“Strong and well as we are, with a good dog team,” said Joe, “we ought to be good for fifteen miles a day, even in poor traveling. Let us call it a hundred miles a week. It should take us not over five weeks to reach the Yukon. Then with a good trail we can go either to Dawson City or St. Michael. In any case, it means that we get out and get home. It is now September. If we could reach St. Michael before the last of November, we might catch a late steamer for San Francisco or Seattle. At any rate, we would be among white men. It is better than staying on this coast for another winter, which is just what we’ll have to do unless we start.” It was rather a desperate venture, but neither was willing to live Eskimo fashion on Eskimo food for another eight months of terrible cold. It made their hearts sick to think of it. On the other hand, the thought of heading toward home, with a chance of reaching it, set the blood leaping in their veins again, and they went about preparation with feverish haste. Fortune favored them, as it does the brave. The very next day a school of belated beluga came puffing and plunging alongshore headed south through the mush ice, looking like a foam-crested wave as they rolled along. The Eskimos seized this opportunity with keen delight, and Harry and Joe joined in the hunting. The beluga is the stupid little white whale of the Arctic, fifteen or twenty feet long and white as milk. The whole community hastened out on the floes and in the umiaks on the seaward side of the school. Here, suddenly, they attacked them with shouting and shooting, with beating of paddles and thrusts of lances. A part of the school got away, but a dozen or more were shot, lanced, or driven ashore, where they stranded in shallow water and were easily killed. It was a feast in store for the natives and provision laid up for the winter, but it meant much more for the boys. The flesh of the beluga is not bad eating for man or beast, and it furnished supplies for themselves and dogs, sufficient to undertake the trip. They were not long in getting away. The gratitude of the natives still held good, and they could have anything they wished. They took five of the strongest dogs and a good sled. They loaded this with beluga meat, furs, a slab or two of whalebone slipped slyly in, “for a sample,” as Joe said, ammunition, their papers, and the two repeating rifles. They did not ask Harluk to accompany them. Such a trip meant taking him from his wife and children for a long time, and he was perhaps needed for their support. He and his Eskimo friends would work down the coast to Icy Cape and join the little village there. Good-bys were said with genuine sorrow on both sides, and the boys set their faces to the south, toward new and stranger adventures. CHAPTER XII IN THE HEART OF BLIZZARDS