cheer
them, the hunters sat down in their snug cabin to wait many months for
daylight.

Those few intervals when the wind did not blow were the only times Rea
and Jones got out of doors. To the plainsman, new to the north, the dim
gray world about him was of exceeding interest. Out of the twilight
shone a wan, round, lusterless ring that Rea said was the sun. The
silence and desolation were heart-numbing.

"Where are the wolves?" asked Jones of Rea.

"Wolves can't live on snow. They're farther south after caribou, or
farther north after musk-ox."

In those few still intervals Jones remained out as long as he dared,
with the mercury sinking to -sixty degrees. He turned from the wonder
of the unreal, remote sun, to the marvel in the north--Aurora
borealis--ever-present, ever-changing, ever-beautiful! and he gazed in
rapt attention.

"Polar lights," said Rea, as if he were speaking of biscuits. "You'll
freeze. It's gettin' cold."

Cold it became, to the matter of -seventy degrees. Frost covered the
walls of the cabin and the roof, except just over the fire. The
reindeer were harder than iron. A knife or an ax or a steel-trap burned
as if it had been heated in fire, and stuck to the hand. The hunters
experienced trouble in breathing; the air hurt their lungs.

The months dragged. Rea grew more silent day by day, and as he sat
before the fire his wide shoulders sagged lower and lower. Jones,
unaccustomed to the waiting, the restraint, the barrier of the north,
worked on guns, sleds, harness, till he felt he would go mad. Then to
save his mind he constructed a windmill of caribou hides and pondered
over it trying to invent, to put into practical use an idea he had once
conceived.

Hour after hour he lay under his blankets unable to sleep, and listened
to the north wind. Sometimes Rea mumbled in his slumbers; once his
giant form started up, and he muttered a woman's name. Shadows from the
fire flickered on the walls, visionary, spectral shadows, cold and
gray, fitting the north. At such times he longed with all the power of
his soul to be among those scenes far southward, which he called home.
For days Rea never spoke a word, only gazed into the fire, ate and
slept. Jones, drifting far from his real self, feared the strange mood
of the trapper and sought to break it, but without avail. More and more
he reproached himself, and singularly on the one fact that, as he did
not smoke himself, he had brought only a small