came and visions of his
dog lying somewhere stiff in the snow slashed and torn by wolves,
tortured his thoughts. If only he could pick up her trail at daylight,
he thought, for she might still live, crippled, unable to come to him,
waiting for Jean Marcel who had never failed her.

As he sat brooding by his fire, he came to realize, now that he had lost
her, what a part of him the dog had become. His thoughts drifted back
over their life together, months of gruelling toil and--delight. Tears
traced their way down the wind-burned cheeks of Marcel as he recalled
her early puppy ways and antics, how she had loved to nibble with her
sharp milk teeth at his moccasins and sit in the bow of the canoe, on
their way down the coast, scolding at the seals and ducks; with what mad
delight she had welcomed his visits to the stockade at Whale River
circling him at full speed, until breathless and panting, she leaped
upon him, her hot tongue seeking his hands and face. Then on the long
trail home from the south coast marshes, how closely she would snuggle
to his back as they lay on the beaches, as if fearing to lose him while
she slept. And the winter on the Ghost, with its ghastly end--what a
rock his dog had been when his partners failed him! In the moment of his
peril, how savagely she had battled for Jean Marcel! Through the lean
weeks of starvation when hope had died, to the dawn when she had waked
him at the coming of the caribou, his thoughts led him. And now, when
spring and Whale River were near, it was all over. Their life together
with its promise of the future had been snapped short off. He should
never again look into the slant, brown eyes of Fleur. He had lost his
all; first Julie, and now, Fleur. There was nothing left.

At daybreak, without hope, he took up the search along the stream. Where
the wind had driven, the crust now stiff with alternate freezing and
thawing and swept clean of snow, would show little sign of the passing
of the dog, but in the sheltered areas where the crust was softer and
the young snow lay, he hoped to cross the tracks of Fleur. At length,
miles from the camp, he picked up the trail of the dog in some light
drift. Following the tracks across the brook-bottom and into the scrub
of the opposite slope, he suddenly stopped, wide-eyed with amazement at
the evidence written plainly in the light covering of the crust. Fleur's
tracks had been joined by, and ran side by side with, the trail of a
wol