CHAPTER XIII.
_Journey resumed--The hunters meet with bears and have a great fight, in which the dogs are sufferers--A bear's dinner--Mode in which Arctic rocks travel--The ice-belt._ On the abating of the great storm referred to in the last chapter, the hunters sought to free themselves from their snowy prison, and succeeded in burrowing, so to speak, upwards after severe labour, for the hut was buried in drift which the violence of the gale had rendered extremely compact.
O'Riley was the first to emerge into the upper world.

Having dusted the snow from his garments, and shaken himself like a Newfoundland dog, he made sundry wry faces, and gazed round him with the look of a man that did not know very well what to do with himself.
"It's a quare place, it is, intirely," he remarked, with a shake of the head that betokened intense sagacity, while he seated himself on a mound of snow and watched his comrades as they busied themselves in dragging their sleeping-bags and cooking utensils from the cavern they had just quitted.

O'Riley seemed to be in a contemplative mood, for he did not venture any further remark, although he looked unutterable things as he proceeded quietly to fill his little black pipe.
"Ho! O'Riley, lend a hand, you lazy fellow," cried Fred; "work first and play afterwards, you skulker." "Sure that same is what I'm doin'," replied O'Riley with a bland smile, which he eclipsed in a cloud of smoke.

"Haven't I bin workin' like a naagur for two hours to git out of that hole, and ain't I playin' a tune on me pipe now?
But I won't be cross-grained.

I'll lind ye a hand av ye behave yerself.