as no
cabin. She was not at the tepee. He could find no trace of her in the
chasm. She was not with Pierrot under the big spruce.

Therefore, unreasoning but sure, he began to follow the old trap line
into the north and west.

CHAPTER 23

No man has ever looked clearly into the mystery of death as it is
impressed upon the senses of the northern dog. It comes to him,
sometimes, with the wind. Most frequently it must come with the wind,
and yet there are ten thousand masters in the northland who will swear
that their dogs have given warning of death hours before it actually
came; and there are many of these thousands who know from experience
that their teams will stop a quarter or half a mile from a strange
cabin in which there lies unburied dead.

Yesterday Baree had smelled death, and he knew without process of
reasoning that the dead was Pierrot. How he knew this, and why he
accepted the fact as inevitable, is one of the mysteries which at times
seems to give the direct challenge to those who concede nothing more
than instinct to the brute mind. He knew that Pierrot was dead without
exactly knowing what death was. But of one thing he was sure: he would
never see Pierrot again. He would never hear his voice again; he would
never hear again the swish-swish-swish of his snowshoes in the trail
ahead, and so on the trap line he did not look for Pierrot. Pierrot was
gone forever. But Baree had not yet associated death with Nepeese. He
was filled with a great uneasiness. What came to him from out of the
chasm had made him tremble with fear and suspense. He sensed the thrill
of something strange, of something impending, and yet even as he had
given the death howl in the chasm, it must have been for Pierrot. For
he believed that Nepeese was alive, and he was now just as sure that he
would overtake her on the trap line as he was positive yesterday that
he would find her at the birchbark tepee.

Since yesterday morning's breakfast with the Willow, Baree had gone
without eating. To appease his hunger meant to hunt, and his mind was
too filled with his quest of Nepeese for that. He would have gone
hungry all that day, but in the third mile from the cabin he came to a
trap in which there was a big snowshoe rabbit. The rabbit was still
alive, and he killed it and ate his fill. Until dark he did not miss a
trap. In one of them there was a lynx; in another a fishercat. Out on
the white surface of a lake he sniffed at a snowy