Page:Life with the Esquimaux - 1864 - Volume 1.djvu/269

248 is ice-locked away up the bay. This we thought he had recognized, and that, on reaching it, he would then know where he should direct his steps. But, alas! too soon he turns in another—a wrong direction.

"His tracks by eleven o'clock showed that he was lost. Up to this hour it was evident to us that John had in mind nearly the proper direction in which the harbour of the vessel lay. It is true that now and then his tracks led in a direction that indicated doubt, but mainly otherwise. When John Brown first made Field Bay, passing from the land over which he had just come from Frobisher Bay, it must have been nine o'clock last night. He could have been but a little in advance of the sledge party he had left in Frobisher Bay. Hence it was not by daylight that he was struggling to reach the vessel; for, not being used to travelling alone, nor familiar with the route, and it being by night he was travelling, no wonder at his deviations, as indicated to us up to the hour I have named, to wit, eleven o'clock  But at this hour I exclaimed, 'See! see! he who made those tracks was lost.' They were tortuous, zigzag, circular, this way and that—every way but the right way.

"At length John took a course S.S.W. leading him obliquely to the opposite side of the bay from where the vessel lay. How our hearts ached at this. Making, finally, a large circular sweep—having perhaps seen the dark, black, buttress-like mountains before him, which he must have known were not on the side of the bay he wished to make—he then took a S.S.E. course, which was the proper one, had he not been making the southing which he had. But this he did not long follow. Another and another bend in his steps, all leading him out of the way.

"I here state that, in following the tortuous tracks leading southwesterly, Sam Wilson and Morgan continued a direct course southeast. Soon the alarm was raised that Sam and Morgan had sighted the object of our search. We looked in that direction, and concluded they had, for they were under a