Dumps sat on the top of a hummock, about quarter of a mile from the ship, with an expression of subdued melancholy on his countenance, and thinking, evidently, about nothing at all.  Poker sat in front of him gazing earnestly and solemnly right into his eyes with a look that said, as plain as if he had spoken, “What a tremendously stupid old fellow you are, to be sure!” Having sat thus for full five minutes, Dumps wagged his tail.  Poker, observing the action, returned the compliment with his stump.  Then Poker sprang up and barked savagely, as much as to say, “Play, won’t you?” but Dumps wouldn’t; so Poker endeavoured to relieve his mind by gambolling violently round him.

We would not have drawn your attention, reader, to the antics of our canine friends, were it not for the fact that these antics attracted the notice of a personage who merits particular description.  This was no other than one of the Esquimau inhabitants of the land—­a woman, and such a woman!  Most people would have pronounced her a man, for she wore precisely the same dress—­fur jumper and long boots—­that was worn by the men of the Dolphin.  Her lips were thick and her nose was blunt; she wore her hair turned up, and twisted into a knot on the top of her head; her hood was thrown back, and inside of this hood there was a baby—­a small and a very fat baby!  It was, so to speak, a conglomerate of dumplings.  Its cheeks were two dumplings, and its arms were four dumplings—­one above each elbow and one below.  Its hands, also, were two smaller dumplings, with ten extremely little dumplings at the end of them.  This baby had a nose, of course, but it was so small that it might as well have had none; and it had a mouth, too, but that was so capacious that the half of it would have been more than enough for a baby double the size.  As for its eyes they were large and black—­black as two coals—­and devoid of all expression save that of astonishment.

Such were the pair that stood on the edge of the ice-belt gazing down upon Dumps and Poker.  And no sooner did Dumps and Poker catch sight of them than they sprang hastily towards them, wagging their tails—­or, more correctly speaking, their tail and a quarter.  But on a nearer approach those sagacious animals discovered that the woman and her child were strangers, whereupon they set up a dismal howl, and fled towards the ship as fast as they could run.

Now, it so happened that, at this very time, the howl of the dogs fell upon the ears of two separate parties of travellers—­the one was a band of Esquimaux who were moving about in search of seals and walruses, to which band this woman and her baby belonged; the other was a party of men under command of Buzzby, who were returning to the ship after an unsuccessful hunt.  Neither party saw the other, for one approached from the east, the other from the west, and the ice-belt, on the point of which the woman stood, rose up between them.