Then his eyes fell upon the carcasses of the three dogs with their stiff legs sticking up.  He drew his sheath knife and went at them immediately.  In a little while he had severed the legs from the bodies and stripped the flesh from the bones.  Now with pieces of dog harness he lashed the legs together, and presently had a serviceable pole, but one which must have been far from straight.

Elated with the result of his experiment, he hastily stripped the shirt from his back, fastened it to one end of his staff, and raising it over his head began moving it back and forth.

It was an ingenious idea to make a flagstaff from the bones of dogs’ legs.  Hardly one man in a thousand would have thought of it.  It was an exemplification of Grenfell’s resourcefulness, and in the end it saved his life.

As he had hoped, men were out upon the rocky bluffs scanning the sea for seals.  The keen eyes of one of them discovered, far away, something dark and unusual.  The men of this land never take anything for granted.  It is a part of the training of the woodsman and seaman to identify any unusual movement or object, or to trace any unusual sound, before he is satisfied to let it pass unheeded.  Centering his attention upon the distant object the man distinguished a movement back and forth.  Nothing but a man could make such a movement he knew, and he also knew that any man out there was in grave danger.  He called some other fishermen, manned a boat and Dr. Grenfell and his surviving dogs were rescued.

XXI

WRECKED AND ADRIFT

It happened that it was necessary for Dr. Grenfell to go to New York one spring three or four years ago.  Men interested in raising funds to support the Labrador and Newfoundland hospitals were to hold a meeting, and it was essential that he attend the meeting and tell them of the work on the coast, and what he needed to carry it on.

This meeting was to have been held in May, and to reach New York in season to attend it Dr. Grenfell decided to leave St. Anthony Hospital, where he then was, toward the end of April, for in any case traveling would be slow.

It was his plan to travel northward, by dog team, to the Straits of Belle Isle, thence westward along the shores, and finally southward, down the western coast of Newfoundland, to Port Aux Basque, from which point a steamer would carry him over to North Sydney, in Nova Scotia.  There he could get a train and direct railway connections to New York.  There is an excellent, and ordinarily, at this season, an expeditious route for dog travel down the western coast of Newfoundland, and Grenfell anticipated no difficulties.