who that man was, and why he came to be there, I do not know. But I
think he was greatly paid by the man and the woman, like me, to do their
work for them.

"That day and that night we had nothing to eat, and all next day we
travelled fast, and we were weak with hunger. Then we came to the Black
Rock, which rose five hundred feet above the trail. It was at the end of
the day. Darkness was coming, and we could not find the cabin of McKeon.
We slept hungry, and in the morning looked for the cabin. It was not
there, which was a strange thing, for everybody knew that McKeon lived in
a cabin at Black Rock. We were near to the coast, where the wind blows
hard and there is much snow. Everywhere there were small hills of snow
where the wind had piled it up. I have a thought, and I dig in one and
another of the hills of snow. Soon I find the walls of the cabin, and I
dig down to the door. I go inside. McKeon is dead. Maybe two or three
weeks he is dead. A sickness had come upon him so that he could not
leave the cabin. The wind and the snow had covered the cabin. He had
eaten his grub and died. I looked for his cache, but there was no grub
in it.

"'Let us go on,' said the woman. Her eyes were hungry, and her hand was
upon her heart, as with the hurt of something inside. She bent back and
forth like a tree in the wind as she stood there. 'Yes, let us go on,'
said the man. His voice was hollow, like the _klonk_ of an old raven,
and he was hunger-mad. His eyes were like live coals of fire, and as his
body rocked to and fro, so rocked his soul inside. And I, too, said,
'Let us go on.' For that one thought, laid upon me like a lash for every
mile of fifteen hundred miles, had burned itself into my soul, and I
think that I, too, was mad. Besides, we could only go on, for there was
no grub. And we went on, giving no thought to the man with the one eye
in the snow.

"There is little travel on the big cut-off. Sometimes two or three
months and nobody goes by. The snow had covered the trail, and there was
no sign that men had ever come or gone that way. All day the wind blew
and the snow fell, and all day we travelled, while our stomachs gnawed
their desire and our bodies grew weaker with every step they took. Then
the woman began to fall. Then the man. I did not fall, but my feet were
heavy and I caught my toes and stumbled many times.

"That night is the end of February. I kill three ptarmigan with th