o see laughter in a face like
Bram's. It transformed his countenance from mere ugliness into one of
the leering gargoyles carven under the cornices of ancient buildings.
It was this laugh, heard almost at Bram's elbow, that made Philip
suddenly grip hard at a new understanding--the laugh and the look in
Bram's eyes. It set him throbbing, and filled him all at once with the
desire to seize his companion by his great shoulders and shake speech
from his thick lips. In that moment, even before the laughter had gone
from Bram's face, he thought again of Pelletier. Pelletier must have
been like this--in those terrible days when he scribbled the random
thoughts of a half-mad man on his cabin door.

Bram was not yet mad. And yet he was fighting the thing that had killed
Pelletier. Loneliness. The fate forced upon him by the law because he
had killed a man.

His face was again heavy and unemotional when with a gesture he made
Philip understand that he was to ride on the sledge. Bram himself went
to the head of the pack. At the sharp clack of his Eskimo the wolves
strained in their traces. Another moment and they were off, with Bram
in the lead.

Philip was amazed at the pace set by the master of the pack. With head
and shoulders hunched low he set off in huge swinging strides that kept
the team on a steady trot behind him. They must have traveled eight
miles an hour. For a few minutes Philip could not keep his eyes from
Bram and the gray backs of the wolves. They fascinated him, and at the
same time the sight of them--straining on ahead of him into a voiceless
and empty world--filled him with a strange and overwhelming compassion.
He saw in them the brotherhood of man and beast. It was splendid. It
was epic. And to this the Law had driven them!

His eyes began to take in the sledge then. On it was a roll of bear
skins--Bram's blankets. One was the skin of a polar bear. Near these
skins were the haunches of caribou meat, and so close to him that he
might have reached out and touched it was Bram's club. At the side of
the club lay a rifle. It was of the old breech-loading, single-shot
type, and Philip wondered why Bram had destroyed his own modern weapon
instead of keeping it in place of this ancient Company relic. It also
made him think of night before last, when he had chosen for his refuge
a tree out in the starlight.

The club, even more than the rifle, bore marks of use. It was of birch,
and three feet in length. Where