two snow-crusted figures stood with backs to the stinging wind.
"All right, Mac; but if this keeps up to-morrow we'll never see the post," shouted his companion.
So they drove the team to the shore and made a supperless camp in the shelter of the spruce. The huskies bolted two pairs of moccasins cut into strips and boiled, while the men drank hot snow-water in a vain attempt to stay their hunger, for as yet John Bolton could not bring himself to kill one of his faithful dogs until hope of reaching the post soon was past. In that case the weaker dogs would have to go to save the others and their masters.
All night the white fury beat down from the north. The next morning, with belts tightened against the long hours in the drifts, they started. All day they battled through the deep snow against the bitter wind, which cracked their frost-blackened faces, buried in the hoods of their capotes as they were, until facing its fury was unspeakable torture. Still the fast-weakening men and dogs kept on, for warmth and food and life lay ahead, somewhere over these pitiless hills.
When the early northern night neared, the wind had blown itself out and finally died on Grand Lac Pierre, and the dusk crept out from the black timber of the shores over its white shell to meet a slow-moving dog-team and two men. But, with the dropping of the wind, the increasing cold of a silent January night on the Height-of-Land so numbed the limbs of weakened
