north and south,
in forest and swamp, in the trapper's cabin and the wolf's
hiding-place, was warning of it. Gray rabbits turned white. Moose and
caribou began to herd. The foxes yipped shrilly in the night, and a new
hunger and a new thrill sent the wolves hunting in packs, while the
gray geese streaked southward under the red moon overhead.

Through this November, and all of December, Jolly Roger and Peter were
busy from two hours before dawn of each day until late at night. The
foxes were plentiful, and McKay was compelled to shorten his lines and
put out fewer baits, and on the tenth of December he set out for a
fur-trading post ninety miles south with two hundred and forty skins.
He had made a toboggan, and a harness for Peter, and pulling together
they made the trip in three days, and on the fourth started for the
cabin again with supplies and something over a thousand dollars in cash.

Through the weeks of increasing storm and cold that followed, McKay
continued to trap, and early in February he made another trip to the
fur post.

It was on their return that they were caught in the Black Storm. It
will be a long time before the northland will forget that storm. It was
a storm in which the Sarcees died to a man, woman and child over on the
Dubawnt waterways, and when trees froze solid and split open with the
sharp explosions of high-power guns. In it, all furred and feathered
life and all hoof and horn along the edge of the Barren Lands from
Aberdeen Lake to the Coppermine was swallowed up. It was in this storm
that streams froze solid, and the man who was cautious fastened a
babiche rope about his waist when he went forth from his cabin for wood
or water, so that his wife might help to pull and guide him back
through that blinding avalanche of wind and freezing fury that held a
twisted and broken world in its grip.

In the country west of Artillery Lake and south of the Theolon River,
Jolly Roger and Peter were compelled to "dig in." They were in a
country where the biggest stick of wood that thrust itself up out of
the snow was no bigger than McKay's thumb; a country of green grass and
succulent moss on which the caribou fed in season, but a hell on earth
when arctic storm howled and screamed across it in winter.

Piled up against a mass of rock Jolly Roger found a huge snow drift.
This drift was as long as a church and half as high, with its outer
shell blistered and battered to the hardness of rock by win