“I do not hear McCan,” Smoke said.  “And what has become of the young men that they have not found us?”

He threw back the robes and saw a normal and solitary sun in the sky.  A gentle breeze was blowing, crisp with frost and hinting of warmer days to come.  All the world was natural again.  McCan lay on his back, his unwashed face, swarthy from camp-smoke, frozen hard as marble.  The sight did not affect Labiskwee.

“Look!” she cried.  “A snow bird!  It is a good sign.”

There was no evidence of the young men.  Either they had died on the other side of the divide or they had turned back.

There was so little food that they dared not eat a tithe of what they needed, nor a hundredth part of what they desired, and in the days that followed, wandering through the lone mountain-land, the sharp sting of life grew blunted and the wandering merged half into a dream.  Smoke would become abruptly conscious, to find himself staring at the never-ending hated snow-peaks, his senseless babble still ringing in his ears.  And the next he would know, after seeming centuries, was that again he was roused to the sound of his own maunderings.  Labiskwee, too, was light-headed most of the time.  In the main their efforts were unreasoned, automatic.  And ever they worked toward the west, and ever they were baffled and thrust north or south by snow-peaks and impassable ranges.

“There is no way south,” Labiskwee said.  “The old men know.  West, only west, is the way.”

The young men no longer pursued, but famine crowded on the trail.

Came a day when it turned cold, and a thick snow, that was not snow but frost crystals of the size of grains of sand, began to fall.  All day and night it fell, and for three days and nights it continued to fall.  It was impossible to travel until it crusted under the spring sun, so they lay in their furs and rested, and ate less because they rested.  So small was the ration they permitted that it gave no appeasement to the hunger pang that was much of the stomach, but more of the brain.  And Labiskwee, delirious, maddened by the taste of her tiny portion, sobbing and mumbling, yelping sharp little animal cries of joy, fell upon the next day’s portion and crammed it into her mouth.

Then it was given to Smoke to see a wonderful thing.  The food between her teeth roused her to consciousness.  She spat it out, and with a great anger struck herself with her clenched fist on the offending mouth.

It was given to Smoke to see many wonderful things in the days yet to come.  After the long snow-fall came on a great wind that drove the dry and tiny frost-particles as sand is driven in a sand-storm.  All through the night the sand-frost drove by, and in the full light of a clear and wind-blown day, Smoke looked with swimming eyes and reeling brain upon what he took to be the vision of a dream.  All about towered great peaks and small, lone sentinels and groups and councils of mighty Titans.  And from the tip of every peak, swaying, undulating, flaring out broadly against the azure sky, streamed gigantic snow-banners, miles in length, milky and nebulous, ever waving lights and shadows and flashing silver from the sun.