Dry, drifting snow half hid the tracks of the caribou during the night, and in the morning he was forced to wait for the late-coming daylight before picking up the trail. The herd had gone straight westward, and Reivers followed the signs, his eyes constantly scanning the snow for moccasin tracks or other evidence of human beings.
In the middle of the forenoon, in a birch and willow swamp, he jumped the animals again. They caught his scent at a mile’s distance, and Reivers crouched down and watched avidly as they streaked from the swamp to security.
To the north of the swamp lay the open, snow-covered tundra, where even the knife-like fore-hoof of the caribou would have hard time to dig out a living in the dead of Winter. To the south lay clumps of brush and stunted trees, ideal shelter and feed.
The animals went north. Reivers nodded in great satisfaction. There were wolves or Indians to the south, probably the latter. Accordingly he turned southward. Toward noon he found his first moccasin track, evidently the trail of a single hunter who had come northward, but not quite far enough, on a hunt for caribou.
The track looped back southward and Reivers trailed it. Soon a set of snow-shoe tracks joined the moccasins, and Reivers, after a close scrutiny had revealed the Chippewa pattern in the snow, knew that he was on the right track. The tracks dropped down on to the bed of a solidly frozen river and continued on to the south.
Other tracks became visible. When they gathered together and made a hard-packed trail down the middle of the river, Reivers knew that a camp was not far away, and grew cautious.
He found the camp as the swift Winter darkness came on, a group of half a dozen tepees set snugly in a bend of the river, one large tepee in the middle easily recognisable as that of Tillie, the squaw, chief of the band.
Reivers sat down to wait. Presently he heard the camp-dogs growling and fighting over their evening meal and knew that they would be too occupied to notice and announce the approach of a stranger. Also, at this time the people of the camp would be in their tepees, supping heavily if the hunter’s god had been favourably inclined, and gnawing the cold bones of yesterday if that irrational deity had been unkind.
By the whining note in the growls of the dogs, Reivers judged that the latter was the case this evening; and when he moved forward and stood listening outside the flap of the big tepee he knew that it was so. Within, an old squaw’s treble rose faintly in a whining chant, of which Reivers caught the despairing motif:
Black is the face of the sun, Ah wo!
The time has come for the old to die. Ah wo, ah wo!
There is meat only to keep alive the young. Ah wo!
We who are old must die. Ah wo! Ah wo! Ah wo!