The next morning Challoner's outfit of three teams and four men left
north and west for the Reindeer Lake country on the journey to his new
post at the mouth of the Cochrane. An hour later Challoner struck due
west with a light sledge and a five-dog team for the Jackson's Knee.
Behind him followed one of MacDonnell's Indians with the team that was
to bring Nanette to Fort O' God.

He saw nothing more of Durant and Grouse Piet, and accepted
MacDonnell's explanation that they had undoubtedly left the Post
shortly after their assault upon him in the cabin. No doubt their
disappearance had been hastened by the fact that a patrol of the Royal
Northwest Mounted Police on its way to York Factory was expected at
Fort O' God that day.

Not until the final moment of departure was Miki brought from the cabin
and tied to the gee-bar of Challoner's sledge. When he saw the five
dogs squatted on their haunches he grew rigid and the old snarl rose in
his throat. Under Challoner's quieting words he quickly came to
understand that these beasts were not enemies, and from a rather
suspicious toleration of them he very soon began to take a new sort of
interest in them. It was a friendly team, bred in the south and without
the wolf strain.

Events had come to pass so swiftly and so vividly in Miki's life during
the past twenty-four hours that for many miles after they left Fort O'
God his senses were in an unsettled state of anticipation. His brain
was filled with a jumble of strange and thrilling pictures. Very far
away, and almost indistinct, were the pictures of things that had
happened before he was made a prisoner by Jacques Le Beau. Even the
memory of Neewa was fading under the thrill of events at Nanette's
cabin and at Fort O' God. The pictures that blazed their way across his
brain now were of men, and dogs, and many other things that he had
never seen before. His world had suddenly transformed itself into a
host of Henri Durants and Grouse Piets and Jacques Le Beaus, two-legged
beasts who had clubbed him, and half killed him, and who had made him
fight to keep the life in his body. He had tasted their blood in his
vengeance. And he watched for them now. The pictures told him they were
everywhere. He could imagine them as countless as the wolves, and as he
had seen them crowded round the big cage in which he had slain the
wolf-dog.

In all of this excited and distorted world there was only one
Challoner, and one Nanette, and one