Cries of encouragement sounded ahead once more. Those in the front of flight had seen a gully in the bluffs through which they might escape. Harry saw them turn toward this, and he stumbled and gasped along under his burden with renewed hope. Dogs and men foremost in the race leaped into this gully and scrambled upward. He was near it now, running in a sort of bad dream, with the tremendous crushing roar of the flood seeming to whelm him in its waves of sound. Cannon boomed in this uproar, volleys of musketry pulsed through it, and the steady hoof-beats of the white horse cavalry of the flood rolled deafeningly on. Now he was at the bank, and plunging up it, too weak to do anything more than drop with his burden at the safety line. He was among the last to reach safety, but Joe was behind him. The Indian mother with her babe was at the edge of the ice. Twenty feet behind them were Joe and the older woman and the child. Behind them again, not a dozen rods away, rolled the great white wave in the forefront of the flood. The river ice swelled to meet this wave. It rounded up, bulged, burst, and was tossed in the air in huge cakes, springing a dozen feet upward, engulfed in the white seething wall as they came down. In front of this the grandmother fell, sending the girl rolling ahead of her on the ice. Joe snatched up the child, turned as if to help the woman, and then the ice lifted under him, sending him spinning toward the bank. A moment and the ice burst beneath his feet. A great cake rose and tossed him up, still clinging to the child, and then he was half smothered, bruised, and soaked in a whirl of ice-cold water, and sank and rose on the edge of the flood, washed into the eddy that whirled in the gully, and still he clung half unconsciously to the child. It was the little one’s father that pulled him out, with Harry a good second, yet distanced by paternal love. The flood was roaring through the canyon, breaking its fierce way to the sea, but the careless travelers were safe from its tumult; all but the old grandmother, whose devotion to the child had cost her her life. She had found the death that is so common to the Eskimo and the other folk of the wild north,—to vanish into the white arms of the flood, or go out to sea with the ice. They traveled on by land, over melting snow, and across ravines in which splashed torrents. The Kowak was open to the sea, and summer navigation had begun. CHAPTER XIII THE MEETING OF TRIBES