Hours passed certainly, hours upon hours, and still, his breath coming quickly and less easily now with every mile, Gulo stuck to the job of putting the landscape behind him with that grim pertinacity of his that was almost fine.

At last the trees stopped abruptly, and he was heading, straighter than crows fly, across a plain.  The plain undulated a little, like a sea, a dead sea, of spotless white, with nothing alive upon it—­only his hunched, slouching, untidy, squat form and his shadow, “pacing” him.  At the top of the highest undulation he stopped, and glowered back along the trail.

Ahead, the forest, starting again, showed as a black band a quarter of an inch high.  Behind, the forest he had already left lay dwarfed in a ruled, serried line.  But that was not all.  Something was moving out upon the spotless plain of snow, something which appeared to be no more than crawling, ant-like, but was really traveling very fast.  It looked like a smudged dot, nothing more; but it was a horse, really, galloping hard, with a light sleigh, and a man in it, behind.  The horse had no bells, and it was not a reindeer as usual.  Pace was wanted here, and the snow was not deep enough to impede the horse, who possessed the required speed under such conditions.

The horse had been trotting along the trail, till it came to the place where Gulo had looked back and heard the sneeze, and knew he was being followed.  Then it had started to gallop, and, with ears back and teeth showing, had never ceased to gallop.  This, apparently, was not the first wolverine that horse had trailed.  It seemed to have a personal grudge against the whole fell clan of wolverine, and to be bent upon trampling Gulo to death.

Gulo watched it for about one quarter of a second.  Then he quitted, and the speed he had put up previously was nothing to that which he showed now—­uselessly.  And, far behind him, the man in the sleigh drew out his rifle from under the fur rugs.  He judged that the time had about come.  The end was very near.

But he judged wrong.  Gulo made the wood at length.  With eyes of dull red, and breath coming in short, rending sobs, he got in among the trees.  He did it, though the feat seemed impossible, for the trees had been so very far away.  Got in among the trees—­yes, but dead-beat, and—­to what end?  To be “treed” ignominiously and calmly shot down, picked off like a squirrel on a larch-pole.  That was all.  And that was the orthodox end, the end the man took for granted.

In a few minutes the horse was in the forest too, was close behind Gulo.  In spite of the muffling effect of snow, his expectant ears could hear the quadruple thud of the galloping hoofs, and—­

Hup!  Whuff!  Biff-biff!  Grrrrrr!  Grr-ur-ururrh!  Grrrr-urr!