Nevertheless their souls made struggle, as did their bodies.  They fought down the feeling of illusion just as they had fought down the feelings of hunger, of weariness, and of cold.  Sam fashioned rough wooden spectacles with tiny transverse slits through which to look, and these they assumed against the snow-blindness.  They kept a sharp watch for freezing.  Already their faces were blackened and parched by the frost, and cracked through the thick skin down to the raw.  Sam had frozen his great toe, and had with his knife cut to the bone in order to prevent mortification.  They tried to talk a little in order to combat by unison of spirit the dreadful influence the North was bringing to bear.  They gained ten feet as a saint of the early church gained his soul for paradise.

Now it came to the point where they could no longer afford to eat their pemmican.  They boiled it, along with strips of the rawhide dog-harness, and drank the soup.  It sufficed not at all to appease the pain of their hunger, nor appreciably did it give them strength, but somehow it fed the vital spark.  They endured fearful cramps.  So far had their faculties lost vigour that only by a distinct effort of the will could they focus their eyes to the examination of any object.

Their obsessions of mind were now two.  They followed the Trail; they looked for the caribou herds.  After a time the improbability became tenuous.  They actually expected the impossible, felt defrauded at not obtaining it, cried out weakly against their ill fortune in not encountering the herd that was probably two thousand miles away.  In its withholding the North seemed to play unfairly.  She denied them the chances of the game.

And the Trail!  Not the freezing nor the starvation nor the illusion were so potent in the deeper discouragement of the spirit as that.  Always it led on.  They could see it; they could see its direction; that was all.  Tireless it ran on and on and on.  For all they knew the Indian, hearty and confident in his wilderness strength, might be watching them at every moment, laughing at the feeble thirty feet their pain bought them, gliding on swiftly in an hour farther than they could travel in a day.  This possibility persisted until, in their minds, it became the fact.  They endowed their enemy with all they themselves lacked; with strength, with swiftness, with the sustenance of life.  Yet never for a moment did it occur to them to abandon the pursuit.

Sam was growing uncertain in his movements; Dick was plainly going mad.  The girl followed; that was all one could say, for whatever suffering she proved was hidden beneath race stolidity, and more nobly beneath a great devotion.