Not until then did they remember the wolf dogs shut up in what had been their prison. Harluk and the two Eskimo men released them from the igloo, nor did they, at Joe’s orders, attempt to either harm or tie them up. He said that he had no wish for revenge on them, but he did not care to have such animals around, and in this Harry agreed with him. Some time afterward the two Eskimos reported to Joe that the other dogs had also vanished. No doubt they had joined the fugitives, and the dominant wolf blood would again make a wild pack of them. It was really a serious matter, but somehow the boys did not care. They found the presence of an Eskimo dog of any sort very distasteful to them. For some days they waited in the Ankut stronghold, keeping watch lest the enemy return, but seeing no signs of them. Harluk declared that they probably would not. They had received such a trouncing, and the odds were so much against them, that they would no doubt go on either to some other outlaw rendezvous, or else take up peaceful life with some Eskimo community for a while. This is the way of the defeated Ankut. And now, rested and recuperated, the problem of further action came up, and was discussed in a council of the whole. To travel across the fast softening tundra toward Point Hope, without dogs, was a difficult, if not impossible, matter, and they decided not to try it. By this time the ice must be out of the sea, and there was a chance of a ship. Their wisest course would be to proceed again to the coast. This would not be difficult. There were two umiaks at the village. They patched the one riddled by Ankut bullets, and, loading their belongings into the two, the whole community set gayly forth downstream. To the Eskimos who had been held in subjection it was a happy deliverance, and their gentle natures brightened up wonderfully at the thought of escape. They would not allow either the boys or Harluk to do any work. They paddled, prepared meals, made camp, and showed their gratitude in a hundred ways, till they bade fair to spoil their deliverers. CHAPTER XI “THE VILLAGE WHERE NO ONE LIVES” The sudden summer was upon the Arctic, and in the days that followed the boys, in spite of their homesickness and anxiety in regard to the future, reveled in it. The tundra grew green, and seemed almost in a night to be spangled with countless flowers. Once, at camp, Joe wandered back into a grassy meadow, and found Harry there before him. Tears were running down his cheeks, but they were happy tears. “Look, Joe!” he cried. “Come and see our old friend here. Oh, how good it is!” The meadow was blue in patches with myosotis,—forget-me-nots,—and among them a yellow bumble-bee was buzzing and bustling in busy way, just as contentedly fussy and self-important as he would have been among the buttercups two thousand miles south. Down on his knees beside this messenger went Joe, with tears in his own eyes and thoughts of the Nantucket meadows of his childhood.