that he had entered
upon an adventure which was leading toward inevitable disaster for him.
For the first time the significance of Bram's supply of meat, secured
by the outlaw at the last moment before starting out into the Barren,
appeared to him with a clearness that filled him with uneasiness. It
meant that Bram required three or four days' rations for himself and
his pack in crossing this sea of desolation that reached in places to
the Arctic. In that time, if necessity was driving him, he could cover
a hundred and fifty miles, while Philip could make less than a hundred.

Until three o'clock in the afternoon he followed steadily over Bram's
trail. He would have pursued for another hour if a huge and dome-shaped
snowdrift had not risen in his path. In the big drift he decided to
make his house for the night. It was an easy matter--a trick learned of
the Eskimo. With his belt-ax he broke through the thick crust of the
drift, using care that the "door" he thus opened into it was only large
enough for the entrance of his body. Using a snowshoe as a shovel he
then began digging out the soft interior of the drift, burrowing a two
foot tunnel until he was well back from the door, where he made himself
a chamber large enough for his sleeping-bag. The task employed him less
than an hour, and when his bed was made, and he stood in front of the
door to his igloo, his spirits began to return. The assurance that he
had a home at his back in which neither cold nor storm could reach him
inspirited him with an optimism which he had not felt at any time
during the day.

From the timber he had borne a precious bundle of finely split
kindlings of pitch-filled spruce, and with a handful of these he built
himself a tiny fire over which, on a longer stick brought for the
purpose, he suspended his tea pail, packed with snow. The crackling of
the flames set him whistling. Darkness was falling swiftly about him.
By the time his tea was ready and he had warmed his cold bannock and
bacon the gloom was like a black curtain that he might have slit with a
knife. Not a star was visible in the sky. Twenty feet on either side of
him he could not see the surface of the snow. Now and then he added a
bit of his kindling to the dying embers, and in the glow of the last
stick he smoked his pipe, and as he smoked he drew from his wallet the
golden snare. Coiled in the hollow of his hand and catching the red
light of the pitch-laden fagot it shone with