Daylight crept wearily over the timber belt and spread itself slowly over the barrenness, and struck the highest rise of ground, running crosswise through the barrens, which men called “Hog-Back Ridge.” Little by little it lighted up the bleak peaks and tops of ridge and rock-spire.
A wind came with it, a bleak, morning Winter wind which whined as it whipped the dry snow from high places and sent it flying across coulée and valley in the grey light of dawn. Nothing stirred with the coming of daylight. No nocturnal animal, warned of the day’s coming, slunk away to its cave; no beast or bird of daylight greeted the morning with movement or song. The grey half-light revealed no living thing of life upon the exposed hump of the ridge.
The sun came, a ball of dull red, rising over the timber line. It touched the topmost spires of rock, sought to gild them rosily, gave up as their sullen sides refused to take the colour, and turned its rays along the eastern slope. Then something moved. A single speck of life stirred in the vast scene of desolation.
On the bare ground in the lea of a boulder a man sat with his back to the stone and slept. His face was hollow and lined. The corners of his mouth were drawn down as if a weight were hung on each of them, and the thin cheeks, hugging the bones so tightly that the teeth showed through, told that the man had driven himself too far on an empty stomach. Yet, even in sleep, there was a hint of a sardonic smile on the misshapen lips, a smile that condemned and made naught the pain and cruelty of his fate.
The sun crept down the slope of Hog-Back Ridge and found him. It reached his eyes. Its rays had no more warmth than the rays of the cold Winter moon, but its light pierced through the tightly drawn lids. They twitched and finally parted. Reivers awoke without yawning or moving and looked around.
It was the second morning after his flight from Cameron-Dam Camp, and he had yet to reach the Winter camp of the people of Tillie the squaw. Somewhere to the west it lay. He would reach it and reach it in good time, he swore; but he had not had a bite of food in his mouth for two days, and the fever of his wound had sapped heavily his strength.
“Be still, Body,” he growled, as with the return of consciousness his belly cried out for food. “You will be fed before life goes out of you.”
He rose slowly and stiffly to his knees and looked down the ridge to where the rays of the sun now were illumining the snow-covered bottom of the valley below. The valley ran eastward for a mile or two, and at first glance it was empty and dead, save for the flurries of wind-swept snow, dropping down from the heights above. But Reivers, as he rose to his feet, swept the valley with a second glance, and suddenly he dropped and crouched down close to the ground.
Far down at the lower end of the valley a black speck showed on the frozen snow, and the speck was moving.
Reivers lay on the bare patch of ground, as silent and immovable as the rock above him. The speck was too large to be a single animal and too small to be a pack of travelling caribou.