Hunter, game though he was, at last was forced to ride on the sled, so fierce was their pace into the wind. Steadily the great beasts ate up the miles. At noon, floundering through drifts like the billows of a broken sea, with Marcel ahead breaking trail, they crossed Caribou Point, Hunter, refusing to burden the dogs, wallowing behind the sled. There they boiled tea, then pushed on to the mouth of the Roggan.
At Ominuk, night fell like a tent, and again a white wraith of a lead-dog, blinded by the fury she faced, kept the trail by instinct, backed loyally by her brood of ice-sheathed wolves, foot-sore, trail-worn, following with low noises her tireless feet.
The coast swung sharply. They were in the lee of the Cape. But a few miles farther and a long rest in the sheltered river valley awaited them. Marcel stopped his dogs and went to Fleur, lying on the trail, her hot breath freezing as it left her panting mouth. Kneeling on the snow beside her with his back to the drive, he examined each hairy paw for pad-cracks or balled snow between the toes, but the feet of the Ungava were iron; then he took in his hands her great head with its battered nose, blood-caked from the snow barrage she had faced all day. Rubbing the ice from her masked eyes, Jean placed his hooded face against his dog's; she turned her nose and her rough tongue touched his frost-blackened cheek.
"Fleur," he said, "we are doing it for Julie—you and Jean Marcel. We mus' mak' de Salmon to-night. Some day we weel hav' de beeg sleep—you and Jean."
Again he stroked her massive head with his red, unmittened hand, then for an instant resting his face against the scarred nose, sprang to his feet. With a glance at the paws and a word for each of the whining puppies whose white tails switched in answer, Jean cracked his whip and shouted, "Marche!"
Late that night a huge fire burned in the timber of the sheltered mouth of the Little Salmon. Two men and a dog-team ate ravenously, then slept like the dead, while over them roared the norther, rocking the spruce and jack-pine in the river bottom, heaping the drifts high on the Whale River trail.
In three days of gruelling toil Marcel had got within ninety miles of his goal—within a day and a half of Whale River had the trail been ice hard. But now it would be days longer—how many he dared not guess.
Had the weather held for him, four days from the night of his starting would have seen him home; for on an iced trail, at his call, his great dogs would have run like wolves at the rallying cry of the pack. As he drew his stiffened legs from the rabbit-skins to freshen the fire at dawn, he bit his cracked lips until they bled, at the thought of what the blizzard had meant to Julie Breton, waiting, waiting for the dog-team creeping up the East Coast, hobbled and held back by head-wind and drift.
The dogs had won a long rest and Marcel did not start breaking trail inland until after daylight. With the sunrise the wind had increased and the heart-sick Marcel groaned at the strength-sapping floundering in breast-high drifts which faced his devoted dogs, when he needed them fresh for the race up the sea-ice of the coast beyond. Before he slept, he had weighed the toil of ten miles of drift-barred short-cut across the Cape, against doubling the headland on the ice, but he had decided that no men or dogs could face the maelstrom of wind and snow which churned around its bald buttresses; no strength could force its way—no endurance prevail, against it.
With Marcel in the lead as trail-breaker and the missionary, who took the punishment without murmur, like the man he was, following the sled, Fleur led her sons up to their Calvary in the hills.