winters, and then lay frozen for three summers. He had lost his mother
in that famine. In the summer the salmon run had failed, and the tribe
looked forward to the winter and the coming of the caribou. Then the
winter came, but with it there were no caribou. Never had the like
been known, not even in the lives of the old men. But the caribou
did not come, and it was the seventh year, and the rabbits had not
replenished, and the dogs were naught but bundles of bones. And
through the long darkness the children wailed and died, and the women,
and the old men; and not one in ten of the tribe lived to meet the sun
when it came back in the spring. That _was_ a famine!

But he had seen times of plenty, too, when the meat spoiled on their
hands, and the dogs were fat and worthless with overeating--times when
they let the game go unkilled, and the women were fertile, and the
lodges were cluttered with sprawling men-children and women-children.
Then it was the men became high-stomached, and revived ancient
quarrels, and crossed the divides to the south to kill the Pellys, and
to the west that they might sit by the dead fires of the Tananas. He
remembered, when a boy, during a time of plenty, when he saw a moose
pulled down by the wolves. Zing-ha lay with him in the snow and
watched--Zing-ha, who later became the craftiest of hunters, and who,
in the end, fell through an air-hole on the Yukon. They found him, a
month afterward, just as he had crawled halfway out and frozen stiff
to the ice.

But the moose. Zing-ha and he had gone out that day to play at hunting
after the manner of their fathers. On the bed of the creek they struck
the fresh track of a moose, and with it the tracks of many wolves. "An
old one," Zing-ha, who was quicker at reading the sign, said--"an old
one who cannot keep up with the herd. The wolves have cut him out from