no wind. It's a breeze up in the Arctic that makes you feel the chill. There was no sun, of course; there never is sun up there in that dreary winter: but the stars were burning blue and clear, and every now and then a big [v]catherine wheel of [v]aurora would show off, for all the world like a firework exhibition. My! but it was lonely, though, once you had left the ship behind! There was just the scrunching of your feet on the frost [v]rime, and not another sound in the world. Even the ice was frozen too hard to squeak. And overhead in that purple-black Heaven you never knew Who was looking down at you. Out there in that cold, bare, black, icy silence, I had occasion to remember that Neil Angus McTodd had been a sinner in his time, and it made me shiver when I glanced up toward those blue, cold stars and the deep purple darkness that lay between and behind them. It may be that I was thinking less of my hunting than was advisable, for of a sudden I woke up to the sound of heavy feet padding over the crisp frost rime. I turned me round sharply enough, but as far as the dim lig
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