s, just nosed and
tasted, eating no more than an ordinary workaday ration. Long before the
final stage of bone-gnawing he actually walked away and curled himself
down at the roots of a big spruce where the ground rose slightly, some
fifty paces distant from the place of orgy.

A couple of hundred yards away, by the shelter of their fire, Jean and
Jake composed themselves to rest and smoke; for they also had fed full.
One by one even the lustiest of the dogs forsook the bones, drawing back
heavily, lazily licking their chops. The dense calm of satiety descended
slowly upon all the visible life-shapes in that place like the fumes of
some potent narcotic--upon all forms of life save one. Bill, curled at
the root of his spruce, had within him a blazing fire of life and
activity which no earthly force could slake while his breath remained to
fan it. But the rest of the world slept.

The moon that night was too young to shed much light. But just after
Jean and Jake sleepily laid aside their pipes and closed their eyes, the
aurora borealis flamed out icily in a clear sky, bringing more than all
the light Bill needed. In that frozen stillness Bill's brain was like
the interior of a lighted factory with all its machinery in full swing.
Fed by hate and slowly accumulated stores of bitter anger, his thoughts
went throbbing in and out the lighted convolutions of his brain with the
silent positive efficiency of a gas-engine's pistons.

Bill understood everything in the world that night in his own world, and
he overlooked nothing. He would have given much, very much, to have been
able to remove Jean's camp a mile or so away. The belt of open
snow-space between it and him was all too narrow for his liking. Well he
knew how swiftly Jean could move, how certainly he could strike when the
need arose. But for this Bill had done murder that night, as surely as
ever softly treading human desperado in the dead of night has done
murder at a bedside. As it was he thought he must fight. Well, he was
prepared. Nay, his bowels yearned for it just as strongly as any dog's
bowels had yearned for fresh-killed meat that night. More strongly, for
in him the one yearning had mastered and ridden down the other yearning,
thus giving him his perfect preparation.

The full-fed team-dogs had been too idle that night to dig out proper
sleeping-nests for themselves in the snow. A mere circling whisp of head
and tail and feet had served them, and the upper