lump
of willows by the glistening ice of a stream, now beneath some shelving
rock, and now in the open, wind-swept tundra; eating about an open
fire, while the smoke curled from the top of the dome of the tepee-like
igloo, they reveled in the strange wildness of it all. Here was a
people who paid no rent, no taxes, owned no land yet lived always in
abundance. In the box beside the sleeping platform were tea and sugar.
Over the fire hung a copper teakettle of ancient design. In the
sleeping-box, which was made of long-haired deerskins, were many robes
of short-haired deerskin, fawn-skin and Siberian squirrel.

To all these the two girls were more than welcome. Their guide and his
daughter did not live alone. A little tribe whose twenty igloos dotted
the tundra traveled with him. These people were sometimes in need of
simple remedies. For these they were singularly grateful. They, their
women and their children, posed untiringly for sketches. But one thing
Marian had not taken into consideration; these people seldom visited
the village of East Cape. Although she did not know it, their herds
were at this time feeding away from this trading metropolis of the
Straits region. Each day while she seized every opportunity to sketch
and hastened her work as much as she could, found them some ten miles
farther from East Cape.

When at last, by signs and such native words as she knew, she indicated
to her native friends that she was ready to return to East Cape, they
stared at her in astonishment and indicated by a diagram on the snow
that they were now at a point three days' journey from that town and
that none of them expected to return before the moon was again full.

No amount of gesturing and jabbering could make them understand that it
was necessary for the girls to return at once.

"We'll never get back," Marian mourned in despair, "and it's all my
fault."

"Oh, we'll make it still," encouraged Lucile, cheerfully. "Probably
the Straits are not fully frozen over yet anyway."

However, after a week of inaction, even Lucile lost her cheerful smile.

One morning, after they had reached what appeared to be the final
depths of despair, they heard a cry of, "Tomai! Tomai! Tomai," rise
in a chorus from among the tents. By this they knew that visitors had
arrived. They hurried out to find the villagers grouped about three
fur-clad figures standing beside three reindeer hitched to sleds of a
strange design.