"By Gar, dis ees queer t'ing!" muttered Marcel, his mittened hand on the massive head.
Then some strange impulse led him to advance into the black wall, when, with fierce protest, Fleur, jerking Jules to his feet, leaped forward, straining to reach him.
The Frenchman, checked by the dog's action, stared into the darkness, until, at length, he saw that the white tundra at his feet fell away before his snow-shoes and he looked out into gray space.
As he crouched peering ahead, his senses slowly warned him that he stood on a shoulder of cliff falling sheer to the invisible beach below.
He had driven his dogs to the lip of a ghastly death; and Julie——
Turning back, he flung himself beside the trembling Fleur and with his arm circling the great neck, kissed the battered nose. Fleur, with the uncanny instinct of the born lead-dog, had scented the open space, divined the danger, had known—and lain down, saving them all.
Swinging his team off the brow of the cliff, he worked back and finally down to the beach, and his muffled passenger, drowsy, with swiftly numbing limbs, never knew that he had ridden calmly, that night, out to the doors of doom.
In the lee of an island Marcel made camp and boiled life-giving tea,—the panacea of the north—and pemmican, on a hot fire, which soon revived the frozen Hunter.
To his joy, he realized that the back of the blizzard was broken, for as the wind and snow eased, the temperature rapidly fell to an Arctic cold. With Whale River eighty miles away; his dogs broken by lack of rest and stiff from the wrenching and exhaustion of the battle with the deep snow; his own legs twinging with "mal raquette"; Marcel thanked God, for the dawn would see the wind dead and if his team did not fail him, in two days he would reach the post.