To-night he sat in Pierre Breault's cabin, with Pierre at the
opposite side of the table between them, and the cabin's sheet
iron stove blazing red just beyond. It was a terrible night
outside. Pierre, the fox hunter, had built his shack at the end of
a long slim forefinger of scrub spruce that reached out into the
Barren, and to-night the wind was wailing and moaning over the
open spaces in a way that made Raine shiver. Close to the east was
Hudson's Bay--so close that a few moments before when Raine had
opened the cabin door there came to him the low, never-ceasing
thunder of the under-currents fighting their way down through the
Roes Welcome from the Arctic Ocean, broken now and then by a
growling roar as the giant forces sent a crack, like a great
knife, through one of the frozen mountains. Westward from Pierre's
cabin there stretched the lifeless Barren, illimitable and void,
without rock or bush, and overhung at day by a sky that always
made Raine think of a terrible picture he had once seen of Dore's
"Inferno"--a low, thick sky, like purple and blue granite, always
threatening to pitch itself down in terrific avalanches. And at
night, when the white foxes yapped, and the wind moaned--

"As I have hope of paradise I swear that I saw him--alive,
M'sieu," Pierre was saying again over the table.

Raine, of the Fort Churchill patrol of the Royal Northwest Mounted
Police, no longer smiled in disbelief. He knew that Pierre Breault
was a brave man, or he would not have perched himself alone out in
the heart of the Barren to catch the white foxes; and he was not
superstitious, like most of his kind, or the sobbing cries and
strife of the everlasting night-winds would have driven him away.