ot and ranging; and he resolved to investigate after he had finished
the business in hand.

At last, at the end of the fourth day, he pulled the great moose down.
For a day and a night he remained by the kill, eating and sleeping, turn
and turn about. Then, rested, refreshed and strong, he turned his face
toward camp and John Thornton. He broke into the long easy lope, and
went on, hour after hour, never at loss for the tangled way, heading
straight home through strange country with a certitude of direction that
put man and his magnetic needle to shame.

As he held on he became more and more conscious of the new stir in the
land. There was life abroad in it different from the life which had been
there throughout the summer. No longer was this fact borne in upon him
in some subtle, mysterious way. The birds talked of it, the squirrels
chattered about it, the very breeze whispered of it. Several times he
stopped and drew in the fresh morning air in great sniffs, reading a
message which made him leap on with greater speed. He was oppressed with
a sense of calamity happening, if it were not calamity already happened;
and as he crossed the last watershed and dropped down into the valley
toward camp, he proceeded with greater caution.

Three miles away he came upon a fresh trail that sent his neck hair
rippling and bristling, It led straight toward camp and John Thornton.
Buck hurried on, swiftly and stealthily, every nerve straining and
tense, alert to the multitudinous details which told a story--all but
the end. His nose gave him a varying description of the passage of the
life on the heels of which he was travelling. He remarked the pregnant
silence of the forest. The bird life had flitted. The squirrels were in
hiding. One only he saw,--a sleek gray fellow, flattened against a gray
dead limb so that he seemed a part of it, a woody excrescence upon the
wood itself.

As Buck slid along with the obscureness of a gliding shadow, his nose
was jerked suddenly to the side as though a positive force had gripped
and pulled it. He followed the new scent into a thicket and found Nig.
He was lying on his side, dead where he had dragged himself, an arrow
protruding, head and feathers, from either side of his body.

A hundred yards farther on, Buck came upon one of the sled-dogs Thornton
had bought in Dawson. This dog was thrashing about in a death-struggle,
directly on the trail, and Buck passed around him without stopping. From