hissing monotone of the aurora, like the song of a vast piece of mechanism in the still farther north.  Toward this Wapi turned his bruised and beaten head.  Out there, just beyond the ghostly pale of vision, was the ship.  Fifty times he had slunk out and around it, cautiously as the foxes themselves.  He had caught its smells and its sounds; he had come near enough to hear the voices of men, and those voices were like the voice of Blake, his master.  Therefore, he had never gone nearer.

There was a change in him now.  His big pads fell noiselessly as he slunk back to the cabin and sniffed for a scent in the snow.  He found it.  It was the trail of the white woman.  His blood tingled again, as it had tingled when her face bent over him and her hand reached out, and in his soul there rose up the ghost of Tao to whip him on.  He followed the woman’s footprints slowly, stopping now and then to listen, and each moment the spirit in him grew more insistent, and he whined up at the stars.  At last he saw the ship, a wraithlike thing in its piled-up bed of ice, and he stopped.  This was his dead-line.  He had never gone nearer.  But tonight—­if any one period could be called night—­he went on.

It was the hour of sleep, and there was no sound aboard.  The foxes, never tiring of their infuriating sport, were yapping at the ship.  They barked faster and louder when they caught the scent of Wapi, and as he approached, they drifted farther away.  The scent of the woman’s trail led up the wide bridge of ice, and Wapi followed this as he would have followed a road, until he found himself all at once on the deck of the Flying Moon.  For a space he was startled.  His long fangs bared themselves at the shadows cast by the stars.  Then he saw ahead of him a narrow ribbon of yellow light.  Toward this Wapi sniffed out, step by step, the footprints of the woman.  When he stopped again, his muzzle was at the narrow crack through which came the glimmer of light.

It was the door of a deck-house veneered like an igloo with snow and ice to protect it from cold and wind.  It was, perhaps, half an inch ajar, and through that aperture Wapi drank the warm, sweet perfume of the woman.  With it he caught also the smell of a man.  But in him the woman scent submerged all else.  Overwhelmed by it, he stood trembling, not daring to move, every inch of him thrilled by a vast and mysterious yearning.  He was no longer Wapi, the Walrus; Wapi, the Killer.  Tao was there.  And it may be that the spirit of Shan Tung was there.  For after forty years the change had come, and Wapi, as he stood at the woman’s door, was just dog,—­a white man’s dog—­again the dog of the Vancouver kennel—­the dog of a white man’s world.

He thrust open the door with his nose.  He slunk in, so silently that he was not heard.  The cabin was lighted.  In a bed lay a white-faced, hollow-cheeked man—­awake.  On a low stool at his side sat a woman.  The light of the lamp hanging from above warmed with gold fires the thick and radiant mass of her hair.  She was leaning over the sick man.  One slim, white hand was stroking his face gently, and she was speaking to him in a voice so sweet and soft that it stirred like wonderful music in Wapi’s warped and beaten soul.  And then, with a great sigh, he flopped down, an abject slave, on the edge of her dress.