Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/224

210 the sleds Koehler took the beasts out over the ice. Four of the seven had been trained by Eskimos to smell seal holes in the ice under the snow. The doctor had tried the dogs at other camps without success; but now they had to find something.

In the same spirit Geoff took one of the best rifles; Latham took the other; Brunton bore the third gun, which had been repaired. They had hunted for weeks with the knowledge that soon their lives must be dependent upon their getting animals for food, but their want no longer was in the future; it was upon them. Geoff, as he hunted, felt the gnawing of hunger and the easy exhaustion from reduced rations. He searched for sight of something moving somewhere with sudden, unforewarned brute readiness to shoot and spring after the shot, to rush upon his quarry and tear it to pieces.

It was the second moonlit "day" of this hunt on the edge of the ice, while Koehler still led his dogs over the frozen sea in the vain hope of smelling a seal, that Geoff at last saw something away to the south. He stood and stared,