in him. For a time his
senses had been dazed by his punishment, but now every instinct in him
was like a living wire. Slowly he pulled himself from his retreat and
sat down on his haunches. His gray muzzle was pointed to the sky. The
same stars were there, burning in cold, white points of flame as they
had burned week after week in the maddening monotony of the long nights
near the pole. They were like a million pitiless eyes, never blinking,
always watching, things of life and fire, and yet dead. And at those
eyes, the little white foxes yapped so incessantly that the sound of it
drove men mad. They were yapping now. They were never still. And with
their yapping came the droning, hissing monotone of the aurora, like
the song of a vast piece of mechanism in the still farther north.
Toward this Wapi turned his bruised and beaten head. Out there, just
beyond the ghostly pale of vision, was the ship. Fifty times he had
slunk out and around it, cautiously as the foxes themselves. He had
caught its smells and its sounds; he had come near enough to hear the
voices of men, and those voices were like the voice of Blake, his
master. Therefore, he had never gone nearer.

There was a change in him now. His big pads fell noiselessly as he
slunk back to the cabin and sniffed for a scent in the snow. He found
it. It was the trail of the white woman. His blood tingled again, as it
had tingled when her face bent over him and her hand reached out, and
in his soul there rose up the ghost of Tao to whip him on. He followed
the woman's footprints slowly, stopping now and then to listen, and
each moment the spirit in him grew more insistent, and he whined up at
the stars. At last he saw the ship, a wraithlike thing in its piled-up
bed of ice, and he stopped. This was his dead-line. He had never gone
nearer. But tonight--if any one period could be called night--he went
on.

It was the hour of sleep, and there was no sound aboard. The foxes,
never tiring of their infuriating sport, were yapping at the ship. They
barked faster and louder when they caught the scent of Wapi, and as he
approached, they drifted farther away. The scent of the woman's trail
led up the wide bridge of ice, and Wapi followed this as he would have
followed a road, until he found himself all at once on the deck of the
Flying Moon. For a space he was startled. His long fangs bared
themselves at the shadows cast by the stars. Then he saw ahead of him a
narrow ribbon of