in every whiff of the
wind. It was in the third week of Challoner's stay at the cabin, the
day which marked the end of the cold spell and the beginning of warm
weather, that Miki came upon an old dead-fall in a swamp a full ten
miles from the clearing. Le Beau had set it for lynx, but nothing had
touched the bait, which was a chunk of caribou flesh, frozen solid as a
rock. Curiously Miki began smelling of it. He no longer feared danger.
Menace had gone out of his world. He nibbled. He pulled--and the log
crashed down to break his back. Only by a little did it fail. For
twenty-four hours it held him helpless and crippled. Then, fighting
through all those hours, he dragged himself out from under it. With the
rising temperature a soft snow had fallen, covering all tracks and
trails. Through this snow Miki dragged himself, leaving a path like
that of an otter in the mud, for his hind quarters were helpless. His
back was not broken; it was temporarily paralyzed by the blow and the
weight of the log.

He made in the direction of the cabin, but every foot that he dragged
himself was filled with agony, and his progress was so slow that at the
end of an hour he had not gone more than a quarter of a mile. Another
night found him less than two miles from the deadfall. He pulled
himself under a shelter of brush and lay there until dawn. All through
that day he did not move. The next, which was the fourth since he had
left the cabin to hunt, the pain in his back was not so great. But he
could pull himself through the snow only a few yards at a time. Again
the good spirit of the forests favoured him for in the afternoon he
came upon the partly eaten carcass of a buck killed by the wolves. The
flesh was frozen but he gnawed at it ravenously. Then he found himself
a shelter under a mass of fallen tree-tops, and for ten days thereafter
he lay between life and death. He would have died had it not been for
the buck. To the carcass he managed to drag himself, sometimes each day
and sometimes every other day, and kept himself from starving. It was
the end of the second week before he could stand well on his feet. The
fifteenth day he returned to the cabin.

In the edge of the clearing there fell upon him slowly a foreboding of
great change. The cabin was there. It was no different than it had been
fifteen days ago. But out of the chimney there came no smoke, and the
windows were white with frost. About it the snow lay clean and white,
lik