CHAPTER V

The night was so bright that the spruce trees cast vivid shadows on the snow.  Overhead there were a billion stars in a sky as dear as an open sea, and the Great Dipper shone like a constellation of tiny suns.  The world did not need a moon.  At a distance of three hundred yards Philip could have seen a caribou if it had passed.  He sat close to his fire, with the heat of it reflected from the blackened face of a huge rock, finishing the snare which had taken him an hour to weave.  For a long time he had been conscious of the curious, hissing monotone of the Aurora, the “music of the skies,” reaching out through the space of the earth with a purring sound that was at times like the purr of a cat and at others like the faint hum of a bee.  Absorbed in his work he did not, for a time, hear the other sound.  Not until he had finished, and was placing the golden snare in his wallet, did the one sound individualize and separate itself from the other.

He straightened himself suddenly, and listened.  Then he jumped to his feet and ran through fifty feet of low scrub to the edge of the white plain.

It was coming from off there, a great distance away.  Perhaps a mile.  It might be two.  The howling of wolves!

It was not a new or unusual sound to him.  He had listened to it many times during the last two years.  But never had it thrilled him as it did now, and he felt the blood leap in sudden swiftness through his body as the sound bore straight in his direction.  In a flash he remembered all that Pierre Breault had said.  Bram and his pack hunted like that.  And it was Bram who was coming.  He knew it.

He ran back to his tent and in what remained of the heat of the fire he warmed for a few moments the breech of his rifle.  Then he smothered the fire by kicking snow over it.  Returning to the edge of the plain, he posted himself near the largest spruce he could find, up which it would be possible for him to climb a dozen feet or so if necessity drove him to it.  And this necessity bore down upon him like the wind.  The pack, whether guided by man or beast, was driving straight at him, and it was less than a quarter of a mile away when Philip drew himself up in the spruce.  His breath came quick, and his heart was thumping like a drum, for as he climbed up the slender refuge that was scarcely larger in diameter than his arm he remembered the time when he had hung up a thousand pounds of moose meat on cedars as thick as his leg, and the wolves had come the next night and gnawed them through as if they had been paper.  From his unsteady perch ten feet off the ground he stared out into the starlit Barren.