mighty simplification, as though the
complexities of the world were reverting toward their original
philosophic unity. The complex summer had become simple autumn; the
autumn, winter; now the very winter itself was apparently losing its
differentiations of bushes and trees, hills and valleys, streams and
living things. The growths were disappearing; the hills were flattening
toward the great northern wastes; the rare creatures inhabiting these
barrens took on the colour of their environment. The ptarmigan matched
the snow,--the fox,--the ermine. They moved either invisible or as
ghosts.

Little by little such dwindling of the materials for diverse
observation, in alliance with the too-severe labour and the starving,
brought about a strange concentration of ideas. The inner world seemed
to undergo the same process of simplification as the outer. Extraneous
considerations disappeared. The entire cosmos of experience came to be
an expanse of white, themselves, and the Trail. These three reacted one
on the other, and outside of them there was no reaction.

In the expanse of white was no food: their food was dwindling; the
Trail led on into barren lands where no food was to be had. That was the
circle that whirled insistent in their brains.

At night they sank down, felled by the sheer burden of weariness, and no
matter how exhausted they might be the Trail continued, springing on
with the same apparently tireless energy toward its unknown goal in the
North. Gradually they lost sight of the ultimate object of their quest.
It became obscured by the immediate object, and that was the following
of the Trail. They forgot that a man had made it, or if for a moment it
did occur to them that it was the product of some agency outside of and
above itself, that agent loomed vaguely as a mysterious, extra-human
power, like the winds or the cold or the great Wilderness itself. It did
not seem possible that he could feel the need for food, for rest, that
ever his vital forces could wane. In the north was starvation for them,
a starvation to which they drew ever nearer day by day, but irresistibly
the notion obsessed them that this forerunner, the forerunner of the
Trail, proved no such material necessities, that he drew his sustenance
from his environment in some mysterious manner not to be understood.
Always on and on and on the Trail was destined to lead them until they
died, and then the maker of it,--not Jingoss, not the Weasel, t