ur and
enabled him to drive his complaining body onward.

Where the river swung in against precipitous bluffs, he climbed the high
mountains behind. Rivers and streams that entered the main river he
forded or swam. Often he took to the rim-ice that was beginning to form,
and more than once he crashed through and struggled for life in the icy
current. Always he was on the lookout for the trail of the gods where it
might leave the river and proceed inland.

White Fang was intelligent beyond the average of his kind; yet his mental
vision was not wide enough to embrace the other bank of the Mackenzie.
What if the trail of the gods led out on that side? It never entered his
head. Later on, when he had travelled more and grown older and wiser and
come to know more of trails and rivers, it might be that he could grasp
and apprehend such a possibility. But that mental power was yet in the
future. Just now he ran blindly, his own bank of the Mackenzie alone
entering into his calculations.

All night he ran, blundering in the darkness into mishaps and obstacles
that delayed but did not daunt. By the middle of the second day he had
been running continuously for thirty hours, and the iron of his flesh was
giving out. It was the endurance of his mind that kept him going. He
had not eaten in forty hours, and he was weak with hunger. The repeated
drenchings in the icy water had likewise had their effect on him. His
handsome coat was draggled. The broad pads of his feet were bruised and
bleeding. He had begun to limp, and this limp increased with the hours.
To make it worse, the light of the sky was obscured and snow began to
fall--a raw, moist, melting, clinging snow, slippery under foot, that hid
from him the landscape he traversed, and that covered over the
inequalities of the ground so that the way of his feet was more difficult
and painful.

Grey Beaver had intended camping that night on the far bank of the
Mackenzie, for it was in that direction that the hunting lay. But on the
near bank, shortly before dark, a moose coming down to drink, had been
espied by Kloo-kooch, who was Grey Beaver's squaw. Now, had not the
moose come down to drink, had not Mit-sah been steering out of the course
because of the snow, had not Kloo-kooch sighted the moose, and had not
Grey Beaver killed it with a lucky shot from his rifle, all subsequent
things would have happened differently. Grey Beaver would not have
camped on the nea