The cold of February, intense, searching, deadly, tightened its grip upon the wilderness, sapping the life of the three struggling human derelicts--for derelicts Shad Trowbridge felt himself and his two companions to be--as they fought their way, now hopefully, now despondently, but ever with slower pace, as strength ebbed, 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 and dried skull of a mummy.

Shad laughed sometimes when he looked at Mookoomahn's ghastly face, framed in a mass of long, straggling black hair; at other times he was overcome with a heart-rending pity for Mookoomahn that brought tears to his eyes. But tears froze, and were annoying and painful.

Manikawan, too, had changed woefully. The lean, gaunt figure stalking along uncomplainingly with Shad and Mookoomahn had small resemblance to the beautiful, commanding Manikawan that bade Bob and Shad be patient in their imprisonment on the island until she returned to relieve them; or the glowing, happy Manikawan that accompanied Shad and the others to the river tilt after she had accomplished the rescue. Though there still burned within her an unquenchable fire of energy, and she never lagged on the trail, she was no longer the Manikawan of old.

In spite of all the hardships and all the pain, and slowly starving as she was, she never ceased her attention to Shad, and she never once lost her patience with him.

When Shad laughed hysterically and derisively at his fate, as he did sometimes, Manikawan would step to his side, touch him lightly with her hand, and say in the same old voice, lower than of old, but even more musical and sweet:

"The friend of White Brother of the Snow is brave. He is not a coward. He is not afraid to die."

This always had a magical, soothing effect upon Shad. Though he never learned to interpret her language, the touch of the hand, the human note o............