ing to really
KILL? They started in instant pursuit, Julian leading.

But the wind was now keen and bitter in their faces, and that peculiar
thickening of the air which they had noticed had become first a dark
blue and then a whitening pall, in which the bear was lost. They still
kept on. Suddenly Julian felt himself struck between the eyes by what
seemed a snowball, and his companions were as quickly spattered by gouts
of monstrous clinging snowflakes. Others as quickly followed--it was
not snowing, it was snowballing. They at first laughed, affecting
to retaliate with these whirling, flying masses shaken like clinging
feathers from a pillow; but in a few seconds they were covered from head
to foot by snow, their limbs impeded or pinioned against them by its
weight, their breath gone. They stopped blindly, breathlessly. Then,
with a common instinct, they turned back. But the next moment they heard
Julian cry, "Look out!" Coming towards them out of the storm was
the bear, who had evidently turned back by the same instinct. An
ungovernable instinct seized the younger boys, and they fled. But Julian
stopped with leveled rifle. The bear stopped too, with sullen, staring
eyes. But the eyes that glanced along the rifle were young, true, and
steady. Julian fired. The hot smoke was swept back by the gale into his
face, but the bear turned and disappeared in the storm again. Julian ran
on to where his companions had halted at the report, a little ashamed of
their cowardice. "Keep on that way!" he shouted hoarsely. "No use tryin'
to go where the b'ar couldn't. Keep on!"

"Keep on--whar? There ain't no trail--no nuthin'!" said Jackson
querulously, to hold down a rising fear. It was true. The trail had long
since disappeared; even their footprints of a moment before were filled
up by the piling snow; they were isolated in this stony upland, high in
air, without a rock or tree to guide them across its vast white level.
They were bitterly cold and benumbed. The stimulus of the storm and
chase had passed, but Julian kept driving them before him, himself
driven along by the furious blast, yet trying to keep some vague
course along the waste. So an hour passed. Then the wind seemed to have
changed, or else they had traveled in a circle--they knew not which, but
the snow was in their faces now. But, worst of all, the snow had changed
too; it no longer fell in huge blue flakes, but in millions of stinging
gray granules. Julian's face gr