at he
easily kept up with them. They were travel-hardened and trained to
snow-shoes from infancy; yet such was his condition that the traverse
bore no more of ordinary hardship to him than to them.

In six days they gained and crossed the central pass, low in comparison
with the mountains it threaded, yet formidable in itself and not
possible for loaded sleds. Five days more of tortuous winding, from
lower altitude to lower altitude, brought them to the open, rolling, and
merely hilly country La Perle had found ten years before. Smoke knew it
with the first glimpse, on a sharp cold day, the thermometer forty below
zero, the atmosphere so clear that he could see a hundred miles. Far as
he could see rolled the open country. High in the east the Rockies still
thrust their snowy ramparts heavenward. To the south and west extended
the broken ranges of the projecting spur-system they had crossed. And in
this vast pocket lay the country La Perle had traversed--snow-blanketed,
but assuredly fat with game at some time in the year, and in the summer
a smiling, forested, and flowered land.

Before midday, traveling down a broad stream, past snow-buried willows
and naked aspens, and across heavily timbered flats of spruce, they came
upon the site of a large camp, recently abandoned. Glancing as he
went by, Smoke estimated four or five hundred fires, and guessed the
population to be in the thousands. So fresh was the trail, and so well
packed by the multitude, that Smoke and his captors took off their
snow-shoes and in their moccasins struck a swifter pace. Signs of game
appeared and grew plentiful--tracks of wolves and lynxes that without
meat could not be. Once, one of the Indians cried out with satisfaction
and pointed to a large area of open snow, littered with fang-polished
skulls of caribou, trampled and disrupted as if an army had fought upon
it. And Smoke knew that a big killing had been made by the hunters since
the last snow-flurry.

In the long twilight no sign was manifested of making camp. They held
steadily on through a deepening gloom that vanished under a sky of
light--great, glittering stars half veiled by a greenish vapor of
pulsing aurora borealis. His dogs first caught the noises of the camp,
pricking their ears and whining in low eagerness. Then it came to the
ears of the humans, a murmur, dim with distance, but not invested with
the soothing grace that is common to distant murmurs. Instead, it was in
a high,