mouth of the cavern should have been was a drift ten feet deep.  Cold and hungry, thinned by his days and nights of fasting, and with his last hope of comradeship shattered by the pitiless mountains of snow, Miki turned back over his trail.  There was nothing left for him now but the old windfall, and his heart was no longer the heart of the joyous comrade and brother of Neewa, the bear.  His feet were sore and bleeding, but still he went on.  The stars came out; the night was ghostly white in their pale fire; and it was cold—­terribly cold.  The trees began to snap.  Now and then there came a report like a pistol-shot as the frost snapped at the heart of timber.  It was thirty degrees below zero.  And it was growing colder.  With the windfall as his only inspiration Miki drove himself on.  Never had he tested his strength or his endurance as he strained them now.  Older dogs would have fallen in the trail or have sought shelter or rest.  But Miki was the true son of Hela, his giant Mackenzie hound father, and he would have continued until he triumphed—­or died.

But a strange thing happened.  He had travelled twenty miles to the ridge, and fifteen of the twenty miles back, when a shelf of snow gave way under his feet and he was pitched suddenly downward.  When he gathered his dazed wits and stood up on his half frozen legs he found himself in a curious place.  He had rolled completely into a wigwam-shaped shelter of spruce boughs and sticks, and strong in his nostrils was the smell of meat.  He found the meat not more than a foot from the end of his nose.  It was a chunk of frozen caribou flesh transfixed on a stick, and without questioning the manner of its presence he gnawed at it ravenously.  Only Jacques Le Beau, who lived eight or ten miles to the east, could have explained the situation.  Miki had rolled into one of his trap-houses, and it was the bait he was eating.

There was not much of it, but it fired Miki’s blood with new life.  There was smell in his nostrils now, and he began clawing in the snow.  After a little his teeth struck something hard and cold.  It was steel—­a fisher trap.  He dragged it up from under a foot of snow, and with it came a huge rabbit.  The snow had so protected the rabbit that, although several days dead, it was not frozen stiff.  Not until the last bone of it was gone did Miki’s feast end.  He even devoured the head.  Then he went on to the windfall, and in his warm nest slept until another day.

That day Jacques Le Beau—­whom the Indians called “Muchet-ta-aao” (the One with an Evil Heart)—­went over his trapline and rebuilt his snow-smothered “houses” and re-set his traps.