mber, for if the Barren was Bram's
retreat he would sooner or later strike a trail--unless Bram had gone
straight out into the vast white plain shortly after he had made his
camp in the forest near Pierre Breault's cabin. In that event it might
be weeks before Bram would return to the scrub timber again.

That night the last of the blizzard that had raged for days exhausted
itself. For a week clear weather followed. It was intensely cold, but
no snow fell. In that week Philip traveled a hundred and twenty miles
westward.

It was on the eighth night, as he sat near his fire in a thick clump of
dwarf spruce, that the thing happened which Pierre Breault, with a
fatalism born of superstition, knew would come to pass. And it is
curious that on this night, and in the very hour of the strange
happening, Philip had with infinite care and a great deal of trouble
rewoven the fifty hairs back into the form of the golden snare.

CHAPTER V

The night was so bright that the spruce trees cast vivid shadows on the
snow. Overhead there were a billion stars in a sky as dear as an open
sea, and the Great Dipper shone like a constellation of tiny suns. The
world did not need a moon. At a distance of three hundred yards Philip
could have seen a caribou if it had passed. He sat close to his fire,
with the heat of it reflected from the blackened face of a huge rock,
finishing the snare which had taken him an hour to weave. For a long
time he had been conscious of the curious, hissing monotone of the
Aurora, the "music of the skies," reaching out through the space of the
earth with a purring sound that was at times like the purr of a cat and
at others like the faint hum of a bee. Absorbed in his work he did not,
for a time, hear the other sound. Not until he had finished, and was
placing the golden snare in his wallet, did the one sound individualize
and separate itself from the other.

He straightened himself suddenly, and listened. Then he jumped to his
feet and ran through fifty feet of low scrub to the edge of the white
plain.

It was coming from off there, a great distance away. Perhaps a mile. It
might be two. The howling of wolves!

It was not a new or unusual sound to him. He had listened to it many
times during the last two years. But never had it thrilled him as it
did now, and he felt the blood leap in sudden swiftness through his
body as the sound bore straight in his direction. In a flash he
remembered all that Pi