Mush on!" commanded Sam again.

Dick ran on steadily in the soft snow, swinging his entire weight now on
one foot, now on the other, passing the snow-shoes with the peculiar
stiff swing of the ankle, throwing his heel strongly downward at each
step in order to take advantage of the long snow-shoe tails' elasticity.
At each step he sank deep into the feathery snow. The runner was forced
to lift the toe of the shoe sharply, and the snow swirled past his
ankles like foam. Behind him, in the trail thus broken and packed for
them, trotted the dogs, their noses low, their jaws hanging. Sam drove
with two long-lashed whips; and May-may-gwan, clinging to the gee-pole,
guided the sledge.

In the absolute and dead stillness of a winter morning before the dawn
the little train went like ghosts in a mist of starlight. The strange
glimmering that seems at such an hour to disengage from the snow itself
served merely to establish the separate bulks of that which moved across
it. The bending figure of the man breaking trail, his head low, his body
moving in its swing with the regularity of a pendulum; the four
wolf-like dogs, also bending easily to what was not a great labour, the
line of their open jaws and lolling tongues cut out against the snow;
another human figure; the low, dark mass of the sledge; and again the
bending figure at the rear,--all these contrasted in their half-blurred
uncertainty of outline and the suggested motion of their attitude with
the straight, clear silhouette of the spruce-trees against the sky.

Also the sounds of their travelling offered an analogous contrast. The
dull _crunch, crunch, crunch_ of the snow-shoes, the breathing of the
living beings, the glither and creak of the sledge came to the ear
blurred and confused; utterly unlike the cameo stillness of the winter
dawn.

Ten minutes of the really violent exertion of breaking trail warmed Dick
through. His fingers ceased their protest. Each breath, blowing to
steam, turned almost immediately to frost. He threw back the hood of his
capote, for he knew that should it become wet from the moisture of his
breath, it would freeze his skin, and with his violent exertions
exposure to the air was nothing. In a short time his eyebrows and
eyelashes became heavy with ice. Then slowly the moisture of his body,
working outward through the wool of his clothing, frosted on the
surface, so that gradually as time went on he grew to look more and more
like a great