have a coat."

In these excursions Virginia learned to use her pistol with remarkable
accuracy. Her strength increased: she could follow wherever Bill led.
Sometimes they climbed snowy mountains where the gales shrieked like
demons, sometimes they dipped into still, mysterious glens; they tracked
the little folk in the snow, and they called the moose from the thickets
beside the lake.

They did not forget their graver business. Ever Virginia kept watch for
a track that was not an animal track, a blaze on a tree that was not
made by the teeth of a porcupine or grizzly, a charred cook rack over
the ashes of a fire. But as yet they had found no sign of human
wayfarers other than themselves. There were no cut trees, no blazed
trails, no sign of a habitation. Yet she didn't despair. She had begun
to have some knowledge of the great distances of the region: she knew
there were plenty of valleys yet unsearched.

Bill never ceased to search for his mine. He looked for blazes too, for
a sign of an old camp or a pile of washings beside a stream. When he
found an open stream he would wash the gravel, and it seemed to him he
combed the entire region between the two little tributaries of Grizzly
River indicated on his map. But with the deepening snow search was ever
more difficult. Unlike Virginia, he was almost ready to give up.

The spirit of autumn had never shown her face again: winter had come to
stay. Every day the snow deepened, the cold in the long nights was more
intense. Travel was no longer possible without snowshoes, but the hide
stretched in the cabin was almost dry and ready to cut into thongs for
the webs. The less turbulent stretches of Grizzly River were frozen
fast: the actual crossing of the stream was no longer a problem. Beyond
it, however, lay only wintry mountains, covered to a depth of five feet
or more with soft and impassable snow; and until the snow crusted, the
journey to Bradleyburg was as impossible as if they had been cast away
on another sphere.

Even the rapids of the river had begun to freeze. Often the clouds
broke away at nightfall and let the cold come in,--stabbing,
incredible cold that meant death to any human being that was caught
without shelter in its grasp. The land locked tight: no more could Bill
hunt for his mine in the creek beds. The last of the moose went down to
their yarding grounds, and even the far-off glimpse of a caribou was a
rarity. The marmots had desc