For a full minute they crouched there, breathless, waiting.

“They’ve gone!” broke Wabi in a tense whisper.

“I got one of them!” replied Rod, his voice trembling with excitement.

Mukoki slipped back and burrowed a hole through the side of the shelter.  He could see nothing.  Slowly he slipped out, his rifle ready.  The others could hear him as he went.  Foot by foot the old warrior slunk along in the deep gloom toward the end of the rock.  Now he was almost there, now—­

The young hunters saw him suddenly straighten.  There came to them a low chuckling grunt.  He bent over, seized an object, and flung it in the light of the fire.

“Heap big Woonga!  Kill nice fat lynx!”

With a wail, half feigned, half real, Rod flung himself back upon the balsam while Wabi set up a roar that made the night echo.  Mukoki’s face was creased in a broad grin.

“Heap big Woonga—­heem!” he repeated, chuckling.  “Nice fat lynx shot well in face.  No look like bad man Woonga to Mukoki!”

When Rod finally emerged from his den to join the others his face was flushed and wore what Wabi described as a “sheepish grin.”

“It’s all right for you fellows to make fun of me,” he declared.  “But what if they had been Woongas?  By George, if we’re ever attacked again I won’t do a thing.  I’ll let you fellows fight ’em off!”

In spite of the general merriment at his expense, Rod was immensely proud of his first lynx.  It was an enormous creature of its kind, drawn by hunger to the scraps of the camp-fire feast; and it was this animal, as it cautiously inspected the camp, that the young hunter had heard crunching in the snow.  Wolf, whose instinct had told him what a mix-up would mean, had slunk into his shelter without betraying his whereabouts to this arch-enemy of his tribe.

With the craft of his race, Mukoki was skinning the animal while it was still warm.

“You go back bed,” he said to his companions.  “I build big fire again—­then sleep.”

The excitement of his adventure at least freed Rod from the unpleasantness of further dreams, and it was late the following morning before he awoke again.  He was astonished to find that a beautiful sun was shining.  Wabi and the old Indian were already outside preparing breakfast, and the cheerful whistling of the former assured Rod that there was now little to be feared from the Woongas.  Without lingering to take a beauty nap he joined them.

Everywhere about them lay white winter.  The rocks, the trees, and the mountain behind them were covered with two feet of snow and upon it the sun shone with dazzling brilliancy.  But it was not until Rod looked into the north that he saw the wilderness in all of its grandeur.  The camp had been made at the extreme point of the ridge, and stretching away under his eyes, mile after mile, was the vast white desolation that reached to Hudson Bay.  In speechless