About midnight Atchoo shuddered and drew her children to her. The other Eskimos looked at Joe with their brown faces whitening with fear, for right down the smoke-hole came that weird, wailing howl. Joe snatched the rifle and scrambled out through the low passage. The moon shone brightly on the still whiteness of the Arctic midnight, but there was no sign of living creature in sight. Only over the ridge, some distance away, came the howl again, this time with mocking intonation, as if the messengers of the Nunatak people laughed at his futile efforts. Again it seemed to come right from the ship, and Joe, baffled and angry, yet felt a chill of fear thrill through him. He jumped as a figure appeared almost at his feet, but it was only Kroo with a bundle of provisions and furs in his hand, scrambling from the low passage of his igloo. “The ghost wolves must be fed,” said Kroo resignedly. “My white brother is brave, but he cannot shoot spirits even if he could find them. I will go.” Quaking with fear, but doggedly, the old man plodded through the snow toward the ridge. He had gone but a step or two when Joe was close behind him, walking as he walked, so close that from a little distance the two would look like one man in the uncertain light. When they reached a furrow between two drifts Joe dropped into this, out of sight. Kroo went on a few rods farther, placed his offering on the snow, and turned back. He would have paused by Joe, but the latter firmly motioned him on, and a few moments later he entered the igloo. There was silence for a long time, while Joe watched the bundle narrowly where it showed dark against the white surface, holding his rifle ready for instant use. The minutes seemed to stretch into hours. He felt a chill that was not altogether cold, and his hand shook with a nervous tremor that was very close to fear. Real wolves he did not care for, yet with all his sturdy Anglo-Saxon sense, something of the superstition of the Eskimos seemed to touch him. Civilization slips easily from us when face to face with night, the wilderness, and the unknown. He had a haunting feeling that something was near him, yet peer as he would he could see nothing but the whiteness of the moonlit expanse of snow and the black bundle, untouched, where Kroo had dropped it.