For them to go to the ice without food was too great a risk.

If they went and failed to find seals and were overtaken by a storm they would perish.
This was the condition of affairs when Bobby and Jimmy set out one cold, clear morning to hunt for ptarmigans, the white grouse of the North.

Not far away was a barren hill whose top was kept clean swept of snow by the winds, and up this hill they climbed, for sometimes ptarmigans are found in places like this, feeding upon the frozen moss berries which cling to the rocks.
Bobby was in advance, and from the summit of the hill he scanned the great expanse of snow reaching away over the endless rolling country to the westward.

And looking, he discovered in the distance a dark, moving mass slowly drawing down another hillside.

For a moment he was speechless with joy, but it was for only a moment, and then he shouted: "_Tuktu! Tuktu! Tuktu!_" (Caribou, or reindeer.) Bobby's excited cry brought Jimmy up on a run, and when he looked and saw, he, too, shouted, and was no less excited than Bobby.
"Caribou! The caribou are coming!" That was enough to send them back on a run for Abel and Skipper Ed and their rifles and all the ammunition they could muster, and then all four turned back to meet the caribou.
On and on came the great herd, in a far-reaching, endless mass, thousands upon thousands of them, and they were heading directly for the hill where the four eager hunters waited.
At length the mass reached them, and what followed was not a hunt but a slaughter, and when they were through more than a hundred caribou lay stretched upon the snow, and still the caribou came.
The period of starvation was at an end.