The sun now skimmed the northern horizon without setting, and daylight was once more continuous. Gulls, terns, and ducks in clouds came along the edge of the ice, working northward, and the weather was warm and springlike. To the first gull seen the Eskimos sang a greeting. Just as young people the world over apostrophize the first star they see at night, and wish on it in the more or less firm belief that their wish will be granted, so the Eskimos sang a greeting to this first gull:— “Now yakaro, now yakaro, Too loo kotaro.” “Gull, gull, bring me good luck.” On warm days the snow melted with great rapidity under this continuous sunshine, and the brown tundra soon began to show between the drifts. Yet the ice held firm, except that narrow leads opened here and there, and there was no hope that the ship would be able to get off for more than a month, in fact nearly two, and it would be that time also before any ships could come in from below. In this ice whaling the entire Eskimo community had participated, yet such is the familiarity of the Eskimo with the world of ice that no serious accident had happened to any one of them. It was not that conditions were not often dangerous as well as uncomfortable, but that the native instinct seemed always to find a way out of difficulty. Pickalye’s two daughters, fine, strong young girls, were out on the ice one day many miles from land, with a team of four dogs and a sled, bringing in blubber from a whale that had been killed out there. A sudden violent snowstorm came up, and they were in great danger of being driven out into the pack and frozen to death. They lost the direction and were obliged to abandon the sled, but each girl fastened two of the dogs by their traces to her own girdle and let them go as they pleased. The result was, that the homing instinct of the dogs brought them safe to land, after many hours in the blizzard. They made the traces fast to their girdles that the dogs might not break away and escape in case they fell on the rough ice and were obliged to let go their grip on the lashings. The natives gave Harry the nickname of “the whale walker,” because one day he was on an ice cake near the open lead with a bomb gun, watching out for a whale that had been seen heading up the lead. The whale came up just beside him, and before he could fire, rolled against the cake and capsized it. Harry sprang for the only available dry spot, the whale’s back near his tail, and running hastily from that dangerous weapon up along the black length, sprang from his head to another cake of ice, reaching it before the lazy leviathan had made up his mind that anything out of the common was happening. Then he turned and discharged the gun into the whale’s neck, breaking it at one shot. This whale was a particularly large one, with a tremendous spread of flukes, and Pickalye was so impressed with this that he ran toward the other villagers shouting,—