The deer were very near Harluk now, and his beckoning arm had shrunken to the tip of his mitten, now lifted a little, then slowly withdrawn. The deer fairly crowded forward to look for it. As their muzzles appeared over the stones, Harluk leaped to his feet with a tremendous yell. The effect was to paralyze the herd for a second. They stamped and snorted, but stood firm while Harluk lunged with his spear full at the shoulder of the nearest. The shaft went home, and the deer sank to the ground transfixed to the heart. Immediately there was a tremendous stampede among the deer. The stupid creatures rushed this way and that, colliding with one another in a paroxysm of terror, then started down the valley again in the direction whence they had come. In this sudden confusion a caribou was knocked fairly from his feet, falling against Harluk from behind and tripping him. He scrambled to his feet again with a rush and carried Harluk clinging mechanically to his back, too surprised to do anything else. As the herd clattered by, Harry saw Joe spring to his feet and begin to jump up and down, wave his rifle in the air, and halloo. He shouted to him to quit that and shoot, and then it came to him that he was doing precisely the same thing, nor did he seem to be able to stop, even when he was conscious of it, until the herd was well by him. Such is the effect of the buck fever. In its delirium people are sometimes conscious that they are acting absurdly, but do not have the power to stop it. By the time the herd was so far down the valley that it was nearly out of gunshot, Harry and Joe had come to sufficiently to do some wild shooting. This had no effect but to bring an equally wild yell from Harluk, who rolled from his perch at the whistling of the bullets and abandoned his quarry. Of the forty caribou among which they had been for a half hour or more, they had secured but one. However, they had enough meat for the present, and they divided up the animal and started back for the camp with it on their shoulders. They reached the spot where they had camped before the hunt, and stared and rubbed their eyes with many exclamations of astonishment and alarm. There was no trace of tent, sled, or dogs. All had vanished. They threw down their burdens and looked at one another. “Are you sure this is the place?” asked Harry. In reply, Harluk nodded his head vehemently, and Joe pointed in silence to the heavy stones they had used in place of tent-pegs. They still made a quadrilateral which marked the spot, but there was nothing more. “What are we going to do?” faltered Harry. For a moment he felt as if the ghost people of the Nunatak were not so unreal after all. He thought he saw the same feeling reflected in Harluk’s face, and the fantastic loneliness of the country seemed to impress itself upon him more than ever. It was like a bad dream, in which, all things being unreal, nothing was too strange to happen.