The sun was setting when Bobby, now well in the lead, halted his team at Abel Zachariah’s old fishing place on Itigailit Island to await Skipper Ed and Jimmy.  The sea, far out in the direction in which Abel had found Bobby in the drifting boat that August morning, was frozen, and a little way out from Itigailit Island the smooth ice gave place to mountainous ridges and hummocks where, earlier in the season, rough seas had piled massive blocks one upon another and left them there to freeze and catch the drifting snow.  Far out beyond the pressure ridges Bobby could see a dark line which marked the edge of the sea ice and the place where open water began.  That was the sena for which they were bound.

“Don’t you think we’d better build our igloo here?” Bobby suggested as the others came up.  “It’s getting late and we can’t do any hunting tonight, anyway, and perhaps there won’t be any good drifts out there.”

“Yes, by all means,” agreed Skipper Ed.  “We’ll have plenty of time in the morning to go out, and if the hunting proves good, and we prefer to stay there, we can build an igloo at our leisure.  If we get plenty of seals we will want to haul them in here to land to cache them, and then if the ice breaks up before we get them all hauled home, we can take them in the boat.  And while we are hauling them in here from the sena we’ll have a snug igloo at each end of the trail, where we can make hot tea, if we wish, and drink it in comfort.”

They found an excellent drift in a spot well sheltered from the wind, and because he was taller and stronger than Bobby and a better builder than Jimmy, Skipper Ed, with a snow knife which looked very much like a sword but had a wider blade, which was straight instead of curved, marked a circle about ten feet in diameter upon the drift.

Then he cut a wedge out of the snow in the center, and with this as a beginning he carved from each side of the hole blocks of the hard-packed snow, each block about two feet long and a foot and a half wide and ten inches thick.  These he placed on edge around the circle, fitting their ends close together by trimming them as he found necessary, with the knife.

Bobby and Jimmy, each with a knife, now began also to cut other slabs from a drift outside the circle, and passed them to Skipper Ed when he had exhausted his supply within the circle.  They were very heavy, these blocks, and as much as the boys could manage.

When Skipper Ed had built a row of blocks completely around the circle, he trimmed the first blocks which he had placed to a wedge, that he might build his circle of blocks up in a spiral.

Each block of snow was so placed that it was braced against the one next it, and its top leaned a little inward, so that as the walls of the igloo rose each was smaller than the one preceding it, until at last a key block in the top completed the dome-shaped structure.  As the house grew Bobby plastered the joints between the blocks full of snow, making its outside smooth like the surface of a snowdrift.