es.
At times, when the force of the snow-swirls sucked their very breath,
men and dogs threw themselves panting on the snow, until, with wind
regained, they stumbled on. Often plunging to their collars in the new
snow, the huskies travelled solely by leaps, until, stalled nose-deep,
tangled in traces and held by the drag of the overturned sled, Marcel
and the exhausted Hunter came to their rescue. Heart-breaking mile after
mile of the country over which Marcel had sped two days before, they
painfully put behind them.

At noon, the man who lived his creed crumpled in the snow. Wrapping him
in robes, Marcel lashed him on the sled and went on, the vision of a
dying girl on a white cot at Whale River ever in his eyes.

Through a break in the snow, before the light waned, Marcel made out,
dim in the north, the silhouette of Big Island. He was over the divide
and well on his way to the coast. With the night, the wind eased, though
the snow held, and although he was off the trail, the new snow on the
exposed north slope of the Cape was either wind-packed or swept from the
frozen tundra, and again the exhausted dogs found good footing.

For some time the team had been working easily down hill, Marcel often
forced to brake the toboggan with his feet. He knew he had worked to the
west of the trail, and was swinging in a circle to regain it. Worried by
the sting of the cold, which was growing increasingly bitter as the wind
fell off, he stopped to rub the muffled, frost-cracked face and hands of
his spent passenger, cheering him with the promise of a roaring fire.
When he started the team, Colin, stiffened by the rest, limped badly,
and Jules, who had bucked the deep snow all day like a veteran of the
mail-teams, gamely following his herculean mother, hobbled along, head
and tail down, with a wrenched shoulder. It was high time they found a
camping place. With the falling wind they would freeze in the open. So
he pushed on through the murk, seeking the beach where there was wood
and a lee.

They were swiftly dropping down to the sea-ice but snow and darkness
drew around them an impenetrable curtain. Seizing the gee-pole, Marcel
had thrown his weight back on the sled to keep it off the dogs on a
descent when suddenly Fleur, whose white back he could barely see moving
in front, with a whine stopped dead in her tracks and flattened on the
snow. Her tired sons at once lay down behind her. The sled slid into
Angus and stopped.

M