“Mush!—­Mush on!” shouted Sam.

The four dogs leaned into their collars.  The sledge creaked free of its frost anchorage and moved.

First it became necessary to drop from the elevation to the river-bed.  Dick and May-may-gwan clung desperately.  Sam exercised his utmost skill and agility to keep the dogs straight.  The toboggan hovered an instant over the edge of the bank, then plunged, coasting down.  Men hung back, dogs ran to keep ahead.  A smother of light snow settled to show, in the dim starlight, the furrow of descent.  And on the broad, white surface of the river were eight spot of black which represented the followers of the Long Trail.

Dick shook himself and stepped ahead of the dogs.

“Mush!  Mush on!” commanded Sam again.

Dick ran on steadily in the soft snow, swinging his entire weight now on one foot, now on the other, passing the snow-shoes with the peculiar stiff swing of the ankle, throwing his heel strongly downward at each step in order to take advantage of the long snow-shoe tails’ elasticity.  At each step he sank deep into the feathery snow.  The runner was forced to lift the toe of the shoe sharply, and the snow swirled past his ankles like foam.  Behind him, in the trail thus broken and packed for them, trotted the dogs, their noses low, their jaws hanging.  Sam drove with two long-lashed whips; and May-may-gwan, clinging to the gee-pole, guided the sledge.

In the absolute and dead stillness of a winter morning before the dawn the little train went like ghosts in a mist of starlight.  The strange glimmering that seems at such an hour to disengage from the snow itself served merely to establish the separate bulks of that which moved across it.  The bending figure of the man breaking trail, his head low, his body moving in its swing with the regularity of a pendulum; the four wolf-like dogs, also bending easily to what was not a great labour, the line of their open jaws and lolling tongues cut out against the snow; another human figure; the low, dark mass of the sledge; and again the bending figure at the rear,—­all these contrasted in their half-blurred uncertainty of outline and the suggested motion of their attitude with the straight, clear silhouette of the spruce-trees against the sky.

Also the sounds of their travelling offered an analogous contrast.  The dull crunch, crunch, crunch of the snow-shoes, the breathing of the living beings, the glither and creak of the sledge came to the ear blurred and confused; utterly unlike the cameo stillness of the winter dawn.

Ten minutes of the really violent exertion of breaking trail warmed Dick through.  His fingers ceased their protest.  Each breath, blowing to steam, turned almost immediately to frost.  He threw back the hood of his capote, for he knew that should it become wet from the moisture of his breath, it would freeze his skin, and with his violent exertions exposure to the air was nothing.  In a short time his eyebrows and eyelashes became heavy with ice.  Then slowly the moisture of his body, working outward through the wool of his clothing, frosted on the surface, so that gradually as time went on he grew to look more and more like a great white-furred animal.