To this light-hearted youth the sight of his sailor friend wrestling with the difficulties of inland navigation as practised in arctic regions afforded a never-failing source of mirth. A single glance at Jalap’s lank figure enveloped in furs, with his weather-beaten face peering from the recesses of a hair-fringed hood, was enough at any time to make Phil laugh. Jalap on snow-shoes that, in spite of all his efforts, would slide in every direction but the one desired, and Jalap gazing at a frosty world through a pair of wooden snow-goggles, were sights that even sober-sided Serge found humorous.
But funniest of all was to see Jalap drive a dog team. This he was now obliged to do, for, while they still had three sledges, they had been unable to procure any Indians at Forty Mile to take the places of Kurilla and Chitsah. So while Phil, who was now an expert in the art of dog-driving, and could handle a six-yard whip like a native, took turns with Serge in breaking the road, Jalap was always allowed to bring up the rear. His dogs had nothing to fear from the whip, except, indeed, when it tripped him up so that he fell on top of them, but they cringed and whined beneath the torrent of incomprehensible sea terms incessantly poured forth by the strange master, who talked to them as though they were so many lubberly sailors.
“Port your hellum! Hard a-port!” he would roar to the accompaniment of flying chunks of ice that he could throw with amazing certainty of aim. Then, “Steady! So! Start a sheet and give her a rap full. Now keep her so! Keep her so! D’ye hear? Let her fall off a fraction of a p’int and I’ll rake ye fore and aft. Now, then, bullies, pull all together. Yo-ho, _heave_! No sojering! Ah, you will, will ye, ye furry sea-cook! Then take that, and stow it in your bread-locker. Shake your hay-seed and climb――_climb_, I tell ye! Avast heaving!” And so on, hour after hour, while the dogs would jump and pull and tangle their “running-rigging,” as Jalap named the trace-thongs, and the two boys would shout with laughter.
But while the journey thus furnished something of merriment, it was also filled with tribulations. So bitter was the cold that their bloodless lips were often too stiff for laughter or even for speech. So rough was the way that they rarely made more than eight or ten miles in a day of exhausting labor. Several dogs broke their legs amid the chaotic ice blocks of the ever-recurring ridges, and had to be shot. Along the palisaded Ramparts it was difficult to find timbered places in which to camp. Their dog feed was running low, and there was none to be had in the wretched native villages that they passed at long intervals.