February was a dreadful month on board the floe. The huts were buried under the snow. It was with difficulty that Joe and Hans, almost the entire dependence of the party, could go abroad for game, and when they did they secured a few seals only, very small, and now and then a dovekie, a wee bit of a pensive sea-bird. Norwhal, the sea unicorn, were shot in several instances, but they sunk in every case and were lost. Hunger and fear seemed to possess the men in the large tent, and Joe and Hannah began to be again terrified by the thought that these hunger-mad men would kill and eat them. Now, will not God appear to help those in so helpless a condition? Yes, his hand has ever been wonderfully apparent in all Arctic perils. On the second of March, just when the dark cloud of these drifting sufferers was never darker, it parted, and a flood of light burst upon their camp. Joe shot an _oogjook_, belonging to the largest species of seal. He was secured and dragged by all hands to the huts. He measured nine feet, weighed about seven hundred pounds, and contained, by estimation, thirty gallons of oil. There was a shout of seal in the camp! The warm blood was relished like new milk, and drank freely. All eat and slept, and woke to eat again, and hunger departed for the time from the miserable huts it had so long haunted. Joe and Hannah dismissed their horrid visions of cannibalism. God was, the helper of these hungry ones, and they _were_ helped. CHAPTER XLV. THE WONDERFUL ESCAPE. OUR voyagers needed all the strength and courage which the timely capture of the great seal had given them. They had drifted into a warmer sea, and windy March was well upon them. Their floe began to herald its fast approaching dissolution. The weary and anxious drifters were startled by day, and awakened suddenly by night, by a rumbling, mingled with fearful grindings and crashes underneath them. Heavy ice-cakes, over-rode by the heavier floe, ground along its under surface, and when finding an opening of thin ice, rushed with a thundering sound to the upper surface. The din was at times so great that it seemed to combine all alarming sounds:-- "Through all its scale the horrid discord ran; Now mocked the beast--now took the groan of man."