The whole outfit was fresh and strong.  It was merely hard work being efficiently done—­the breaking of a midwinter trail across a divide.  On this severe stretch, ten miles a day they called a decent stint.  They kept in condition, but each night crawled well tired into their sleeping-furs.  This was their sixth day out from the lively camp of Mucluc on the Yukon.  In two days, with the loaded sled, they had covered the fifty miles of packed trail up Moose Creek.  Then had come the struggle with the four feet of untouched snow that was really not snow, but frost-crystals, so lacking in cohesion that when kicked it flew with the thin hissing of granulated sugar.  In three days they had wallowed thirty miles up Minnow Creek and across the series of low divides that separate the several creeks flowing south into Siwash River; and now they were breasting the big divide, past the Bald Buttes, where the way would lead them down Porcupine Creek to the middle reaches of Milk River.  Higher up Milk River, it was fairly rumored, were deposits of copper.  And this was their goal—­a hill of pure copper, half a mile to the right and up the first creek after Milk River issued from a deep gorge to flow across a heavily timbered stretch of bottom.  They would know it when they saw it.  One-Eyed McCarthy had described it with sharp definiteness.  It was impossible to miss it—­unless McCarthy had lied.

Smoke was in the lead, and the small scattered spruce-trees were becoming scarcer and smaller, when he saw one, dead and bone-dry, that stood in their path.  There was no need for speech.  His glance to Shorty was acknowledged by a stentorian “Whoa!” The dogs stood in the traces till they saw Shorty begin to undo the sled-lashings and Smoke attack the dead spruce with an ax; whereupon the animals dropped in the snow and curled into balls, the bush of each tail curved to cover four padded feet and an ice-rimmed muzzle.

The men worked with the quickness of long practice.  Gold-pan, coffee-pot, and cooking-pail were soon thawing the heaped frost-crystals into water.  Smoke extracted a stick of beans from the sled.  Already cooked, with a generous admixture of cubes of fat pork and bacon, the beans had been frozen into this portable immediacy.  He chopped off chunks with an ax, as if it were so much firewood, and put them into the frying-pan to thaw.  Solidly frozen sourdough biscuits were likewise placed to thaw.  In twenty minutes from the time they halted, the meal was ready to eat.

“About forty below,” Shorty mumbled through a mouthful of beans.  “Say—­I hope it don’t get colder—­or warmer, neither.  It’s just right for trail breaking.”

Smoke did not answer.  His own mouth full of beans, his jaws working, he had chanced to glance at the lead-dog, lying half a dozen feet away.  That gray and frosty wolf was gazing at him with the infinite wistfulness and yearning that glimmers and hazes so often in the eyes of Northland dogs.  Smoke knew it well, but never got over the unfathomable wonder of it.  As if to shake off the hypnotism, he set down his plate and coffee-cup, went to the sled, and began opening the dried-fish sack.