Daylight found them in the belt of foothills that lay between the rolling country and the mountains.  McCan suggested breakfast, but they held on.  Not until the afternoon thaw softened the crust and prevented travel would they eat.

The foothills quickly grew rugged, and the stream, up whose frozen bed they journeyed, began to thread deeper and deeper canyons.  The signs of spring were less frequent, though in one canyon they found foaming bits of open water, and twice they came upon clumps of dwarf willow upon which were the first hints of swelling buds.

Labiskwee explained to Smoke her knowledge of the country and the way she planned to baffle pursuit.  There were but two ways out, one west, the other south.  Snass would immediately dispatch parties of young men to guard the two trails.  But there was another way south.  True, it did no more than penetrate half-way into the high mountains, then, twisting to the west and crossing three divides, it joined the regular trail.  When the young men found no traces on the regular trail they would turn back in the belief that the escape had been made by the west traverse, never dreaming that the runaways had ventured the harder and longer way around.

Glancing back at McCan, in the rear, Labiskwee spoke in an undertone to Smoke.  “He is eating,” she said.  “It is not good.”

Smoke looked.  The Irishman was secretly munching caribou suet from the pocketful he carried.

“No eating between meals, McCan,” he commanded.  “There’s no game in the country ahead, and the grub will have to be whacked in equal rations from the start.  The only way you can travel with us is by playing fair.”

By one o’clock the crust had thawed so that the skees broke through, and before two o’clock the web-shoes were breaking through.  Camp was made and the first meal eaten.  Smoke took stock of the food.  McCan’s supply was a disappointment.  So many silver fox-skins had he stuffed in the bottom of the meat bag that there was little space left for meat.

“Sure an’ I didn’t know there was so many,” he explained.  “I done it in the dark.  But they’re worth good money.  An’ with all this ammunition we’ll be gettin’ game a-plenty.”

“The wolves will eat you a-plenty,” was Smoke’s hopeless comment, while Labiskwee’s eyes flashed their anger.

Enough food for a month, with careful husbanding and appetites that never blunted their edge, was Smoke’s and Labiskwee’s judgment.  Smoke apportioned the weight and bulk of the packs, yielding in the end to Labiskwee’s insistence that she, too, should carry a pack.

Next day the stream shallowed out in a wide mountain valley, and they were already breaking through the crust on the flats when they gained the harder surface of the slope of the divide.

“Ten minutes later and we wouldn’t have got across the flats,” Smoke said, when they paused for breath on the bald crest of the summit.  “We must be a thousand feet higher here.”