Shad Trowbridge stood dazed, as one in a dream--a horrid, awful dream. He looked through a haze, and what he saw was distorted, unreal, terrible. The suffering creatures about him were spectral phantoms of the nether world, the shimmering rime, a symbol of death, the endless snow the white robe of the grave quickly to cover them all.
A sudden stillness fell upon the camp, to be presently broken by the agonised scream of a woman, shrill and startling, followed by wailings and melancholy moans. The Spirit of Death had snatched away her favourite son.
A sickening nausea overtook Shad, and he sank upon his toboggan, faint and dizzy with an overpowering weakness. His imagination was getting the better of him.
It is always dangerous and sometimes fatal for one to permit the imagination to assert itself in seasons of peril. Will power to put away thoughts of to-morrow, to think only of to-day, to do to-day the thing which necessity requires, coupled with a determination never to abandon hope, is a paramount essential for the successful explorer to possess.
In this moment of hopeless surrender Shad felt Manikawan's hand rest lightly upon his shoulder for an instant, and looking up he saw her standing before him, tall, straight, commanding, and as she looked that day on the river bank when she bade him and Bob wait for her return to free them from their island prison.
"The friend of White Brother of the Snow is not a coward. He is not afraid of the Spirit of Hunger. He is not afraid of the Spirit of Death. He is brave. He once outwitted the Matchi Manitu of the River. He will outwit the Spirit of Hunger. He will outwit the Spirit of Death. The friend of White Brother of the Snow is brave. He is not afraid to die."
The words were unintelligible to him, but their import was unmistakable. She, a young Indian maiden, was offering him encouragement, and recalling him to his manhood.
He arose to his feet, ashamed that she had read his mind, ashamed that she had found it necessary to recall him from a lapse into his foolish weakness which must have seemed to her like cowardice.
But he remembered now that he was a man--a white man--and because he was a white man, the physical equal and mental superior of any savage there. Looking into Manikawan's eyes, he made an unspoken vow that she should never again have cause to chide him.
Dawn was breaking, and in the growing light a half-dozen lodges were to be seen. At one side and alone stood a deerskin tent of peculiar form. It was a high tent of exceedingly small circumference, and where the smoke opening was provided and the poles protruded at the top of the ordinary wigwam, this was tightly closed. It was the medicine lodge of the shaman.