As they left the valley and reached the open tundra above, they met the full force of the wind. For an instant men and dogs stopped dead in their tracks, then with heads down they hurled themselves into the white fury which had buried the trail beyond all following.
On pushed the desperate Frenchman in the direction of the north coast, followed by Fleur with her whitened nose at the tails of his snow-shoes. At times, when the force of the snow-swirls sucked their very breath, men and dogs threw themselves panting on the snow, until, with wind regained, they stumbled on. Often plunging to their collars in the new snow, the huskies travelled solely by leaps, until, stalled nose-deep, tangled in traces and held by the drag of the overturned sled, Marcel and the exhausted Hunter came to their rescue. Heart-breaking mile after mile of the country over which Marcel had sped two days before, they painfully put behind them.
At noon, the man who lived his creed crumpled in the snow. Wrapping him in robes, Marcel lashed him on the sled and went on, the vision of a dying girl on a white cot at Whale River ever in his eyes.
Through a break in the snow, before the light waned, Marcel made out, dim in the north, the silhouette of Big Island. He was over the divide and well on his way to the coast. With the night, the wind eased, though the snow held, and although he was off the trail, the new snow on the exposed north slope of the Cape was either wind-packed or swept from the frozen tundra, and again the exhausted dogs found good footing.
For some time the team had been working easily down hill, Marcel often forced to brake the toboggan with his feet. He knew he had worked to the west of the trail, and was swinging in a circle to regain it. Worried by the sting of the cold, which was growing increasingly bitter as the wind fell off, he stopped to rub the muffled, frost-cracked face and hands of his spent passenger, cheering him with the promise of a roaring fire. When he started the team, Colin, stiffened by the rest, limped badly, and Jules, who had bucked the deep snow all day like a veteran of the mail-teams, gamely following his herculean mother, hobbled along, head and tail down, with a wrenched shoulder. It was high time they found a camping place. With the falling wind they would freeze in the open. So he pushed on through the murk, seeking the beach where there was wood and a lee.
They were swiftly dropping down to the sea-ice but snow and darkness drew around them an impenetrable curtain. Seizing the gee-pole, Marcel had thrown his weight back on the sled to keep it off the dogs on a descent when suddenly Fleur, whose white back he could barely see moving in front, with a whine stopped dead in her tracks and flattened on the snow. Her tired sons at once lay down behind her. The sled slid into Angus and stopped.
Mystified, Marcel called: "Marche, Fleur! Marche!" fearing to find, when she rose, that his rock and anchor had suddenly broken on the trail.
But the great dog, ignoring the command, raised her nose in a low growl as Marcel reached her.
"What troubles you, Fleur?" he asked, on his knees beside her, brushing the crusted snow from her ears and slant eyes. Again Fleur whined mysteriously.
"Where ees de pain, Fleur? Get up!" he ordered sharply, thinking to learn where her iron body had received its hurt. But the dog lay rigid, her throat still rumbling.