“Yes, yes,” she hastened to comfort what she supposed must be his distress, “I know.  But you turned back.”

She closed her eyes again and appeared to doze in a happy dream.  The North swooped above them like some greedy bird of prey.

Gradually in his isolation and stillness Dick began to feel this.  It grew on him little by little.  Within a few hours, by grace of suffering and of imminent death, he came into his woodsman’s heritage of imagination.  Men like Sam Bolton gained it by patient service, by living, by the slow accumulations of years, but in essence it remained the same.  Where before the young man had seen only the naked, material facts, now he felt the spiritual presence, the calm, ruthless, just, terrible Enemy, seeking no combat, avoiding none, conquering with a lofty air of predestination, inevitable, mighty.  His eyes were opened, like the prophet’s of old.  The North hovered over him almost palpable.  In the strange borderland of mingled illusion and reality where now he and starvation dwelt he thought sometimes to hear voices, the voices of his enemy’s triumph.

“Is it done?” they asked him, insistently.  “Is it over?  Are you beaten?  Is your stubborn spirit at last bowed down, humiliated, crushed?  Do you relinquish the prize,—­and the struggle?  Is it done?”

The girl stirred slightly in his arms.  He focussed his eyes.  Already the day had passed, and the first streamers of the aurora were crackling in the sky.  They reduced this day, this year, this generation of men to a pin-point in time.  The tragedy enacting itself on the snow amounted to nothing.  It would soon be over:  it occupied but one of many, many nights—­wherein the aurora would crackle and shoot forth and ebb back in precisely the same deathful, living way, as though the death of it were the death in this world, but the life of it were a thing celestial and alien.  The moment, to these three who perished the most important of all the infinite millions of millions that constitute time, was absolutely without special meaning to the wonderful, flaming, unearthly lights of the North.

Mack, the hound, lay in the position he had first assumed, his nose between his outstretched forepaws.  So he had lain all that day and that night.  So it seemed he must intend to lie until death took him.  For on this dreadful journey Mack had risen above the restrictions imposed by his status as a zoological species, had ceased to be merely a dog, and by virtue of steadfastness, of loyalty, of uncomplaining suffering, had entered into the higher estate of a living being that has fearlessly done his best in the world before his call to leave it.

The girl opened her eyes.

“Jibiwanisi,” she said, faintly, “the end is come.”

Agonized, Dick forced himself to consciousness of the landscape.  It contained moving figures in plenty.  One after the other he brought them within the focus of scrutiny and dissolved them into thin air.  If only the caribou herds—­