nd himself. For these wolves were
gaunt and poor, and the absence of game made them more than normally
audacious. So far from seeking to avoid man and his dogs, they seemed to
infest Willis's trail, ranging emptily and wistfully to his rear and
upon either side as hungry sharks patrol a ship's wake.

The circumstances would have had little enough of significance for
Willis, but for an accident which befell just before the cold snap set
in. Hastening along the track of a moose he had already mortally
wounded, beside one of the tributaries of the Mackenzie, Willis had had
the misfortune to take a false step among half-formed ice, and he and
his gun had fallen into deep water. The bigger part of a day was given
to the attempted salvaging of that gun. But in the end the quest had to
be relinquished.

The gun was never seen again; and, though Jim had good store of
ammunition, he now had no weapon of any sort or kind, save ax and whip.
This was the reason why the presence of large packs of hungry wolves
annoyed him and made him anxious to reach a Peace River station as
speedily as might be. He carried a fair stock of moose-meat, but
accidents might happen, and in any case, apart from the presence of
hungry wolves in large numbers, no man cares to be without weapons of
precision in the wilderness, for it is these which more than any other
thing give him his mastery over the predatory of the wild.

Just before three o'clock in an afternoon of still, intense cold, when
daylight was fading out, the narrow devious watercourse whose frozen
surface had formed Willis's trail for many a mile, brought him at last
to a bend of the Peace River from which he knew he could reach a
settlement within four or five days of good traveling. Therefore his
arrival at this point was of more interest and importance to Willis than
any ordinary camping halt. But it struck him as curious that Jan should
show the interest he did show in it.

"Seems like as if that blame dog knows everything," he muttered as he
saw Jan trotting to and fro over the trail, his flews sweeping the
trodden snow with eager, questing gestures, his stern waving as with
excitement of some sort.

"Surely there's been no game past this way," thought Willis, "or them
wolves would be on to the scent of it pretty quick."

He could hear his tireless escorts of the past week yowling a mile or
more away in the rear. Having built and lighted a fire of pine-knots, he
called the dogs