Geoffrey Hossack practises hammer-throwing with an iron crowbar, patches the worn-out sleighs, makes little expeditions on his own account, and discovers nothing, except that he has a non-geographical mind, and that, instead of the trapper’s unerring instinct, which enables him to travel always in a straight line, he has an unpleasant tendency to describe a circle; prowls about with his gun, and the scanty supply of ammunition which Davoren allows him; makes traps for silver foxes, and has the mortification of seeing his bait devoured by a wolverine, who bears a life as charmed as that Macbeth was promised; and sometimes, but alas too seldom, kills something—a moose, and once a buffalo. O, then what a hunter’s feast they have in the thick northern darkness! what a wild orgie seems that rare supper! Their souls expand over the fresh meat; they feel mighty as northern gods, Odin and Thor. Hope rekindles in every breast; the moody silence which has well-nigh grown habitual to them in the gloom of these hungry hopeless days, melts into wild torrents of talk. They are moved with a kind of rapture engendered of this roast flesh, and recognise the truth of Barry Cornwall’s dictum, that a poet should be a high feeder. The grip of the frost-fiend tightens upon them; the brief days flit by ghostlike, only the long nights linger. They sit in their log-hut in a dreary silence, each man seated on the ground, with his knees drawn up to his chin, and his back against the wall. Were they already dead, and this their sepulchre, they could wear no ghastlier aspect. They are silent from no sullen humour. Discord has never risen among them. What have they to talk about? Swift impending death, the sharp stings of hunger, the bitterness of an empty tobacco-barrel. Their dumbness is the dumbness of stoics who can suffer and make no moan. They have not yet come to absolute starvation; there is a little pemmican still, enough to sustain their attenuated thread of life for a few more days. When that is gone, they can see before them nothing but death. The remains of their buffalo has been eaten by the wolves, carefully as they hid it under the snow. The region to which they have pushed their way seems empty of human life—a hyperborean chaos ruled by Death. What hardy wanderer, half-breed or Indian, would venture hither at such a season? They are sitting thus, mute and statue-like, in the brief interval which they call daylight, when something happens which sets every heart beating with a sudden violence—something so unexpected, that they wait breathless, transfixed by surprise. A voice, a human voice, breaks the dead silence; a wild face, with bright fierce eyes peers in at the entrance of the hut, from which a bony hand has dragged aside the tarpaulin that serves for a screen against the keen northern winds, which creep in round the angle of the rough wooden porch.