plies 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 wind and sleet.
Through this shell he cut a small door with his knife, and after that
dug out the soft snow from within until he had a room half as big as his
cabin, and so snug and warm after a little with the body heat of himself
and Peter that he could throw off the thick coat which he wore.

To Peter, in the first night of this storm, it seemed as though all
the people in the world were shrieking and wailing and sobbing in the
blackness outside. Jolly Roger sat smoking his pipe at intervals in the
gloom, though there was little pleasure in smoking a pipe in darkness.
The storm did not oppress him, but filled him with an odd sense of
security and comfort. The wind shrieked and lashed itself about his
snow-dune, but it could not get at him. Its mightiest efforts to destroy
only beat more snow upon him, and made him safer and warmer. In a way,