“Did you know he’d discovered a fossil elephant?”

“No.”

“Well, he has.  I must light out, too, and have a look at it.”

“Do; it’ll be a cheerful sort of House-Warming with one of you off scouring the country for more blisters and chilblains, and another huntin’ antediluvian elephants.”  The Colonel spoke with uncommon irascibility.  The great feast-day had certainly not dawned propitiously.

When breakfast was done Mac left the Big Cabin without a word; but, instead of going over the divide across the treeless snow-waste to the little frozen river, where, turned up to the pale northern dawn, were lying the bones of a beast that had trampled tropic forests, in that other dawn of the Prime, the naturalist, turning his back on Elephas primigenius, followed in the track of the Boy down the great river towards Ikogimeut.

* * * * *

On the low left bank of the Yukon a little camp.  On one side, a big rock hooded with snow.  At right angles, drawn up one on top of the other, two sleds covered with reindeer-skins held down by stones.  In the corner formed by the angle of rocks and sleds, a small A-tent, very stained and old.  Burning before it on a hearth of greenwood, a little fire struggling with a veering wind.

Mac had seen from far off the faint blue banners of smoke blowing now right, now left, then tossed aloft in the pallid sunshine.  He looked about sharply for the Boy, as he had been doing this two hours.  There was the Jesuit bending over the fire, bettering the precarious position of a saucepan that insisted on sitting lop-sided, looking down into the heart of coals.  Nicholas was holding up the tent-flap.

“Hello!  How do!” he sang out, recognising Mac.  The priest glanced up and nodded pleasantly.  Two Indians, squatting on the other side of the fire, scrambled away as the shifting wind brought a cloud of stifling smoke into their faces.  “Where’s the Boy?” demanded Mac, arresting the stampede.

Nicholas’s dog-driver stared, winked, and wiped his weeping, smoke-reddened eyes.

“Is he in there?” Mac looked towards the tent.

Andrew nodded between coughs.

“What’s he doing in there?  Call him out,” ordered Mac.

“He no walk.”

Mac’s hard face took on a look of cast-iron tragedy.

The wind, veering round again, had brought the last words to the priest on the other side of the fire.

“Oh, it’ll be all right by-and-by,” he said cheerfully.

“But knocking up like that just for blisters?”

“Blisters?  No; cold and general weakness.  That’s why we delayed—­”

Without waiting to hear more Mac strode over to the tent, and as he went in, Nicholas came out.  No sign of the Boy—­nobody, nothing.  What?  Down in the corner a small, yellow face lying in a nest of fur.  Bright, dark eyes stared roundly, and as Mac glowered astonished at the apparition, a mouth full of gleaming teeth opened, smiling, to say in a very small voice: