They were swiftly dropping down to the sea-ice but snow and darkness drew around them an impenetrable curtain. Seizing the gee-pole, Marcel had thrown his weight back on the sled to keep it off the dogs on a descent when suddenly Fleur, whose white back he could barely see moving in front, with a whine stopped dead in her tracks and flattened on the snow. Her tired sons at once lay down behind her. The sled slid into Angus and stopped.
Mystified, Marcel called: "Marche, Fleur! Marche!" fearing to find, when she rose, that his rock and anchor had suddenly broken on the trail.
But the great dog, ignoring the command, raised her nose in a low growl as Marcel reached her.
"What troubles you, Fleur?" he asked, on his knees beside her, brushing the crusted snow from her ears and slant eyes. Again Fleur whined mysteriously.
"Where ees de pain, Fleur? Get up!" he ordered sharply, thinking to learn where her iron body had received its hurt. But the dog lay rigid, her throat still rumbling.
"By Gar, dis ees queer t'ing!" muttered Marcel, his mittened hand on the massive head.
Then some strange impulse led him to advance into the black wall, when, with fierce protest, Fleur, jerking Jules to his feet, leaped forward, straining to reach him.
The Frenchman, checked by the dog's action, stared into the darkness, until, at length, he saw that the white tundra at his feet fell away before his snow-shoes and he looked out into gray space.
As he crouched peering ahead, his senses slowly warned him that he stood on a shoulder of cliff falling sheer to the invisible beach below.
He had driven his dogs to the lip of a ghastly death; and Julie----
Turning back, he flung himself beside the trembling Fleur and with his arm circling the great neck, kissed the battered nose. Fleur, with the uncanny instinct of the born lead-dog, had scented the open space, divined the danger, had known--and lain down, saving them all.
Swinging his team off the brow of the cliff, he worked back and finally down to the beach, and his muffled passenger, drowsy, with swiftly numbing limbs, never knew that he had ridden calmly, that night, out to the doors of doom.
In the lee of an island Marcel made camp and boiled life-giving tea,--the panacea of the north--and pemmican, on a hot fire, which soon revived the frozen Hunter.