The dogs, still in harness, lay down where they stood, and in a little while the snow, which found lodgment against the komatik, covered men and dogs alike in one big drift and the weary travellers slept warm and well regardless of the fact that at any moment the ice might part and they be swallowed up by the sea.

The storm was one of those sudden outbursts of anger that winter in his waning power inflicts upon the world in protest against the coming spring supplanting him, and as a reminder that he still lives and carries with him his withering rod of chastisement and breath of destruction.  But he was now so old and feeble that in a single night his strength was spent, and when morning dawned the sun arose with a new warmth and the wind had ceased to blow.

The men beneath the snow did not move.  It was quite useless for them to get up.  There was nothing that they could do, and they might as well be sleeping as wandering aimlessly about the ice field.

The dogs, however, thought differently.  They had not been fed the previous night, and bright and early they were up, nosing about within the limited area afforded them by the length of their traces.  One of them began to dig away the snow around the komatik.  He paused, held his nose into the drift a moment and sniffed, then went vigorously to work again with his paws.  Soon he grabbed something in his fangs.  The others joined him, and the snarling and fighting that ensued aroused Bob and the sleeping Eskimos.

Aluktook was the first to throw off the snow and look out to see what the trouble was about Then he shouted and jumped to his feet, kicking the dogs with all his power.  Bob and Netseksoak sprang to his aid, but they were too late.

The dogs had devoured every scrap of food they had, save some tea that Bob kept in a small bag in which he carried his few articles of dunnage.

This was a terrible condition of affairs, for though they were doubtless doomed to drown with the first wind strong enough to shatter the ice, still the love of living was strong within them, and they must eat to live.

Separating and going in different directions, the three hunted about in the vain hope that somewhere on the ice there might be seals that they could kill, but nowhere was there to be seen a living thing—­nothing but one vast field of ice reaching to the horizon on the north, east and south.  To the west the water sparkled in the sunlight, but no land and no life, human or otherwise, was within the range of vision.

After a time they returned to their bivouac and then drove the dogs a little farther into the ice pack to a high hummock that Aluktook had found, and with an axe and snow knives cut blocks of ice from the hummock and snow from a drift on its lee side, and finally had a fairly substantial igloo built.  This they made as comfortable as possible, and settled in it as the last shelter they should ever have in the world, as they all firmly believed it would prove.