Born of generations inured to famine, no one recovers from it more quickly than the Eskimo, and within half an hour he was able to walk about and take a hand, in a feeble way, in patching up the injured dingey. They found that he was a Point Hope man by birth, and had learned a little English at the mission there. He had come north with some of his tribe a summer or two before, and finding a place to his liking near Point Lay, had settled there with them. He had been out after seal among the floes and lost his kayak, and had drifted on the cake for nine days. A day or so before, he had given himself up for lost, and calmly covered his head with his skin coat, waiting for death, as an Eskimo will. He had taken the boys at first for the ghosts of the ice world, come for him, and had gone to sleep at sight of them. Now he knew them to be men, his friends, and some day he would save their lives as they had his. All this he explained, bit by bit, partly in brief English, partly in Eskimo which they understood, as the boat was being patched with a bit of canvas tacked over the break in the planking. They had no tacks, but Harry had a many-bladed knife with an awl in it, and they made holes with this and used pegs whittled from a thwart. These they made a trifle long for the awl-holes, and hammered the protruding ends to a fuzzy head. It was not a good job, but it would do. Harry was eager to start back for the ship at once, but Joe, wiser in the ways of the Arctic, wanted to wait. He knew that in that driving snow it would be almost impossible to reach her unless constantly guided by sound. Without that they might row within a dozen yards of her and not see her. More than one whaleman has lost his ship while wintering in the Arctic, and died in the storm within a few rods of her, never knowing that he was so near safety. So Joe, backed by the Eskimo, judged that they would better wait until they were sure in what direction to go. As a matter of fact, the ship, floe-bound near the shore, had drifted but slowly in the southerly wind, while the cake on which they were had gone northward quite rapidly. Hence when the shots and whistle sounded they heard them only faintly, and could not tell, in the drive of the storm, from what direction they came.