The snow was drifted deep at the doorway, and here Baree sat down and whined.  It was no longer the anxious, questing whine of a few hours ago.  Now it voiced hopelessness and a deep despair.  For half an hour he sat shivering with his back to the door and his face to the starlit wilderness, as if there still remained the fleeting hope that Nepeese might follow after him over the trail.  Then he burrowed himself a hole deep in the snowdrift and passed the remainder of the night in uneasy slumber.

With the first light of day Baree resumed the trail.  He was not so alert this morning.  There was the disconsolate droop to his tail which the Indians call the Akoosewin—­the sign of the sick dog.  And Baree was sick—­not of body but of soul.  The keenness of his hope had died, and he no longer expected to find the Willow.  The second cabin at the far end of the trap line drew him on, but it inspired in him none of the enthusiasm with which he had hurried to the first.  He traveled slowly and spasmodically, his suspicions of the forests again replacing the excitement of his quest.  He approached each of Pierrot’s traps and the deadfalls cautiously, and twice he showed his fangs—­once at a marten that snapped at him from under a root where it had dragged the trap in which it was caught, and the second time at a big snowy owl that had come to steal bait and was now a prisoner at the end of a steel chain.  It may be that Baree thought it was Oohoomisew and that he still remembered vividly the treacherous assault and fierce battle of that night when, as a puppy, he was dragging his sore and wounded body through the mystery and fear of the big timber.  For he did more than to show his fangs.  He tore the owl into pieces.

There were plenty of rabbits in Pierrot’s traps, and Baree did not go hungry.  He reached the second trap-line cabin late in the afternoon, after ten hours of traveling.  He met with no very great disappointment here, for he had not anticipated very much.  The snow had banked this cabin even higher than the other.  It lay three feet deep against the door, and the window was white with a thick coating of frost.  At this place, which was close to the edge of a big barren, and unsheltered by the thick forests farther back, Pierrot had built a shelter for his firewood, and in this shelter Baree made his temporary home.  All the next day he remained somewhere near the end of the trap line, skirting the edge of the barren and investigating the short side line of a dozen traps which Pierrot and Nepeese had strung through a swamp in which there had been many signs of lynx.  It was the third day before he set out on his return to the Gray Loon.

He did not travel very fast, spending two days in covering the twenty-five miles between the first and the second trap-line cabins.  At the second cabin he remained for three days, and it was on the ninth day that he reached the Gray Loon.  There was no change.  There were no tracks in the snow but his own, made nine days ago.