Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/271

Rh lie in a trail across Europe following the prehistoric camps of the Cave Men, and the skins of the musk-ox now helped to furnish the sleeping shelf of snow on which Geoff lay. The stone arrowheads, the sewing-needles, the amulets and necklaces of carved teeth and the horn daggers, shown in museums as relics of the Cave Men of milleniums ago, were merely the ornaments and weapons of the families in the igloos there on the bay ice; the rude sketches of bears and foxes found on the old paleolithic tusks seemed simply the sketches of these Eskimos scratched on their walrus ivory.

The moon waned and was gone; and in the endless darkness of the arctic night, with only the aurora to light the sky, the hunters shivered and froze their faces, hands and feet as they sat at their seal holes. Each hunter, Eskimo or white, stayed out in the terrible cold as long as he dared; but all together brought back not enough meat to feed the village; and the few seals that were procured were nearly all caught by the Eskimos. The dogs, except a few spared to find out fresh seal holes, now were let die unfed; the people stared at each other