s face grew black with bitter
disappointment. The capricious beasts had gone. Seized by one of
their incomprehensible vagaries--Pete was certain that he had not
alarmed them--they were now far out on the white level, labouring
heavily southward.

Pete set his jaws resolutely. Hunger and cold, each the mightier from
their alliance, were now assailing him savagely. His first impulse was
to throw off all concealment and rush straight down the broad-trodden
trail. But on second thought he decided that he would lose more than
he would gain by such tactics. Hampered though they were by the deep,
soft snow, he knew that, once frightened, they could travel through it
much faster than they were now moving, and very much faster than he
could hope to follow. Assuredly, patience was his game. Slipping
furtively from rampike to rampike, now creeping, now worming his way
like a snake, he made good time down to the very edge of the level.
Then, concealment no more possible, and the rear of the herd still
beyond gunshot, he emerged boldly from the covert of a clump of
saplings and started in pursuit. At the sight of him, every antlered
head went up in the air for one moment of wondering alarm; then,
through a rolling white cloud the herd fled onward at a speed which
Pete, with all his knowledge of their powers, had not imagined
possible in such a state of the snow. Sullen, but not discouraged, he
plodded after them.

Noel was now fairly obsessed with the one idea of overtaking the herd.
Every other thought, sense, or faculty was dully occupied with his
hunger and his effort to keep from thinking of it. Hour after hour he
plodded on, following the wide, chaotic trail across the white silence
of the barren. There was nothing to lift his eyes for, so he kept them
automatically occupied in saving his strength by picking the easiest
steps through the ploughed snow. He did not notice at all that the sun
no longer sparkled over the waste. He did not notice that the sky had
turned from hard blue to ghostly pallor. He did not notice that the
wind, now blowing in his teeth, had greatly increased in force.
Suddenly, however, he was aroused by a swirl of fine snow driven so
fiercely that it crossed his face like a lash. Lifting his eyes from
the trail, he saw that the plain all about him was blotted from sight
by a streaming rout of snow-clouds. The wind was already whining its
strange derisive menace in his face. The blizzard had him.

As the