izing an arm in her jaws, she dragged Marcel from his rabbit-skin
blankets.

As he sat upright, wide awake, Fleur sniffed long at the frosty air,
then dashed yelping into the dusk up the trail toward the barren.
Turning, she ran back to camp, whining excitedly.

"Tiens! W'at you smell, Fleur?" cried Marcel tearing his rifle with
shaking hands from its skin case and cramming cartridges into a pocket.
Could it be, he wondered, could it be the deer at last? No, only a
starving wolf or lynx, prowling near the camp, likely. But still he
would go! The love of life was yet strong in Jean Marcel now that a
gleam of hope warmed his heart.

Slipping his toes into the thongs of his snow-shoes, he made Fleur fast
to a tree, and started. He was so weak from lack of food that often he
was forced to stop in the climb, shaken by his hammering heart. At last,
exhausted, he dragged himself to the shoulder of the barren and on
unsteady legs moved along the edge of the scrub, his eyes straining to
pierce the wall of dusk which shut the plateau from his sight. But the
shadows still blanketed the barren; so testing the light wind, that he
might move directly out toward the game when the light grew stronger, he
sat down to save his strength for the stalk. Only too clearly, his
weakness warned him that it was his last hunt. By another day, even
though he managed the climb, his trembling hands would prevent the
lining of his sights on game.

As opal and rose faintly streaked the east, the teeth of the hunter,
waiting to read the fate daylight would disclose, chattered in the
stinging air. But a space now, and he would know whether he were to
creep back to his blankets and wait for stark despair to steady the hand
which would bring swift release for Fleur and himself, or whether meat,
food, life, were scraping with round-toed hooves the snow from the
caribou moss out there in the dim dawn.

Daylight filtered over the floor of snow to meet Marcel lying at the top
of a rise out on the barren, waiting. As the light at length opened up
the treeless miles, a sob shook the lean frame of the hunter. Tears
welled in the deep-set eyes to course down and freeze upon his face, for
there, on the snow before him, were the _blue-gray shapes of caribou_.

Three deer were feeding almost within range while farther out, gray
patches, moving on the snow, marked other bands. At last the spring
migration had reached him, and barely in time. He would see Whale