lpable.
In the strange borderland of mingled illusion and reality where now he
and starvation dwelt he thought sometimes to hear voices, the voices of
his enemy's triumph.

"Is it done?" they asked him, insistently. "Is it over? Are you beaten?
Is your stubborn spirit at last bowed down, humiliated, crushed? Do you
relinquish the prize,--and the struggle? Is it done?"

The girl stirred slightly in his arms. He focussed his eyes. Already
the day had passed, and the first streamers of the aurora were crackling
in the sky. They reduced this day, this year, this generation of men to
a pin-point in time. The tragedy enacting itself on the snow amounted to
nothing. It would soon be over: it occupied but one of many, many
nights--wherein the aurora would crackle and shoot forth and ebb back in
precisely the same deathful, living way, as though the death of it were
the death in this world, but the life of it were a thing celestial and
alien. The moment, to these three who perished the most important of all
the infinite millions of millions that constitute time, was absolutely
without special meaning to the wonderful, flaming, unearthly lights of
the North.

Mack, the hound, lay in the position he had first assumed, his nose
between his outstretched forepaws. So he had lain all that day and that
night. So it seemed he must intend to lie until death took him. For on
this dreadful journey Mack had risen above the restrictions imposed by
his status as a zoological species, had ceased to be merely a dog, and
by virtue of steadfastness, of loyalty, of uncomplaining suffering, had
entered into the higher estate of a living being that has fearlessly
done his best in the world before his call to leave it.

The girl opened her eyes.

"Jibiwanisi," she said, faintly, "the end is come."

Agonized, Dick forced himself to consciousness of the landscape. It
contained moving figures in plenty. One after the other he brought them
within the focus of scrutiny and dissolved them into thin air. If only
the caribou herds--

He looked down again to meet her eyes.

"Do not grieve. I am happy, Jibiwanisi," she whispered.

After a little, "I will die first," and then, "This land and that--there
must be a border. I will be waiting there. I will wait always. I will
not go into the land until you come. I will wait to see it--with you.
Oh, Jibiwanisi," she cried suddenly, with a strength and passion in
startling contrast to her weakness. "I am y