White Fang Page #4

								


"Henry," he said.  "Oh, Henry."

Henry groaned as he passed from sleep to waking, and demanded, "What's wrong now?"

"Nothin'," came the answer; "only there's seven of 'em again.  I just counted."

Henry acknowledged receipt of the information with a grunt that slid into a snore as he drifted back into sleep.

In the morning it was Henry who awoke first and routed his companion out of bed.  Daylight was yet three hours away, though it was already six o'clock; and in the darkness Henry went about preparing breakfast, while Bill rolled the blankets and made the sled ready for lashing.

"Say, Henry," he asked suddenly, "how many dogs did you say we had?"

"Six."

"Wrong," Bill proclaimed triumphantly.

"Seven again?" Henry queried.

"No, five; one's gone."

"The hell!"  Henry cried in wrath, leaving the cooking to come and count the dogs.

"You're right, Bill," he concluded.  "Fatty's gone."

"An' he went like greased lightnin' once he got started.  Couldn't 've seen 'm for smoke."

"No chance at all," Henry concluded.  "They jes' swallowed 'm alive.  I bet he was yelpin' as he went down their throats, damn 'em!"

"He always was a fool dog," said Bill.

"But no fool dog ought to be fool enough to go off an' commit suicide that way."  He looked over the remainder of the team with a speculative eye that summed up instantly the salient traits of each animal.  "I bet none of the others would do it."

"Couldn't drive 'em away from the fire with a club," Bill agreed.  "I always did think there was somethin' wrong with Fatty anyway."

And this was the epitaph of a dead dog on the Northland trail--less scant than the epitaph of many another dog, of many a man.

CHAPTER II--THE SHE-WOLF

Breakfast eaten and the slim camp-outfit lashed to the sled, the men turned their backs on the cheery fire and launched out into the darkness. At once began to rise the cries that were fiercely sad--cries that called through the darkness and cold to one another and answered back. Conversation ceased.  Daylight came at nine o'clock.  At midday the sky to the south warmed to rose-colour, and marked where the bulge of the earth intervened between the meridian sun and the northern world.  But the rose-colour swiftly faded.  The grey light of day that remained lasted until three o'clock, when it, too, faded, and the pall of the Arctic night descended upon the lone and silent land.

As darkness came on, the hunting-cries to right and left and rear drew closer--so close that more than once they sent surges of fear through the toiling dogs, throwing them into short-lived panics.

At the conclusion of one such panic, when he and Henry had got the dogs back in the traces, Bill said:

"I wisht they'd strike game somewheres, an' go away an' leave us alone."

"They do get on the nerves horrible,"  Henry sympathised.

They spoke no more until camp was made.
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