“Can’t we get her alongside and turn her over?” Jimmy suggested.  “We can pull her up empty.”

With some mighty pulling and hauling, and many futile efforts, they at length succeeded, and presently the skiff was in the water again and floating as easily as though nothing had happened and it had never once been under the waves.  And then a new problem confronted them.

“The oars!  The oars are gone!” exclaimed Jimmy in consternation.

And so they were.  Nowhere could they discover the oars, though they clambered up the iceberg again and scanned the surrounding sea.

“Well,” said Bobby, “that’s hard luck!  I wonder if we can’t make father or some one hear.  Let’s get up on top and yell.”

From the top of the iceberg they shouted and shouted, but Mrs. Abel was in one tent, busied with her household affairs, and Skipper Ed and Abel were in the other tent, making ready their fishing gear, and the breeze blew from the land, and altogether no one heard the shouting.

“No use,” said Bobby at last, descending to the skiff.  “I’ll tell you what we’ll do.  We’ll knock one of the seats out, split it, and make two paddles.  They’ll be short, but they’ll do us to get ashore.  It isn’t far.”

“It looks as though it’s the only thing to do, unless we want to stay here for three or four hours,” agreed Jimmy, taking the ax and knocking out the seat.  “I’m shivering cold from my wetting.”

“It’s lucky I hung to the ax,” said Bobby, as he watched Jimmy fashioning the paddles.

“There,” said Jimmy at length, “they’re pretty short paddles, but we’ll have to make ’em do.  Let’s get off of this.”

But the tide was running out, and a very strong tide it proved, and the breeze from the land was stiff enough, too, had there been no opposing tide, to have made pulling against it with a good pair of oars no easy task.  All this they did not realize until they had paddled beyond the shelter of the iceberg, for they had drawn the boat up upon its lee side.

They put all the energy they could muster into their effort, but the paddles were very short and very narrow, and work as they would they presently discovered that tide and wind were mastering them, and instead of progressing toward Itigailit Island they were drifting seaward.

“We can’t make it!” said Jimmy at last.

“No,” agreed Bobby.  “We’ll have to go back to the berg and wait for them to come for us.”

But even that they could not accomplish.  Work as they would, the paddles proved hopelessly inefficient, and after an hour’s desperate effort they realized that they were nearly as far to seaward from the iceberg as the iceberg was from Itigailit Island.

“Well,” said Bobby, at length, “we’re in for it, and a fine fix it is.”

“What are we going to do?” asked Jimmy.  “We’ve got to do something.”

“I wish that I had some of that bear meat.  I’m as hungry as the old bear ever was,” said Bobby, irrelevantly.