ht, and the battered old coffee pot bubbled and steamed again, as if
rejoicing at his return.

With the breaking of another day he immediately began preparations for
the season's trapping. In two days' hunting he killed three caribou, his
winter meat. Then he cut wood, and made his strychnine poison baits, and
marked out his trap-lines.

The first of November brought the chill whisperings of an early winter
through the Northland. Farther south autumn was dying, or dead. The last
of the red ash berries hung shriveled and frost-bitten on naked twigs,
freezing nights were nipping the face of the earth, the voices of the
wilderness were filled with a new note and the winds held warning for
every man and beast between Hudson's Bay and the Great Slave and from
the Height of Land to the Arctic Sea. Seven years before there had come
such a winter, and the land had not forgotten it--a winter sudden and
swift, deadly in its unexpectedness, terrific in its cold, bringing
with it such famine and death as the Northland had not known for two
generations.

But this year there was premonition. Omen of it came with the first
wailing night winds that bore the smell of icebergs from over the black
forests north and west. The moon came up red, and it went down red, and
the sun came up red in the morning. The loon's call died a month ahead
of its time. The wild geese drove steadily south when they should have
been feeding from the Kogatuk to Baffin's Bay, and the beaver built his
walls thick, and anchored his alders and his willows deep so that he
would not starve when the ice grew heavy. East, west, 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 sup