ir sleep_. Through their slumbers it had spelt into their brains,
and instantly snapped into action that wonderful, faultless machinery
that moved them to speed as if automatically.

Then the chase began, grim, steady, relentless, dogged--the chase of
death, the battle of endurance.

A pause followed after the vanishing of the hated wolverines. A crow
lifted on rounded vans, marking their departure, and it was seen. A
blackcock launched from a high tree with a whir and a bluster like an
aeroplane, showing their course, and it was noted. An eagle climbed
heavily and ponderously over the low curtain of the snow mist, pointing
their way, and it was followed. All the wild, all the world, seemed to
be against the wolverines. The brigands were afoot by day. The scouts
were marking their trail.

Then a lynx, moving with great bounds on his huge swathed paws, shot
past between the iron-hard tree-boles; a fox followed, scudding like
the wind on the frozen crest; a hare, white as a waste wraith, flashed
by, swift as a racing white cloud-shadow; a goshawk screamed, and drew
a straight streaking line across a glade. And then came the men, side
by side, deadly dumb, with set faces, the pale sun glinting coldly
cruel upon the snaky, lean barrels of their slung rifles, moving with
steady, fleet, giant strides on their immense spidery ski that were
eleven feet long, which whispered ghostily among the silent aisles of
Nature's cathedral of a thousand columns. The Brothers were on the
death-trail of Gulo at last; the terrible, dreaded Brothers, who could
overtake a full-grown wolf in under thirty minutes on ski, and whose
single bullet spelt certain death. Now for it; now for the fight. Now
for the great test of the "star" wild outlaw against the "star" human
hunters--at last. The reindeer were to be avenged.

Then Time took the bit of silence between his teeth and seconds became
hours, and minutes generations.

No sound made the wolverines as they rolled along in Indian file,
except for the soft whisper of the snow underfoot.

No noise encompassed the Brothers as they sped swiftly side by side
over the glittering white carpet, save for the slither of the snow
under their weight.

All the wild seemed to be standing still, holding its breath, looking
on, spell-bound; and save for the occasional crash of a collapsing
snow-laden branch, sounding magnified as in a cave, all the forest
about there was as still as death.