It was harder now that I was alone, scant as was my load. I had but two dogs, Malicula, loyal and steady, and Barsick, the undemonstrative, as companions; for another dog had been left behind, back there in the tent in the woods, where Kentuck was alone.
All day long we tugged together, dogs and master. So long had Malicula followed those other sled tracks, traced out like a faint road in the snow, and frozen into little rough lines, that he took the road instinctively. For hours at a stretch, I did not look at the land around me, save to remember landmarks, looking backward and stamping on my memory the details that I must remember for my return in case the shroud of snow obliterated the trail.
Now it was a hummock in the wide expanse; then it was a group of trees. Again it would be a lone pinnacle of a hill, and a wide tundra, where I noted my compass, and dragged off my mittens to write, with stiff, cramped fingers, the pointing of the needle. I was divided between two cares—solicitude to remember the backward route to where lay that brave, helpless, crippled man; and watchfulness ahead.
On the sled in front of me, caught by a mere string that could be broken, lay Dan's rifle, loaded; for I proposed to take no chances in case of conflict with the desperate Indian adventurer ahead. Not only was my own life at stake, but that of Kentuck, left behind, and to whom sooner or later I must return and assist, lest he die there miserably, in that terrible isolation. And always I was alert, constantly fearing that I should come upon the Hatchet so close that he would sense me, and lie in ambush to murder. Again I would steady myself with the thought, repeated aloud, that he would not pause until he came to those high mountains where stood three pinnacles, in distorted shapes, the pinnacles of the legend and the curse.
I camped late, and was grateful, in a peculiarly puerile way, to the Hatchet for having left me a wikiup, which gave shelter and a bed of boughs, the remnants of a charred log, and a piece of a snowshoe thong. I had but a robe, and the dogs slept on either side of me, their warm bodies lending comfort—Malicula bravely taking the outer edge, and the worn Barsick, black-coated, the inner. I talked to them as we ate together, and laid down to rest together, and I knew for the first time the depths of canine sympathy and companionship. Ah, I was learning; and coming nearer to nature's heart, away off up there in the frozen, uncharted lands on which God Himself seemed to have set His seal of isolation!
I slept late, because I was tired out, and took the trail reluctantly. Ahead of me was nothing but the rolling tundra. I may have plodded hours without noticing it, but I suddenly discovered something new and foreboding in the pale signs of the snow. They were tracks, huge and menacing, the tracks of timber wolves. They ventured alongside that other trail, and at times passed over it, obliterating it with the marks of broad, spread pads.
Persistently they were there, always defined remorselessly, as if they had scented and followed the Hatchet, and bided their time, as he must have bided his when he knew that behind him were men whom he proposed to make his prey. They were still there when the dusk made the trailing difficult, and I stopped watching them, leaving it to the intelligence of the great, gray beast ahead to keep the tracks, and bring me to a camping place. He stopped at last, and we were in a little draw, where willows, swept by early winter winds, reared their tops above the snow, melancholy and plumelike.
On this night there was no friendly shelter of trees, only those thin branches, congealed in the icy cold, still ind immovable, above,the place where the Hatchet had slept, and where we slept. But to-night the dogs huddled closer.
In the morning I bent over to study the strange writing around me. There was something peculiar in it. I stopped and picked it up. It was an empty shell of a repeating rifle. I found another. Again my foot struck something hard. It was the skull of a dog, polished to an ivory white. I wandered farther, more intent on my search. I found another skull, this time of a wolf, and farther out the vertebræ of two other dogs. Around all was that confusion of tracks. I hurried out in widening circles to examine the trail in the dim light of the morning. It was plain.