And Bill, despite the flame of desire in his bowels, just nosed and tasted, eating no more than an ordinary workaday ration.  Long before the final stage of bone-gnawing he actually walked away and curled himself down at the roots of a big spruce where the ground rose slightly, some fifty paces distant from the place of orgy.

A couple of hundred yards away, by the shelter of their fire, Jean and Jake composed themselves to rest and smoke; for they also had fed full.  One by one even the lustiest of the dogs forsook the bones, drawing back heavily, lazily licking their chops.  The dense calm of satiety descended slowly upon all the visible life-shapes in that place like the fumes of some potent narcotic—­upon all forms of life save one.  Bill, curled at the root of his spruce, had within him a blazing fire of life and activity which no earthly force could slake while his breath remained to fan it.  But the rest of the world slept.

The moon that night was too young to shed much light.  But just after Jean and Jake sleepily laid aside their pipes and closed their eyes, the aurora borealis flamed out icily in a clear sky, bringing more than all the light Bill needed.  In that frozen stillness Bill’s brain was like the interior of a lighted factory with all its machinery in full swing.  Fed by hate and slowly accumulated stores of bitter anger, his thoughts went throbbing in and out the lighted convolutions of his brain with the silent positive efficiency of a gas-engine’s pistons.

Bill understood everything in the world that night in his own world, and he overlooked nothing.  He would have given much, very much, to have been able to remove Jean’s camp a mile or so away.  The belt of open snow-space between it and him was all too narrow for his liking.  Well he knew how swiftly Jean could move, how certainly he could strike when the need arose.  But for this Bill had done murder that night, as surely as ever softly treading human desperado in the dead of night has done murder at a bedside.  As it was he thought he must fight.  Well, he was prepared.  Nay, his bowels yearned for it just as strongly as any dog’s bowels had yearned for fresh-killed meat that night.  More strongly, for in him the one yearning had mastered and ridden down the other yearning, thus giving him his perfect preparation.

The full-fed team-dogs had been too idle that night to dig out proper sleeping-nests for themselves in the snow.  A mere circling whisp of head and tail and feet had served them, and the upper half of Jan’s magnificent frame lay fully exposed halfway down the slope from Bill’s tree.  Very deliberately now Bill rose, and moved toward Jan, walking with dainty, springy steps like a cat at play.  In all that countryside Bill possessed an absolute monopoly of springiness and elasticity.  But, at their most sluggish, dogs in the northland are, of course, more alert than the home-staying dogs of civilization.  Snip snarled fatly as Bill passed with his catlike tread.  Jan, the crimson haw of one eye gleaming as its lid lifted, growled savagely but low as Bill approached him.  His big limbs twitched convulsively and the hair about his shoulders stiffened; but so grossly full-fed was he that he did not rise, though the note of his growl ascended toward that of a snarl as Bill came nearer.