CHAPTER XX
"YOU MEAN TO DO IT?"
Across the bare rock of Herschel Island in the Arctic Ocean the wind from the Pole blew a gale. For to the whalers, Herschel was known familiarly as "the blow-hole," and through all the storm-bitten twelve miles of it neither tree nor shrub dared raise its head, though the long grasses waved over it in the summer and the wildflowers bloomed.
In the little settlement of white men and Esquimaux which crouched on the sand-pit round Pauline Cove every door was barred and every window made taut against the blast roaring down over the shoulder of the low hill behind. Out in the land-locked bay—the safest harbour all along the Coast—the riding-lights of four of the whaling-fleet swayed and shuddered, driven hard against their moorings, and three short miles away the black humps of the mainland mountains showed fitfully as the Northern Lights flickered up and fell back.
The low, strong log-and-skin huts of the Kogmollock tribe of Esquimaux on the island were dark blots only, like tortoises asleep. The store-houses of the whaling-companies were dark, and in the half-dozen log huts used by occasional officers of the whaling ships when they chose to live ashore, no life showed. Except for the riding-lights in the Bay and the glow from the windows of the Royal North-West Mounted Police Barracks, Herschel Island might well have been a dead thing, accursed and lonely between the frozen Pole and the naked shore. But the life-light of the daring men burned bright there; of the whalers who follow their strike by berg and floe through the teeth of the harsh salt wind and the smoky-spume that it brings, and of the Police of Canada, who plant their flag some four thousand miles north of its
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