A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 97: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

stride. By this time, I had reachéd the rim of the piled ice blocks of the ridge. Then I heard a slight scuffling sound be- hind me and there, tearing head and shoulders over a great, polished square of ice, was a polar bear, and a whopper, at that! I looked at him, as I got my rifle to my shoulder, but he, the scoundrel, merely turned his red eye toward the sea. Oh, and I understood vety well. He Was Simply measuring the distance to the edge of the water, and making sure that no “seal” in the world could escape him so far from water. That happy thought must have been in his heart still, when I sent a hard-nosed bullet to the same place. That day we ate bear’s meat and found it tough, but good. CHAPTER 30 Back to Earth FTER that we startéd in a regular “program of labor. In the first place, we tiever could tell when the silver fish from the Smoking Lafid might appear in the sky, and therefore we built ourselves an ice hotise on the edge of the wreckage of the pressure fidge. That would probably keep us from béing seén by spies from the wisé men of the Ice Pole. And we had double reéd of a good shelter, by this time, because the wind, pulling around until it blew dead from the north, or a bit west of north, increased to hurricane force and raged like a fiend. It was one of those Arctic storms that one finds but rarely in life. We céuld make verv little progress outside the shel- ter. As a inatter of fact, we gavé up try- ing, very largely, except to make trips to the carcass of the bear. On the third day I found four seals on the ice, atid I managed to shoot the lot. Even more tha their value as an extra supply of food, the four seal skins wete a godsend in other ways, We spent most of the rémaining week of the storm in work- ing those hides, fire-drying them, rubbing a horrible compost of brains and fat into them, and making our noses impervious to bad odors as we toiled in our confined little tannery. We got the hides rubbed and thinned } t THE SMOKING LAND down and cured as well as we could. We wanted thei light and strong. Strength we could not, of course, give to them by stich hasty curing, but at last we had them at such a point that we could begin to shape them for the covering of our sled- boat. — We had atranged a sled, and a pretty good sléd, too. At least, it had the most ® indestructible rutiners that ever were used in the Arctics. Those runners were the two halves of my cuirass ard the two halvés of the cuirass worn by Darrell. And the runners wére held together by a curiotis combination of seal and bear bonés, and much excellent sinew. It was not a pretty sled to look at, and it Was never a sled to run true and straight, but it was fairly light and, as I have said before, it was almost itidestructible—at least in its futining parts. We had sewed the sealskins together with needles fash- ioned from bone and dried tendotis for thread, to.make cover for it, but when I looked at the meager dimensions of our sled and thought of it covered with the skins, I could not help shaking my head. It would be loaded to crazitiess with three humans arid a huge dog, surely! Darrell said that it probably would do very well. He said that if our sewing had been water-tight enough, we should get on very well, and he figured out, with an in- tricate drawing and a great deal of higher mathematics, that our boat, loaded to a safe watér line, would carry eight hundred and fifty pounds, or eleven hundred, if it were sunk an inch or two deeper. Every minute during the storm-bound days, we were constantly employed, and that was what kept us well, I dare say. But the moment the scream of the wind let up, we had something else to think of, for our ice island hit a great mass of other ice and promptly broke up. Not into little bits, but into chunks the size of a room, It was horribly topsy-turvy, to sit on the top of our iceberg and see other lumps, perhaps ten times as big as ours, stagger- ing this way, and rolling that. It was a nightmare, However, the witid was still from the north, and though it was not strong, it drifted our bit of ice wreckage toward the rim of the great sheet. ‘