seemed ever crushing inward; the stars danced with great leaps,
as is their wont in the time of the Great Cold; while the Spirits
of the Pole trailed their robes of glory athwart the heavens.

'Scruff' Mackenzie dimly realized the wild grandeur of the
setting as his eyes ranged down the fur-fringed sides in quest of
missing faces. They rested for a moment on a newborn babe,
suckling at its mother's naked breast. It was forty below,--seven
and odd degrees of frost. He thought of the tender women of his
own race and smiled grimly. Yet from the loins of some such
tender woman had he sprung with a kingly inheritance,--an
inheritance which gave to him and his dominance over the land and
sea, over the animals and the peoples of all the zones.
Single-handed against fivescore, girt by the Arctic winter, far
from his own, he felt the prompting of his heritage, the desire
to possess, the wild danger--love, the thrill of battle, the
power to conquer or to die.

The singing and the dancing ceased, and the Shaman flared up in
rude eloquence.

Through the sinuosities of their vast mythology, he worked
cunningly upon the credulity of his people. The case was strong.
Opposing the creative principles as embodied in the Crow and the
Raven, he stigmatized Mackenzie as the Wolf, the fighting and the
destructive principle. Not only was the combat of these forces
spiritual, but men fought, each to his totem. They were the
children of Jelchs, the Raven, the Promethean fire-bringer;
Mackenzie was the child of the Wolf, or in other words, the
Devil. For them to bring a truce to this perpetual warfare, to