The inmates of the little camp waited.  Each morning Dick was early afoot searching the signs of the weather; examining the ice that crept stealthily from shore, waiting to pounce upon and imprison the stream; speculating on the chances of an early season.  The frost pinched his bare fingers severely, but he did not mind that.  His leg was by now almost as strong as ever, and he was impatient to be away, to leave behind him this rapid that had gained over him even a temporary victory.  Always as the time approached, his spirits rose.  It would have been difficult to identify this laughing boy with the sullen and terrible man who had sulked through the summer.  He had made friends with all the dogs.  Even the fierce “huskies” had become tame, and liked to be upset and tousled about and dragged on their backs growling fierce but mock protest.  The bitch he had named Claire; the hound with the long ears he had called Mack, because of a fancied and mournful likeness to MacDonald, the Chief Trader; the other “husky” he had christened Wolf, for obvious reasons; and there remained, of course, the original Billy.  Dick took charge of the feeding.  At first he needed his short, heavy whip to preserve order, but shortly his really admirable gift with animals gained way, and he had them sitting peacefully in a row awaiting each his turn.

At last the skim ice made it impossible longer to use the canoe in fishing on the river.  The craft was, therefore, suspended bottom up between two trees.  A little snow fell and remained, but was speedily swept into hollows.  The temperature lowered.  It became necessary to assume thicker garments.  Once having bridged the river the ice strengthened rapidly.  And then late one afternoon, on the wings of the northwest wind, came the snow.  All night it howled past the trembling wigwam.  All the next day it swirled and drifted and took the shapes of fantastic monsters leaping in the riot of the storm.  Then the stars, cold and brilliant, once more crackled in the heavens.  The wilderness in a single twenty-four hours had changed utterly.  Winter had come.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

In the starlit, bitter cold of a north country morning the three packed their sledge and harnessed their dogs.  The rawhide was stubborn with the frost, the dogs uneasy.  Knots would not tie.  Pain nipped the fingers, cruel pain that ate in and in until it had exposed to the shock of little contacts every tightened nerve.  Each stiff, clumsy movement was agony.  From time to time one of the three thrust hand in mitten to beat the freezing back.  Then a new red torture surged to the very finger-tips.  They bore it in silence, working hastily, knowing that every morning of the long, winter trip this fearful hour must come.  Thus each day the North would greet them, squeezing their fingers in the cruel hand-clasp of an antagonist testing their strength.

Over the supplies and blankets was drawn the skin envelope laced to the sledge.  The last reluctant knot was tied.  Billy, the leader of the four dogs, casting an intelligent eye at his masters, knew that all was ready, and so arose from his haunches.  Dick twisted his feet skilfully into the loops of his snow-shoes.  Sam, already equipped, seized the heavy dog-whip.  The girl took charge of the gee-pole with which the sledge would be guided.