Before dawn, a cold nose nuzzling his face buried in his robe, waked Marcel.
"Fleur, hungry? Eet ees better to sleep w'en dere ees no breakfast," he protested.
The warm tongue sought the face of the drowsy man, and the dog, not to be put off, thrust her nose roughly into his robe, whimpering as she pulled at his capote.
"Poor Fleur!" he muttered. "No more meat for de pup! Lie down! Jean ees ver' tired."
But the dog, bent on arousing the master, grew only the more insistent. Seizing an arm in her jaws, she dragged Marcel from his rabbit-skin blankets.
As he sat upright, wide awake, Fleur sniffed long at the frosty air, then dashed yelping into the dusk up the trail toward the barren. Turning, she ran back to camp, whining excitedly.
"Tiens! W'at you smell, Fleur?" cried Marcel tearing his rifle with shaking hands from its skin case and cramming cartridges into a pocket. Could it be, he wondered, could it be the deer at last? No, only a starving wolf or lynx, prowling near the camp, likely. But still he would go! The love of life was yet strong in Jean Marcel now that a gleam of hope warmed his heart.
Slipping his toes into the thongs of his snow-shoes, he made Fleur fast to a tree, and started. He was so weak from lack of food that often he was forced to stop in the climb, shaken by his hammering heart. At last, exhausted, he dragged himself to the shoulder of the barren and on unsteady legs moved along the edge of the scrub, his eyes straining to pierce the wall of dusk which shut the plateau from his sight. But the shadows still blanketed the barren; so testing the light wind, that he might move directly out toward the game when the light grew stronger, he sat down to save his strength for the stalk. Only too clearly, his weakness warned him that it was his last hunt. By another day, even though he managed the climb, his trembling hands would prevent the lining of his sights on game.
As opal and rose faintly streaked the east, the teeth of the hunter, waiting to read the fate daylight would disclose, chattered in the stinging air. But a space now, and he would know whether he were to creep back to his blankets and wait for stark despair to steady the hand which would bring swift release for Fleur and himself, or whether meat, food, life, were scraping with round-toed hooves the snow from the caribou moss out there in the dim dawn.
Daylight filtered over the floor of snow to meet Marcel lying at the top of a rise out on the barren, waiting. As the light at length opened up the treeless miles, a sob shook the lean frame of the hunter. Tears welled in the deep-set eyes to course down and freeze upon his face, for there, on the snow before him, were the blue-gray shapes of caribou.