never see a sign of life. It is very quiet. There is
no sound. Sometimes it snows, and we are like wandering ghosts.
Sometimes it is clear, and at midday the sun looks at us for a moment
over the hills to the south. The northern lights flame in the sky, and
the sun-dogs dance, and the air is filled with frost-dust.

"I am Sitka Charley, a strong man. I was born on the trail, and all my
days have I lived on the trail. And yet have these two baby wolves made
me very tired. I am lean, like a starved cat, and I am glad of my bed at
night, and in the morning am I greatly weary. Yet ever are we hitting
the trail in the dark before daylight, and still on the trail does the
dark after nightfall find us. These two baby wolves! If I am lean like
a starved cat, they are lean like cats that have never eaten and have
died. Their eyes are sunk deep in their heads, bright sometimes as with
fever, dim and cloudy sometimes like the eyes of the dead. Their cheeks
are hollow like caves in a cliff. Also are their cheeks black and raw
from many freezings. Sometimes it is the woman in the morning who says,
'I cannot get up. I cannot move. Let me die.' And it is the man who
stands beside her and says, 'Come, let us go on.' And they go on. And
sometimes it is the man who cannot get up, and the woman says, 'Come, let
us go on.' But the one thing they do, and always do, is to go on. Always
do they go on.

"Sometimes, at the trading posts, the man and woman get letters. I do
not know what is in the letters. But it is the scent that they follow,
these letters themselves are the scent. One time an Indian gives them a
letter. I talk with him privately. He says it is a man with one eye who
gives him the letter, a man who travels fast down the Yukon. That is
all. But I know that the baby wolves are after the man with the one eye.

"It is February, and we have travelled fifteen hundred miles. We are
getting near Bering Sea, and there are storms and blizzards. The going
is hard. We come to Anvig. I do not know, but I think sure they get a
letter at Anvig, for they are much excited, and they say, 'Come, hurry,
let us go on.' But I say we must buy grub, and they say we must travel
light and fast. Also, they say that we can get grub at Charley McKeon's
cabin. Then do I know that they take the big cut-off, for it is there
that Charley McKeon lives where the Black Rock stands by the trail.

"Before we start, I talk maybe