Micmac John lay down again and after a time the tired brain and body
yielded to nature and he slept.

The instincts of the half-breed, keen even in slumber, felt rather
than heard the diminishing of wind and snow as the storm subsided with
the approach of morning, and he arose at once. The rest had quieted
his nerves, and he was the stolid, revengeful Indian again. After a
meagre breakfast of tea and jerked venison he took down the tent and
lashed the things securely upon the toboggan and ere the first stars
began to glimmer through the cloud rifts he was hurrying away in the
stillness of the night.

When the sky finally cleared and the moon came out, cold and
brilliant, there was something uncanny and weird in its light lying
upon earth's white shroud rent here and there by long, dark shadows
across the trail. There was an indefinable mystery in the atmosphere.
Micmac John, accustomed as he was to the wilderness, felt an
uneasiness in his soul, the reflex perhaps of the previous night's
awakening, that he could not quite throw off--a sense of impending
danger--of a calamity about to happen. The trees became mighty men
ready to strike at him as he approached and behind every bush crouched
a waiting enemy. His guilty conscience was at work. The little spirit
that God had placed within his bosom, to tell him when he was doing
wrong, was not quite dead.

He increased his speed as daylight approached travelling almost at a
run. Suddenly he stopped to listen. From somewhere in the distance
behind him a wolf cry broke the morning silence. In a little while
there were more wolf cries, and they were coming nearer and nearer.