After the battle with the highbinders, the community at Icy Cape saw no more outsiders, but as day by day the sun rose higher and stayed longer, they began to await impatiently the coming of the spring and to prepare for it. March was a wild, uproarious month, intensely cold for the most part, and with fierce gales blowing. The boys got a bear or two and the Eskimos brought in a good number of smaller pelts, so that the collection of furs grew steadily and bade fair to be of considerable value. Joe used to figure it up every few days, and when it reached the two-thousand-dollar valuation mark he was quite jubilant. [Illustration: LOCKED IN THE ARCTIC ICE] “Now,” he said, “if we can only get a good catch of whalebone while the ice is melting and get the ship out safe, what happy fellows we’ll be!” The Eskimos too began to prepare for whaling after their own fashion, and the second week in April began their ceremony of propitiation. They blackened their faces with soot and streaked them with red. They dressed in their best clothes, with hoods fringed with wolverine fur, giving their faces thus a halo of bristling hair that made them look quite savage and warlike. Then they took bits of blubber carefully saved from the preceding year and cut into little dice-like cubes. These they bore in pompous procession to the grave of Konwa, and placed them thereon with much ceremony, that his spirit might be propitiated. They marched about his grave as they had at the time of the burial, then passed down to the ice and across it to the first open water. Here they strewed the remaining bits of blubber, that the spirits of the ice might be favorable. Nor would they consent that the boys, or modern weapons, should participate in the taking of the first whale. The others might be captured as they pleased, but the first must be taken with all the ceremonies and in the accustomed manner of their forefathers, else would not prosperity come to their whale hunting.