“Let’s walk along the shore a ways,” said Dick. “We may find something interesting.”
A hundred yards farther on they passed out of sight of the camp, and ran into a flock of eider ducks who took to the water upon their approach with the prettiest nose dives they had ever seen. Toma’s sharp eyes located some nests on the shore, and they procured a few fresh eggs and a good many old ones.
“Leave the old eggs where they are,” Dick said, as Sandy was about to see how far he could throw one. “We don’t want to destroy what will be little eider ducks some day.”
“You’re right, Dick,” Sandy agreed. “I just didn’t think.”
“Him nice an’ soft—make um warm nest,” Toma spoke up, running his fingers around in one of the duck nests.
Dick picked up some of the fine, white feathers with which the nest was lined. “Yes, these are about as soft feathers as are known. The Eskimos gather and trade them to the white men for tools and things. In the United States we call it eiderdown.”
They wandered on down the shore to the point where the great glacial ridge west of their camp extended into the sea. The ridge sloped off into the water in a long slope at the foot of which the waves rumbled and thundered, dashing the huge icebergs this way and that as if they were toys. Occasionally they could hear the distant noises of the glacier as fragments of it fell into the sea, or when its slow movements caused huge cracks to form in its depths.
Dick led the way a short distance up the slope toward a dark knob that was sticking up through the snow and ice.
“I wonder if that isn’t one of the meteors they say are in the polar regions,” he said. “Robert Peary, the great explorer, brought back some fine specimens to American museums. This does look like it might be a very small one.”
They stopped at the protuberance and inspected it curiously.
“It looks like melted iron to me,” Sandy declared. “Is that what meteors are made of?”
“Yes, a form of iron,” Dick replied. “It’s called meteoric iron. Scientists claim it is about the hardest iron which has been found in a natural state. In the sky it is heated to a liquid state by the friction of falling through the air, then when it strikes the earth’s atmosphere it cools suddenly and explodes with a loud report, lighting up the country for miles and miles.”