But Labiskwee, without speaking, pointed down to an open flat among the trees.  In the midst of it, scattered abreast, were five dark specks that scarcely moved.

“The young men,” said Labiskwee.

“They are wallowing to their hips,” Smoke said.  “They will never gain the hard footing this day.  We have hours the start of them.  Come on, McCan.  Buck up.  We don’t eat till we can’t travel.”

McCan groaned, but there was no caribou suet in his pocket, and he doggedly brought up the rear.

In the higher valley in which they now found themselves, the crust did not break till three in the afternoon, at which time they managed to gain the shadow of a mountain where the crust was already freezing again.  Once only they paused to get out McCan’s confiscated suet, which they ate as they walked.  The meat was frozen solid, and could be eaten only after thawing over a fire.  But the suet crumbled in their mouths and eased the palpitating faintness in their stomachs.

Black darkness, with an overcast sky, came on after a long twilight at nine o’clock, when they made camp in a clump of dwarf spruce.  McCan was whining and helpless.  The day’s march had been exhausting, but in addition, despite his nine years’ experience in the arctic, he had been eating snow and was in agony with his parched and burning mouth.  He crouched by the fire and groaned, while they made the camp.

Labiskwee was tireless, and Smoke could not but marvel at the life in her body, at the endurance of mind and muscle.  Nor was her cheerfulness forced.  She had ever a laugh or a smile for him, and her hand lingered in caress whenever it chanced to touch his.  Yet, always, when she looked at McCan, her face went hard and pitiless and her eyes flashed frostily.

In the night came wind and snow, and through a day of blizzard they fought their way blindly, missing the turn of the way that led up a small stream and crossed a divide to the west.  For two more days they wandered, crossing other and wrong divides, and in those two days they dropped spring behind and climbed up into the abode of winter.

“The young men have lost our trail, an’ what’s to stop us restin’ a day?” McCan begged.

But no rest was accorded.  Smoke and Labiskwee knew their danger.  They were lost in the high mountains, and they had seen no game nor signs of game.  Day after day they struggled on through an iron configuration of landscape that compelled them to labyrinthine canyons and valleys that led rarely to the west.  Once in such a canyon, they could only follow it, no matter where it led, for the cold peaks and higher ranges on either side were unscalable and unendurable.  The terrible toil and the cold ate up energy, yet they cut down the size of the ration they permitted themselves.

One night Smoke was awakened by a sound of struggling.  Distinctly he heard a gasping and strangling from where McCan slept.  Kicking the fire into flame, by its light he saw Labiskwee, her hands at the Irishman’s throat and forcing from his mouth a chunk of partly chewed meat.  Even as Smoke saw this, her hand went to her hip and flashed with the sheath-knife in it.