efore I looked about me; saw the fly and, underneath, the
pine boughs spread for the sleeping furs; saw the grub sacks, the camera,
the frosty breaths of the dogs circling on the edge of the light; and,
above, a great streamer of the aurora, bridging the zenith from south-
east to north-west. I shivered. There is a magic in the Northland
night, that steals in on one like fevers from malarial marshes. You are
clutched and downed before you are aware. Then I looked to the
snowshoes, lying prone and crossed where he had flung them. Also I had
an eye to my tobacco pouch. Half, at least, of its goodly store had
vamosed. That settled it. Fancy had not tricked me after all.

Crazed with suffering, I thought, looking steadfastly at the man--one of
those wild stampeders, strayed far from his bearings and wandering like a
lost soul through great vastnesses and unknown deeps. Oh, well, let his
moods slip on, until, mayhap, he gathers his tangled wits together. Who
knows?--the mere sound of a fellow-creature's voice may bring all
straight again.

So I led him on in talk, and soon I marvelled, for he talked of game and
the ways thereof. He had killed the Siberian wolf of westernmost Alaska,
and the chamois in the secret Rockies. He averred he knew the haunts
where the last buffalo still roamed; that he had hung on the flanks of
the caribou when they ran by the hundred thousand, and slept in the Great
Barrens on the musk-ox's winter trail.

And I shifted my judgment accordingly (the first revision, but by no
account the last), and deemed him a monumental effigy of truth. Why it
was I know not, but the spirit moved me to repeat a tale told to me by a
man who had dwelt in the land too long to know better. It was of the
great bear that hugs the steep slopes of St Elias, never descending to
the levels of the gentler inclines. Now God so constituted this creature
for its hillside habitat that the legs of one side are all of a foot
longer than those of the other. This is mighty convenient, as will be
reality admitted. So I hunted this rare beast in my own name, told it in
the first person, present tense, painted the requisite locale, gave it
the necessary garnishings and touches of verisimilitude, and looked to
see the man stunned by the recital.

Not he. Had he doubted, I could have forgiven him. Had he objected,
denying the dangers of such a hunt by virtue of the animal's inability to
turn about and go the other way