Completely maddened by the pain of his wound, and the constant drag of the kayack, the narwhal seemed to have lost all fear of man, for when his short-sighted eyes caught sight of the Eskimo hunters he made straight toward them, his great mouth wide open and revealing a frightful toothless cavern under the long sword-like tusk.
But the hunters did not give way save to give the narwhal room to pass between them. Seven harpoons impaled the narwhal as he dashed in among the kayacks, and his speed was lessened by half. Soon the monster was floundering about in a welter of blood, growing weaker and weaker.
As soon as the Eskimos had the situation well in hand, Dick cut away his harpoon line and made all haste to paddle to shore. The icy water that had splashed into his shirt through his hood was already numbing him with cold. Before he got to shore his nose lost all sense of feeling, then suffered a burning sensation as if it had come in contact with a hot iron. Dick knew then that he had frozen his nose. Beaching the kayack, he grabbed up his mittens full of snow and buried his face in this frost absorbing application as he ran for the igloo and an oil stove.
A half hour later Sandy burst through the round door of their igloo to find his chum nursing a badly frosted face. Dick’s nose and cheeks were as white as tallow and he was writhing with pain as the blood commenced to circulate again in the frozen tissues.
“Gee, you got it bad, didn’t you,” Sandy sympathized. “But, say, when you see that big narwhal laid out on the shore, you’ll think it was worth it. It was sure game of you to hang on to that fellow when you could as easily as not cut loose your line.” Dick smiled bravely through his burning pains. “I don’t know as I deserve all that flattery, Sandy. When that whale started to dive, I’d have slashed the rope if I could have located it. But the water blinded me.”
The following day Dick’s face was well enough for him to go out into the outside air, so long as he kept bundled up to his eyes. He walked down to the beach with Sandy where the narwhal had been towed in.
Though not nearly so large as the common species of whale inhabiting the seas further south, the narwhal was fully sixteen feet long, not including the six-foot tusk of twisted ivory that extended from his blunt nose, and must have weighed several thousand pounds. The Eskimos had already begun to cut up the enormous masses of blubber and to extract the whalebone from the jaws. Dick procured a small piece of the bone as a keep-sake, though for the present his frosted nose was enough to keep the episode in his memory for several weeks to come.