He turned over. We lay quite still for a long time. Then in that dead hush a husky whined, and Barreau sat up with a whispered oath, his voice trembling, and struck savagely at the dog. The sudden spasm of rage subtly communicated itself to me. I lay quivering in the blankets. If I had moved it would have been to turn and strike him as he had struck the dog. It passed presently, and left me wondering. I got up then and dressed. So did Barreau. We built a fire and sat by it, thawing meat, melting snow for tea, cooking bannock; all in silence, like folk who involuntarily lower their voices in a great empty church, the depths of a mine, or the presence of death. Afraid to speak? I laughed at the fancy, and looked up at the raucous sound of my own voice, to find Barreau scowling blackly—at the sound, I thought. Before long Jessie came shivering to the fire. The rigors of the North breed a wolfish hunger. We ate huge quantities of bannock and moose-meat. That done we laid Montell’s body at the base of a spruce, and piled upon it a great heap of brush. Jessie viewed the abandonment calmly enough—she knew the necessity. Then we packed and put the dogs to the toboggan, increasing the load of food from Montell’s supply and leaving behind our tent and some few things we could not haul. Barreau went ahead, bearing straight south, setting his snowshoes down heel to toe, beating a path for the straining dogs. Fierce work it was, that trail-breaking. My turn at it came in due course. Thus we forged ahead, the black surrounding forest and the white floor of it irradiated by the moonbeams. Away behind us the Aurora flashed across the Polar horizon, a weird blazon of light, silky, shimmering, vari-colored, dying one moment to a pin-point leaping the next like sheet lightning to the height of the North Star. This died at the dawn. Over the frost-gleaming tree-tops the sun rose and bleared at us through the frost-haze. “And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, whereunder crawling, cooped, we live and die——” The Tentmaker’s rhyme came to me and droned over and over in my brain. The “Bowl” arched over us, a faded blue, coldly beautiful. At our noon camp a gun snapped among the trees, and a dog fell sprawling. As we sprang to our feet another husky doubled up. Barreau caught the remaining two by the collars and flung a square of canvas over them. A third shot missed. He caught up his rifle and plunged into the timber. An hour or more we waited. When he returned I had the toboggan ready for the road. “I got his track,” he said between mouthfuls of the food I had kept warm. “One man. He struck straight east when he saw me start. There may be more though. It is not like the Company to put all its eggs in one basket.” “You think the Company is behind this?” I asked. “Who else?” he jeered. “Isn’t this money worth some trouble? And who but the Company men know of it?” “Why bother with dogs if that is so?” I replied. “The same bullets would do for us.”