Crusts were covered with yards of new snow, that crusted and were snow-covered again.  There were places, in canyon- and pocket-drifts, where they crossed snow hundreds of feet deep, and they crossed tiny glaciers, in drafty rifts, wind-scurried and bare of any snow.  They crept like silent wraiths across the faces of impending avalanches, or roused from exhausted sleep to the thunder of them.  They made fireless camps above timber-line, thawing their meat-rations with the heat of their bodies ere they could eat.  And through it all Labiskwee remained Labiskwee.  Her cheer never vanished, save when she looked at McCan, and the greatest stupor of fatigue and cold never stilled the eloquence of her love for Smoke.

Like a cat she watched the apportionment of the meager ration, and Smoke could see that she grudged McCan every munch of his jaws.  Once, she distributed the ration.  The first Smoke knew was a wild harangue of protest from McCan.  Not to him alone, but to herself, had she given a smaller portion than to Smoke.  After that, Smoke divided the meat himself.  Caught in a small avalanche one morning after a night of snow, and swept a hundred yards down the mountain, they emerged half-stifled and unhurt, but McCan emerged without his pack in which was all the flour.  A second and larger snow-slide buried it beyond hope of recovery.  After that, though the disaster had been through no fault of his, Labiskwee never looked at McCan, and Smoke knew it was because she dared not.

It was a morning, stark still, clear blue above, with white sun-dazzle on the snow.  The way led up a long, wide slope of crust.  They moved like weary ghosts in a dead world.  No wind stirred in the stagnant, frigid calm.  Far peaks, a hundred miles away, studding the backbone of the Rockies up and down, were as distinct as if no more than five miles away.

“Something is going to happen,” Labiskwee whispered.  “Don’t you feel it?—­here, there, everywhere?  Everything is strange.”

“I feel a chill that is not of cold,” Smoke answered.  “Nor is it of hunger.”

“It is in your head, your heart,” she agreed excitedly.  “That is the way I feel it.”

“It is not of my senses,” Smoke diagnosed.  “I sense something, from without, that is tingling me with ice; it is a chill of my nerves.”

A quarter of an hour later they paused for breath.

“I can no longer see the far peaks,” Smoke said.

“The air is getting thick and heavy,” said Labiskwee.  “It is hard to breathe.”

“There be three suns,” McCan muttered hoarsely, reeling as he clung to his staff for support.

There was a mock sun on either side of the real sun.

“There are five,” said Labiskwee; and as they looked, new suns formed and flashed before their eyes.

“By Heaven, the sky is filled with suns beyant all countin’,” McCan cried in fear.

Which was true, for look where they would, half the circle of the sky dazzled and blazed with new suns forming.