Curious as to the cause of her absence Jean smoked his pipe and waited. He was anxious to start back with his traps and meat; but where was Fleur? Becoming alarmed by the middle of the morning, he made a wide circle of the camp hoping to pick up her trail. Two days previous there had been a flurry of snow sufficient to enable him to follow her tracks on the stiff crust. In the vicinity of the camp were traces of Fleur's recent footprints but finally, at a distance, Marcel ran into a fresh trail leading down into the brook-bottom. There he lost it, and after hours of search returned to camp to wait for her return. But the day wore away and the husky did not appear. Night came and visions of his dog lying somewhere stiff in the snow slashed and torn by wolves, tortured his thoughts. If only he could pick up her trail at daylight, he thought, for she might still live, crippled, unable to come to him, waiting for Jean Marcel who had never failed her.
As he sat brooding by his fire, he came to realize, now that he had lost her, what a part of him the dog had become. His thoughts drifted back over their life together, months of gruelling toil and--delight. Tears traced their way down the wind-burned cheeks of Marcel as he recalled her early puppy ways and antics, how she had loved to nibble with her sharp milk teeth at his moccasins and sit in the bow of the canoe, on their way down the coast, scolding at the seals and ducks; with what mad delight she had welcomed his visits to the stockade at Whale River circling him at full speed, until breathless and panting, she leaped upon him, her hot tongue seeking his hands and face. Then on the long trail home from the south coast marshes, how closely she would snuggle to his back as they lay on the beaches, as if fearing to lose him while she slept. And the winter on the Ghost, with its ghastly end--what a rock his dog had been when his partners failed him! In the moment of his peril, how savagely she had battled for Jean Marcel! Through the lean weeks of starvation when hope had died, to the dawn when she had waked him at the coming of the caribou, his thoughts led him. And now, when spring and Whale River were near, it was all over. Their life together with its promise of the future had been snapped short off. He should never again look into the slant, brown eyes of Fleur. He had lost his all; first Julie, and now, Fleur. There was nothing left.