Sleep was no longer a matter of the rising and
setting of the sun, but was regulated by the hands of the watch. A world
frozen to the core for seven months was bursting open like a
great flower.
From Shelton, Alan and his companion visited the eighty or ninety people
at Candle, and thence continued down the Keewalik River to Keewalik, on
Kotzebue Sound. A Lomen power-boat, run by Lapps, carried them to Choris
Peninsula, where for a week Alan remained with Lomen and his huge herd
of fifteen thousand reindeer. He was eager to go on, but tried to hide
his impatience. Something was urging him, whipping him on to greater
haste. For the first time in months he heard the crackling thunder of
reindeer hoofs, and the music of it was like a wild call from his own
herds hurrying him home. He was glad when the week-end came and his
business was done. The power-boat took him to Kotzebue. It was night, as
his watch went, when Paul Davidovich started up the delta of the Kobuk
River with him in a lighterage company's boat. But there was no
darkness. In the afternoon of the fourth day they came to the Redstone,
two hundred miles above the mouth of the Kobuk as the river winds. They
had supper together on the shore. After that Paul Davidovich turned back
with the slow sweep of the current, waving his hand until he was out
of sight.
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