“Labiskwee!” Smoke cried, and his voice was peremptory.

The hand hesitated.

“Don’t,” he said, coming to her side.

She was shaking with anger, but the hand, after hesitating a moment longer, descended reluctantly to the sheath.  As if fearing she could not restrain herself, she crossed to the fire and threw on more wood.  McCan sat up, whimpering and snarling, between fright and rage spluttering an inarticulate explanation.

“Where did you get it?” Smoke demanded.

“Feel around his body,” Labiskwee said.

It was the first word she had spoken, and her voice quivered with the anger she could not suppress.

McCan strove to struggle, but Smoke gripped him cruelly and searched him, drawing forth from under his armpit, where it had been thawed by the heat of his body, a strip of caribou meat.  A quick exclamation from Labiskwee drew Smoke’s attention.  She had sprung to McCan’s pack and was opening it.  Instead of meat, out poured moss, spruce-needles, chips—­all the light refuse that had taken the place of the meat and given the pack its due proportion minus its weight.

Again Labiskwee’s hand went to her hip, and she flew at the culprit only to be caught in Smoke’s arms, where she surrendered herself, sobbing with the futility of her rage.

“Oh, lover, it is not the food,” she panted.  “It is you, your life.  The dog!  He is eating you, he is eating you!”

“We will yet live,” Smoke comforted her.  “Hereafter he shall carry the flour.  He can’t eat that raw, and if he does I’ll kill him myself, for he will be eating your life as well as mine.”  He held her closer.  “Sweetheart, killing is men’s work.  Women do not kill.”

“You would not love me if I killed the dog?” she questioned in surprise.

“Not so much,” Smoke temporized.

She sighed with resignation.  “Very well,” she said.  “I shall not kill him.”

The pursuit by the young men was relentless.  By miracles of luck, as well as by deduction from the topography of the way the runaways must take, the young men picked up the blizzard-blinded trail and clung to it.  When the snow flew, Smoke and Labiskwee took the most improbable courses, turning east when the better way opened south or west, rejecting a low divide to climb a higher.  Being lost, it did not matter.  Yet they could not throw the young men off.  Sometimes they gained days, but always the young men appeared again.  After a storm, when all trace was lost, they would cast out like a pack of hounds, and he who caught the later trace made smoke signals to call his comrades on.

Smoke lost count of time, of days and nights and storms and camps.  Through a vast mad phantasmagoria of suffering and toil he and Labiskwee struggled on, with McCan somehow stumbling along in the rear, babbling of San Francisco, his everlasting dream.  Great peaks, pitiless and serene in the chill blue, towered about them.  They fled down black canyons with walls so precipitous that the rock frowned naked, or wallowed across glacial valleys where frozen lakes lay far beneath their feet.  And one night, between two storms, a distant volcano glared the sky.  They never saw it again, and wondered whether it had been a dream.