<h2 id="c23"><span class="small">CHAPTER XXIII</span> <br/>“A BEAR! A BEAR!”</h2>
<p>In the meantime Joe Marion and Jennings
were making their way over the treacherous
ice floe toward the party of explorers who were
battling for their lives against cold, hunger and
ever perilous floes.</p>
<p>They had crossed a broad expanse of ice
which, level as a floor, lay between the shore
and a series of low, barren, sandy islands. Then
for three miles farther they had traveled over
ice which was frozen to the shore. This ice,
piled as it had been by storms of early winter
into fantastic heaps, here and there mixed with
flat cakes and with narrow, tombstone-like fragments
set on end, was nevertheless firmly united
to the shore. Over this, winding back and forth
on flat cakes and over tumbled piles of ice, they
traveled without fear.</p>
<div class="pagenum" id="Page_187">[187]</div>
<p>When they came to what lay beyond this,
all was changed. They entered upon a new life
with fear and trembling. True, the ice, pressed
hard on shore by a north wind, was not at this
moment moving, yet the slow rising and falling
of a broad cake of ice here, the crumbling of a
pile there, told them that they were now far
out over the fathomless ocean; told them too
that should the wind shift to south, east or west
they might at any moment be carried out to
sea, never to be heard of again.</p>
<p>“Can’t be helped,” Jennings said grimly, as
Joe spoke of this. “When the lives of thirty
of Uncle Sam’s brave citizens are at stake one
does not think of personal danger. He goes
straight ahead and does his duty. Our duty
lies out there.” He pointed straight over the
ice floes which lay far as eye could scan, out
to sea.</p>
<p>“Right-o,” said Joe as he turned to urge his
dogs forward.</p>
<p>It was hard on Joe, this urging of his faithful
four forward over the difficult trail.</p>
<div class="pagenum" id="Page_188">[188]</div>
<p>“’Twouldn’t be so bad,” he told them, “if I
wasn’t driving you straight on to your own
destruction. To think that after all this struggle
your reward is being eaten by some starving explorers.
That’s what breaks my heart.”</p>
<p>“Ho, well,” he sighed as he climbed a tumbled
pile of ice fragments, “there may be a way
out yet.”</p>
<p>Night came on, and still by the light of the
moon they fought their way forward. Every
moment counted. Their own lives as well as
the lives of those they sought to rescue were at
stake.</p>
<p>Only when the dogs, completely exhausted,
lay down in the traces and howled piteously,
begging for rest and food, did they pause and
seek a camping place for the night.</p>
<p>A broad cake of ice some hundred yards wide
from edge to edge was chosen. In the center
of this they pitched their tent. No Arctic
feathers for them that night, only the hard surface
of the ice. But even such a bed as this
was welcome after a day of heroic toil.</p>
<div class="pagenum" id="Page_189">[189]</div>
<p>When the dogs had been fed and they had
eaten their own supper they set up the radiophone,
and braving the danger of being detected
by the outlaw, sought to get into communication
with the exploring party.</p>
<p>“Got to find out whether we are going right,”
Joe explained.</p>
<p>In a surprisingly short time they received an
answer and were cheered by the news that their
course was correct, and that they were at this
moment not more than seventy-five miles from
the explorers. With good luck, did not the ice
floe begin to shift, they might almost hope to
meet the men they sought at the evening of
the next day and to relieve them of their suffering
from hunger.</p>
<p>After getting in touch with Curlie and rejoicing
over the knowledge that he was alive
and safe, they crept into their sleeping-bags and
speedily drifted away to the land of dreams.</p>
<p>Joe was awakened some time later to hear
old Major sawing at the chain which bound
him to his sled and barking lustily.</p>
<div class="pagenum" id="Page_190">[190]</div>
<p>Before his eyes were fully open he heard a
ripping sound at the flaps of the tent. The next
instant two great round balls of fire appeared
at the gap made in the tent-wall.</p>
<p>“Jennings! Jennings!” he shouted hoarsely.
“A bear! A bear!”</p>
<p>The polar bear, attracted by the sound of
his voice, lunged forward, taking half the tent
with him.</p>
<p>Joe had scarcely time to creep back into the
depths of his sleeping bag when the bear’s
foot came down with a thud exactly where his
head had been a second before.</p>
<p class="center"><span class="gs">* * * * * * * *</span></p>
<p>What Curlie Carson saw as he plunged toward
his reindeer there at the edge of the scrub
forest was a spectacle which might well have
staggered a person much older than himself.</p>
<p>The forest of scrub spruce was on fire. The
fire was traveling toward him, seemed, indeed,
to be all but upon him.</p>
<div class="pagenum" id="Page_191">[191]</div>
<p>There was not a breath of air. The fire
traveled by leaping from tree to tree. The
very heat of it appeared to seize the dwarf
trees and, uprooting them, to hurl them hundreds
of feet in air.</p>
<p>It was such a spectacle as few are called
upon to witness. A red column of flame rose
a sheer hundred feet in air. Dry, rosiny spruce
cones and needles rose like feathers high in
air, to go rocketing away like sparks from a
volcano. The sky, the very snow all about him,
seemed on fire.</p>
<p>“And near! So near!” he muttered through
parched lips as he tore at the thong which
bound his terrified reindeer to the willow bush.</p>
<p>His thought had been to loose the reindeer,
and clinging to the sled, attempt to escape.</p>
<div class="pagenum" id="Page_192">[192]</div>
<p>It was fortunate that the thong resisted his
efforts, for just as he was about to succeed in
loosing it, he caught above the tremendous roar
of the fire a strange crack-cracking. The next
instant he saw a vast herd of wild and half
tame things, all maddened by the fire, bearing
down upon him. There was just time to flash
his knife twice, to cut the thong and the sled
strap, then to leap astride the white reindeer.
Then the surge were upon him. Like a mighty
flood they surrounded him, engulfed him, carried
him forward.</p>
<p>He saw them as in a dream, reindeer by hundred,
caribou by thousands, wolves, a bear, all
struggling in a mad effort to rush down the
narrow valley from the destroying pillar of fire.</p>
<p>He saw a wolf snap at a caribou’s heels. Saw
innumerable hoofs strike the wolf and bear him
down to sure destruction.</p>
<p>“Trampled him to death,” he shivered,
“trampled him as they would me if I fell from
my reindeer.”</p>
<p>He clung to the deer’s neck and to his harness
with the grim grip of death.</p>
<p>“Sled’s gone, radiophone set gone. Everything
gone but life and a reindeer. And thus
far you are lucky.” So his mind seemed to
tell him things as he felt himself floating forward
as if on the backs of the innumerable host.</p>
<div class="pagenum" id="Page_193">[193]</div>
<div style="break-after:column;"></div><br />