“No,” agreed Mar. “The white man decided it must be some driftwood contrivance of the natives. Only the remarkable thing about it was, that he hadn’t noticed it before. For a thing like that is apt to strike you in a country where there wasn’t a tree for a hundred and fifty miles to the south’ard, and not one between you and the Pole. Well, he felt he’d know more about those sticks, and he’d know more about a lot besides, when he’d got to the top of the hill. So they went on; but the hill was a good way off. The ‘little white patches’ turned out to be vast fields of rotten snow. You went in up to your waist. The native jabbered, and seemed to be pointing out that it was better to go the long way round. There was less snow, and there didn’t seem to be such a chaos of talus—broken rock, you know—tumbled down from the peak. And the peak wasn’t a peak. It was more like a queer-shaped, flat stone set on a rock pedestal. ‘It’s all right,’ the man kept saying to himself, as they pushed on, ‘I shall feel it was worth it, once I’m on the top.’ And they went on and on. All of a sudden the man looked up, and realized that the feeling that had been haunting him was justified. The rock up there was like a giant anvil. So like, it was almost uncanny to think nature could have carved a stone with such whimsical exactness. ‘Just wait till I get up there,’ he said again, half-laughing to himself; ‘see if I don’t hammer out _something_!’ and he forgot his wound and how it hurt him to walk, and he jumped across a water hole to a higher knoll and saw that the ground on the other side fell gently down to a shallow valley. And the valley held a little stream in its lap. The white man realized when he saw that, how thirsty he was. He hadn’t dared to drink out of the standing pools on the tundra, and he went as fast as he could away from the anvil, and down the slope to the running water. He saw a dash of something white on the edge of the bank, as he hurried down to the creek, and he knew in the back of his head that it was a little heap of weather-bleached bones that shone so, off there in the grass. But he never stopped till he stood by the bed of the stream. He took up the water in his double hands and drank. It was good water, and he’d never been so thirsty before in his life. But the water spilled away through his fingers, and he felt he should never get enough. So he balanced himself over some stones, and he lay on his stomach, and reached his lips to the clear water. He drank and drank, with his half-shut eyes fixed on a spark of mica, that caught the light and was shining like a diamond under the water. No, it wasn’t mica. He saw plainer now. He leaned over a little further, and picked the bit of pyrites out of the wet gravel. The Esquimau boy saw the white man stand up as suddenly as if he’d been stung. But he held on to the thing he had taken into his palm, and he lifted his hand, like this, several times, and he turned the thing over