In his weakened state, black spots and pin-points of light danced before his eyes. Distant objects were often magnified out of all proportion. So intense was the glare of the high March sun on the crust that his wooden goggles alone saved him from snow-blindness. He travelled a few miles until dizziness forced him to rest. Later he continued on, to rest again, while the black nose of Fleur, who was still comparatively strong, sought his face, as she wondered at the reason for the master's strange actions.
By noon he had crossed no trail except that of a wolverine seeking food like himself, and finally went down into the timbered valley of a brook where he left Fleur and the sled. Then he started again on his hopeless search. As the streams flowed northeast, he was certain that he had crossed the Height of Land to the Ungava Bay watershed, and was now in the headwater country of the fabled River of Leaves, the Koksoak of the Esquimos, into which no hunter from Whale River had ever penetrated.
Marcel was snow-shoeing through the scrub at the edge of the plateau when far out on the barren he saw two spots. Shortly he was convinced that the objects moved.
"By Gar, deer! At last they travel nord!" he gasped, gazing with bounding pulses at the distant spots almost indistinguishable against the snow. Meat out there on the barren awaited him—food and life, if only he could get within range.
Cutting back into the scrub, that he might begin his stalk of the caribou from the nearest cover with the wind in his face, he moved behind a rise in the ground slowly out into the barren. With a caution he had never before exercised, lest the precious food now almost within reach should escape him, the starving man advanced.
At last he crawled up behind a low knoll, and stretched out on the snow. Cocking and thrusting his rifle before him, he wormed his way to the top of the rise and looked.
There a hundred yards off, playing on the crust, were two arctic foxes. Distorting their size, the barren ground mirage had cruelly deceived him.
With a groan the spent hunter dropped his head on his arms. "All dees for fox!" he murmured. Then, because foxes were meat, he took careful aim and shot one, wounding the other, which he killed with the second bullet. Hanging the carcasses in a spruce, Marcel continued to skirt the barren toward the east.
As dusk fell he returned to Fleur and made camp. Cutting up and boiling one of the foxes, he and the dog ate ravenously of the rank flesh, but hope was low in the breast of Jean Marcel. A day or two more of half rations and he was done. The spring migration of the caribou was not yet on. And when the deer did come, it would be too late. Jean Marcel would be past aid and Fleur—what would become of her? True, she could live on the flanks of the caribou herds like the wolves, but the wolves would find and destroy her.
Tortured by such thoughts, he sat by his fire, the husky's great head on his knee, her eyes searching his, mutely demanding the reason for his strange silence.