the bones of a wolf or
two beside it, to indicate his desperate last stand.

With difficulty, McTavish shook off the evil thoughts that preyed
upon him, and stretched his blankets and robes on the hard earth.
Then, he cast more wood on his fire, and wrapped himself snugly,
covering his head completely, Indian fashion, to prevent his face
from freezing.

It was an hour before sleep came to him, and it seemed to him that
he had scarcely dropped off when he felt himself shaken by the
shoulder, and told to get up.

For a moment, Donald did not realize where he was, then the horrid
truth rushed in upon him with sickening reality, and he sat up,
blinking. His companion, he saw, was an Indian, who began to cook
breakfast over the fire, upon which he had thrown more wood
immediately after his entrance.

McTavish forced himself to eat heartily this last full meal he was,
perhaps, ever to know. Then, obeying the guttural words of the
Indian, he made his blankets into a pack, and unfalteringly followed
outside.

There, the men were gathered around a dog-train, with two trappers,
who, McTavish knew instinctively, were to be his companions for a
distance into the wilderness. Throwing his blankets on the sledge,
where he observed also a small pack of provisions, he climbed
aboard.

Now, Charley Seguis appeared, and offered the Hudson Bay man a last
chance. But Donald waved him aside, and requested that the start
be made at once. Then, without a sound except the tinkling of the
bells on the dogs' harness, the train got under way, and the last
thing the Scotchman saw as he plunged into the woods was the silent
group of men looking after him from in front of the big log house.

Straight north they took him, into the wildest country of all that
desolation. Through forest aisles, beside great expanses of muskeg,
over barren rock ridges, wound the unmarked trail. An army of
caribou, drifting south in the distance, was all the life the doomed
man saw in that long morning. Even the small live creatures seemed
to have deserted this maddening region.

At noon, they camped for an hour, and then, with scarcely a word,
took up the trail again. At last, when the darkness had begun to
come, one of the Indians halted the dogs, and motioned McTavish
off the sledge. While he was turning the dogs around, the other
laid the victim's pack on the snow and presented two knives--the
long, crooked hunter's knife, and the straight sheath-knife.