They discover a cavern with gold nuggets.
They train a puffin.
They fly to the North Pole on a sled with a sail.
They play mouth organs with trained seals.
And they revive a hairy mammoth who has been frozen in an ice berg
for thousands of years.
As the book ends Bertram and his friends come home with a huge menagerie of animals and a bag of gold nuggets. The animals are sold to a zoo. Bertram shares the gold with his pals. And everyone will get a college scholarship when they are ready.
The book is about dreams and adventure and the wonder of naive children. Gilbert wrote the Bertram books with a subtle dead-pan humorous reality placing Bertram and his friends in absurd and difficult situations with the reader rightly expecting that our characters will not just be saved when it comes to the danger but will be rewarded for their efforts.
I should also point out that as I was in third grade reading the Bertram books in 1941 the world around me and my friends and family was crumbling. Europe was at war and Pearl Harbor was about to happen. This book stimulated my dreams of travel to the Far North but also indicated that facing difficulty and danger could be expected to result in a favorable outcome.
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