Tisdale nodded slowly. "But the instant I cut Tyee loose, he went limping
off, picking up his master's trail. It was a zigzag course up the face of
a ridge into a grove of spruce. Weatherbee took a course like a husky;
location was a sixth sense to him; yet I found his tracks up there,
winding aimlessly. It had stopped snowing then, but the first impressions
were nearly filled. In a little while I noticed the spaces were shorter
between the prints of the left shoe; they made a dip and blur. Then I came
into a parallel trail, and these tracks were clear, made since the
snowstorm, but there was the same favoring of the left foot. He was
traveling in a circle. Sometimes in unsheltered places, where the wind
swept through an avenue of trees, small drifts covered the impressions,
but the dog found them again, still doubling that broad circle. Finally I
saw a great dark blotch ahead where the ground sloped up to a narrow
plateau. And in a moment I saw it was caused by a great many fresh twigs
of spruce, all stuck upright in the snow and set carefully in rows, like a
child's make-believe garden."

Tisdale's voice broke. He was looking off again into the night, and his
face hardened; two vertical lines like clefts divided his brows. It was as
though the iron in the man cropped through. The pause was breathless. Here
and there a grim face worked.

"When the dog reached the spot," Hollis went on, "he gave a quick bark and
ran with short yelps towards a clump of young trees a few yards off. The
rim of a drift formed a partial windbreak, but he had only a low bough to
cover him,--and the temperature,--along those ice-peaks--"

His voice failed. There was another speaking silence. It was as though
these men, having followed all those hundreds of miles over tundra and
mountains, through thaw and frost, felt with him in that moment the