d, toward the
precious cache on the shores of the Great Lake; and with the slower
progress that growing weakness demanded, it was quickly found
necessary to reduce by half the already minute portion of dried
caribou meat allotted to each.

Everything in the world save only themselves seemed to have been
frozen into oblivion. There was no sound, save the monotonous swish,
swish of their own snowshoes, to disturb the silence--a silence
otherwise as absolute and vast as the uttermost depths of the grave.

Storms overtook them, but they mercifully were storms of short
duration, and seldom interfered with hours of travel. Staggering, but
ever struggling forward, they forced their way painfully on and on,
over pitiless windswept ridges, across life-sapping, desolate barrens,
through scarcely less inhospitable forests. Exerting their waning
strength to its utmost, they never stopped, save when exhausted nature
compelled them to halt for brief intervals of sleep and rest, to
recuperate their wasted energies.

Shad Trowbridge came finally to wonder vaguely if he were not dead,
this another existence, and be doomed to keep going and going through
endless ages over endless reaches of snow. To his numbed intellect it
seemed that he had been thus going for months and years.

Like a vague, pleasant dream of something experienced in a previous
life, he remembered Bob and the tilts, Wolf Bight farther back, and
the dear old college. What would the fellows say now, if they were to
see him--the fellows who had known him in that former, happier life?

At other times he fancied he heard Ungava Bob and the others hallooing
in the distance, and he would answer in glad, expectant shouts. But
there never came a reply.

The first time this occurred Manikawan turned and looked inquiringly
at him, through eyes sunk deep in their sockets. When it was repeated
later--and he came to hear the voices and to shout to the empty snow
wastes at least once every day--she would step to his side,
solicitously touch his shoulder and say:

"The friend of White Brother of the Snow hears the voices of the
Matchi Manitu of Hunger. Let him close his ears and be deaf, for the
Matchi Manitu is mocking him."

Mookoomahn's face was not pleasant to see now; it was horrible--the
dark skin was drawn tight over the high cheek bones, the lips shrunken
to the gums, and the eyes fallen far back into the skull. His face
resembled more than anything else the smoked a