"I doubt it," answered Rob. "If he wanted to leave here he could take the bidarka almost any night and escape, but I believe he is afraid to leave the bay lest he may be found by some of these villagers whom he has offended. I don't think Skookie would go anywhere with him. As it is, one is a foil to the other here with us, but each is afraid of the other _away_ from us!" "But don't you suppose that Skookie's people will come back after him sometime?" "True enough, they may; but who can tell the Aleut mind? I don't pretend to. Of course, by the late fall, say November, when the snows come and the fur is good, I don't doubt these people will come back here to trap foxes, for that is evidently a regular business here; but that would mean that we would have to winter either with them or by ourselves; and I want to tell you that wintering here alone is an entirely different proposition from summering here, now when the salmon are running and we can go out almost any day and get codfish, not to mention ducks and geese. Besides, our people would be driven frantic by that time. On the other hand, if we were lucky enough to make it to Kadiak we would get there in time to find your uncle Dick, or at least to get a boat home to Valdez sometime within a month after we got to Kadiak. Of course, we don't know anything about the country between here and there. The whole coast may be a rock wall, for all we know." "The steamers have government charts to tell them where to go," mused John; "but we haven't any chart, and we don't even know in what direction of the compass we ought to sail, even if we had a compass." "Before ships could have charts," said Rob, "it was necessary for some one to discover things all over the world. I suppose that's the class we're in now--we're the first navigators, so far as help from any one else is concerned. In Alaska a fellow has to take care of himself, and he has to learn to take his medicine. Now none of us is a milksop or a mollycoddle." "That's the talk!" said John. "For my part, if Jesse agrees, we'll try the journey back in the dory. But if we're going to undertake it we ought to begin now to lay in plenty of supplies." "I have been thinking of that," said Rob, "and so I move we begin now to get together our provisions."