He surveyed the small bundle of jerked venison with misgivings. Even with one light meal a day he calculated that it could not last them above three weeks. Their journey from the cache on the Great Lake to their present position had consumed a month, including a period of one week when they were stormbound.
Should they be fortunate and encounter no storms, the food, sparingly doled out, might serve to sustain them. If storms delayed them, it certainly would not.
In any case their lives must hang in the balance until the cache was reached, unless game were encountered in the meantime, which seemed highly improbable.
A meagre meal was served at an early hour the following morning. As usual, camp was broken long before day, and then came the farewells.
The parting between Sishetakushin and Mookoomahn was affecting, that between the women more stoical. Shad regretfully shook the hands of the old Indian and his wife. They had been friends to him, and he had no expectation that he should ever see them again.
Then Shad and his companions turned southward into the wide wastes of frozen desolation that lay between him and his friends. It was to be a journey of tragic experiences--a journey that was to try his metal as it had never yet been tried.
THE FOLK AT WOLF BIGHT
The Grays were very lonely and the little cabin at Wolf Bight seemed desolate and deserted indeed during the first days following the departure of the trappers for the interior. Mrs. Gray and Emily cried a little, and often Emily would say:
"I wonders where Bob is now, Mother, an' what he's doin'?"