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 shore 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 space by
comparison. Should he escape it would be the first time that a man
adrift on the offshore ice had come ashore 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 shore.

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

No boat could c