Philip drew a deep breath.  He was learning new things about Bram Johnson.  First he assured himself that Bram was not afraid, and that his disappearance could not be called a flight.  If fear of capture had possessed him he would not have returned for his meat.  Suddenly he recalled Pierre Breault’s story of how Bram had carried off the haunches of a bull upon his shoulders as easily as a child might have carried a toy gun, and he wondered why Bram—­ instead of returning for the meat this night—­had not carried the meat to his sledge.  It would have saved time and distance.  He was beginning to give Bram credit for a deeply mysterious strategy.  There was some definite reason why he had not made an attack with his wolves that night.  There was a reason for the wide detour around the point of timber, and there was a still more inexplicable reason why he had come back with his sledge for the meat, instead of carrying his meat to the sledge.  The caribou haunch had not weighed more than sixty or seventy pounds, which was scarcely half a burden for Bram’s powerful shoulders.

In the edge of the timber, where he could secure wood for his fire, Philip began to prepare.  He cooked food for six days.  Three days he would follow Bram out into that unmapped and treeless space—­the Great Barren.  Beyond that it would be impossible to go without dogs or sledge.  Three days out, and three days back—­and even at that he would be playing a thrilling game with death.  In the heart of the Barren a menace greater than Bram and his wolves would be impending.  It was storm.

His heart sank a little as he set out straight north, marking the direction by the point of his compass.  It was a gray and sunless day.  Beyond him for a distance the Barren was a white plain, and this plain seemed always to be merging not very far ahead into the purple haze of the sky.  At the end of an hour he was in the center of a vast amphitheater which was filled with the gloom and the stillness of death.  Behind him the thin fringe of the forest had disappeared.  The rim of the sky was like a leaden thing, widening only as he advanced.  Under that sky, and imprisoned within its circular walls, he knew that men had gone mad; he felt already the crushing oppression of an appalling loneliness, and for another hour he fought an almost irresistible desire to turn back.  Not a rock or a shrub rose to break the monotony, and over his head—­so low that at times it seemed as though he might have flung a stone up to them—­dark clouds rolled sullenly from out of the north and east.

Half a dozen times in those first two hours he looked at his compass.  Not once in that time did Bram diverge from his steady course into the north.  In the gray gloom, without a stone or a tree to mark his way, his sense of orientation was directing him as infallibly as the sensitive needle of the instrument which Philip carried.