“Now,” said Marian as they reached the proper stage of disrobing, “you do it like this.”
Sitting down upon the canvas, she thrust her feet into the sleeping bag, then began to work her way into it.
“Come on,” she directed, “we can do it best together. It’s just big enough for two. I had it made that way on purpose.”
Patsy dropped to the place beside her. Then together they burrowed their way into the depths of the bag until only their eyes and noses were uncovered.
“How soft!” murmured Patsy as she wound an arm about her cousin’s neck, then lay staring up at the stars.
“How warm!” she whispered again five minutes later.
“Yes,” Marian whispered, as though they were sleeping at home and might disturb the household by speaking aloud. “You see, this bag is made of the long haired winter skins of reindeer. The hair is a solid mat more than an inch thick. The skin keeps out the wind. With the foot and the sides of it sewed up tight, you can’t possibly get cold, even if you sleep on the frozen ground.”
“How wonderful!” exclaimed Patsy. “It wouldn’t be a bit of use writing that to my friends. They simply wouldn’t believe it.”
For a little time, with arms twined about one another, the cousins lay there in silence. Each, busy with her own thoughts, was not at all conscious of the bonds of human affection which the vast silence of the white wilderness was even now weaving about them. Bonds far stronger than their arms about one another’s neck, these were to carry them together through many a wild and mysterious adventure.
As if in anticipation of all this, Patsy snuggled a bit closer to Marian and said:
“No,” laughed Marian, “at least not any more than we wish to. You see, we have three Eskimo herders with us, and Attatak, a girl who cooks for them. They do most of the work. All we have to do is to finance the herd and sort of supervise it.
“You see, the Eskimo people are really child-people. They have had many strange customs in the past that don’t fit now. In their old village life of hunting and fishing, it was an unwritten law that if one man had food and another had none, it must be shared. That won’t work now.
“There is only one time of year that we can get food into this herding ground; that is summer. We freight it up the river and store it for winter’s use. That gives us a big supply of provisions in the fall. There are two Eskimo villages thirty miles away. If there were no white people about, our good-hearted herders would share our supplies with the villagers as often as they came around. Before the winter was half through they would be out of supplies. They would then have to live on reindeer meat, and that would be hard on our herd. In fact, we would soon have no herd. So that is the reason we are going to spend a winter on the tundra.”