himself dozed off, but never for long. Then Dolores nodded, and her head
drooped until it found a pillow on Peter's shoulder. Gently Peter drew a
bearskin about her, and for a long time sat wide-awake, guarding Uppy and
baring his ears at intervals to listen. A dozen times he saw Wapi's
bloodshot eyes looking at him, and twice he put out a hand to the dog's
head and spoke to him in a whisper.

Even Peter's eyes were filmed by a growing drowsiness when Wapi drew
silently away and slunk suspiciously into the night. There was no yapping
foxes here, forty miles from the coast. An almost appalling silence hung
under the white stars, a silence broken only by the low and distant
moaning the wind always makes on the barrens. Wapi listened to it, and he
sniffed with his gray muzzle turned to the north. And then he whined. Had
Dolores or Peter seen him or heard the note in his throat, they, too,
would have stared back over the trail they had traveled. For something
was coming to Wapi. Faint, elusive, and indefinable breath in the air, he
smelled it in one moment, and the next it was gone. For many minutes he
stood undecided, and then he returned to the sledge, his spine bristling
and a growl in his throat.

Wide-eyed and staring, Peter was looking back. "What is it, Wapi?"

His voice aroused Dolores. She sat up with a start. The growl had grown
into a snarl in Wapi's throat.

"I think they are coming," said Peter calmly. "You'd better rouse Uppy.
He hasn't moved in the last two hours."

Something that was like a sob came from Dolores' lips as she stood up.
"They're not coming," she whispered. "They've stopped--and they're