from their tents each morning, and spreading soft creaking ice-films before the canoe-prows. The heat of midday swept it off; but each morning it lasted longer, and each evening it came more early. The tentacles of the North were pushing down to annex its own again. Little by little the land was closing up behind them. Already the Mackenzie River would have shut down, and Herschel be settling into its seven months of rigidity. The keen, glad breath of the mornings put new vigour into the men; the flies were dead, and the long, hard miles of labour had tightened thew and muscle, and sweated off superfluous flesh until there was nothing left but a tense springy strength that seemed never to tire.
And then, one hot midday when the river ran fast between tall, naked cliffs, the canoes swung round a bluff and found an anchorage before a knot of deerskin tepees where Esquimaux women were working. Dick's heart was in his throat as he went with Tempest up to the tepees. But there was nothing for him there. All the men were away at Fullerton, trading fur and carvings with the whalers, and the little information which the laughing, fat-faced women could give in their broken English suggested no knowledge of a white man among them.
Tempest stopped to admire the sleek, alert, dusky dogs which made the sledge-teams.
"About as different from an Indian dog as day from night," he said. "I shouldn't wonder if we weren't wishing we had 'em before long."
"Why!" Dick was startled. "Don't you imagine we will catch the steamer at Chesterfield or Fullerton?" he asked.
"Can't say." Tempest turned on his heel. "Winter seems likely to be early, and I am afraid its going to take us all our time"
And then he forgot Dick and stood watching Depache down on his long knees among the greasy, chuckling babies who rolled on the stamped ground without the tepees.
Depache was cuddling those babies and kissing them. He made bobbing rabbits for them out of his ragged handkerchief. He tickled them and laughed as the fat, good-natured mothers laughed, and Tempest went away to camp with a sudden, surprised understanding in him. Shut in
