Realizing at once what had happened, she stood up and held her face to the air.  The wind was off shore.  There was not the least bit of use in trying to make the land.  A stretch of black waters yawned between shore and ice floe by now.

Shrugging her shoulders, she climbed a pile of ice for a better view, then hurrying down again, she picked up the harpoon and began puzzling over it.  She coiled and uncoiled the skin rope attached to it.  She worked the rope up and down through the many buttons which held it to the shaft.  She examined the sharp steel point of the shaft which was fastened to the skin rope.

After that she sat down to think.  Over to the left of her she had seen something that lay near a pool of water.  She had never hunted anything, did not fancy she’d like it, but she was hungry.

There was a level pan of ice by the pool.  The creature lay on the ice pan.  Suddenly she sprang up and made her way across the ice piles to the edge of that broad pan.  The brown creature, a seal, still some distance away, did not move.

Searching the ice piles she at last found a regularly formed cake some eight inches thick and two feet square.  With some difficulty she pried this out and stood it on edge.  The edge was uneven, the cake tippy.  Rolling it on its side she chipped it smooth with the point of the harpoon.

The second trial found the cake standing erect and solid.  Gripping her harpoon, she threw herself flat on her stomach and pushing the cake before her, began to wriggle her way toward the sleeping seal.

Once she paused long enough to bore a peep hole through the cake with her dagger.  From time to time the seal wakened, and raised his head to look about.  Then he sank down again.  Now she was but three rods away, now two, now one.  Now she was within ten feet of the still motionless quarry.

Stretching every muscle for a spring like a cat, she suddenly darted forward.  At the next instant she hurled the harpoon deep into the seal’s side.  She had him!  Through her body pulsated thrills of wild triumph which harkened back to the days of her primitive ancestry.  Then for a second she wavered.  She was a woman.  But she was hungry.  Tomorrow she might be starving.

Her knife flashed.  A stream of red began dyeing the ice.  A moment later, the creature’s muscles relaxed.

The Japanese girl, Cio-Cio-San, sat up and began to think.  Here was food, but how was it to be prepared?  To think of eating raw seal meat was revolting, yet here on the floe there was neither stove nor fuel.

Slowly and carefully she stripped the skin from the carcass.  Beneath this she found a two-inch layer of blubber, which must be more than ninety per cent oil.  Under this was a compact mass of dark meat.  This would be good if it was cooked.  She sat down to think again.  The fat seemed to offer a solution.  It would burn if she had matches.  She felt over the parka for pockets, and, with a little cry of joy, she found in one several matches wrapped in a bit of oiled seal skin.  Every native carried them.