that came to his lips. A low
whine answered it, and he looked down at Baree, huddled in the snow
within a yard of his feet. "My god and master," Baree's eyes said, as
they looked up at him, "I am here." It was as if David had heard the
words. He held out a hand and Baree came to him, his great wolfish body
aquiver with joy. After all, he was not alone.

A short distance from him the Indian who was to take him over to Fond du
Lac, on Lake Athabasca, was waiting with his dogs and sledge. He was a
Sarcee, one of the last of an almost extinct tribe, so old that his hair
was of a shaggy white, and he was so thin that he looked like a
famine-stricken Hindu. "He has lived so long that no one knows his age,"
Father Roland had said, "and he is the best trailer between Hudson's Bay
and the Peace." His name was Upso-Gee (the Snow Fox), and the Missioner
had bargained with him for a hundred dollars to take David from White
Porcupine House to Fond du Lac, three hundred miles farther northwest.
He cracked his long caribou-gut whip to remind David that he was ready.
David had said good-bye to the factor and the clerk at the Company store
and there was no longer an excuse to detain him. They struck out across
a small lake. Five minutes later he looked back. Father Roland, not much
more than a speck on the white plain now, was about to disappear in the
forest. It seemed to David that he had stopped, and again he waved his
hand, though human eyes could not have seen the movement over that
distance.

Not until that night, when David sat alone beside his campfire, did he
begin to realize fully the vastness of this adventure into which he had
plunged. The Snow Fox was dead asleep and it was horribly lonely. It was
a dark night, too, with the shivering wailing of a restless wind in the
tree tops; the sort of night that makes loneliness grow until it is like
some kind of a monster inside, choking off one's breath. And on
Upso-Gee's tepee, with the firelight dancing on it, there was painted in
red a grotesque fiend with horns--a medicine man, or devil chaser; and
this devil chaser grinned in a bloodthirsty manner at David as he sat
near the fire, as if gloating over some dreadful fate that awaited him.
It _was_ lonely. Even Baree seemed to sense his master's oppression, for
he had laid his head between David's feet, and was as still as if
asleep. A long way off David could hear the howling of a wolf and it
reminded him shiveringly of the lea