he
defaulter, the man of flesh and blood and nerves and thoughts and the
capacities for suffering,--but a being elusive as the aurora, an
embodiment of that dread country, a servant of the unfriendly North,
would return as he had done.

Over the land lay silence. The sea has its undertone on the stillest
nights; the woods are quiet with an hundred lesser noises; but here was
absolute, terrifying, smothering silence,--the suspension of all sound,
even the least,--looming like a threatening cloud larger and more
dreadful above the cowering imagination. The human soul demanded to
shriek aloud in order to preserve its sanity, and yet a whisper uttered
over against the heavy portent of this universal stillness seemed a
profanation that left the spirit crouched beneath a fear of retribution.
And then suddenly the aurora, the only privileged voice, would crackle
like a silken banner.

At first the world in the vastness of its spaces seemed to become bigger
and bigger. Again abruptly it resumed its normal proportions, but they,
the observers of it, had been struck small. To their own minds they
seemed like little black insects crawling painfully. In the distance
these insects crawled was a disproportion to the energy expended, a
disproportion disheartening, filling the soul with the despair of an
accomplishment that could mean anything in the following of that which
made the Trail.

Always they ate pemmican. Of this there remained a fairly plentiful
supply, but the dog meat was running low. It was essential that the team
be well fed. Dick or Sam often travelled the entire day a quarter of a
mile one side or the other, hoping thus to encounter game, but without
much success. A fox or so, a few plarmigan, that was all. These they
saved for the dogs. Three times a day they boiled tea and devoured the
little square of pemmican. It did not supply the bulk their digestive
organs needed, and became in time almost nauseatingly unpalatable, but
it nourished. That, after all, was the main thing. The privation carved
the flesh from their muscles, carved the muscles themselves to leanness.

But in spite of the best they could do, the dog feed ran out. There
remained but one thing to do. Already the sledge was growing lighter,
and three dogs would be quite adequate for the work. They killed Wolf,
the surly and stupid "husky." Every scrap they saved, even to the
entrails, which froze at once to solidity. The remaining dogs were put
on h