"I'll find him yet," he muttered. "My Dad always played in hard luck—but he never quit! I'll find Waseche—but, if I don't find him, the big men back there that knew Sam Morgan—they'll know Sam Morgan's boy was no quitter, either!" He turned away from the entrance and began to harness the dogs.
Way down the valley, high on the surface of the glacier, Waseche Bill stopped suddenly to listen. Faint and far, a sound was borne to his ears through the thin, cold air. He jerked back his parka hood and strained to catch the faint echo. Again he heard it—the long, bell-like howl of a dog—and as he listened, the man's face paled, and a strange prickling sensation started at the roots of his hair and worked slowly along his spine. For this man of the North knew dogs. Even in the white fastness of the terrible Lillimuit he could not be mistaken.
"Boris! Boris!" he cried, and whirling his wolf-dogs in their tracks, dashed over the windswept surface of the glacier in the direction of the sound.
"I can't be wrong! I can't be wrong!" he repeated over and over again, "I raised him from a pup!"
CHAPTER VII
IN THE LILLIMUIT
Speak desolation. What does it mean to you? What picture rises before your eyes? A land laid waste by the ravages of war? A brain picture of sodden, trampled fields, leaning fences, grey piles of smoking ashes which are the ruins of homes, flanking a long, white, unpeopled highway strewn with litter, broken wagons, abandoned caissons, and, here and there, long fresh-heaved ridges of brown earth that cover the men who were? Isn't that the picture? And isn't it the evening of a dull grey day, just at the time when the gloom of twilight shades into the black pall of night, and way toward the edge of the world, on the indistinct horizon, a lurid red glow tints the low-hung clouds—no flames—only the dull, illusive glow that wavers and fades in the heavens above other burning homes? Yes, that is desolation. And, yet—men have been here—everything about you speaks the presence of people. Here people lived and loved and were happy; and here, also, they were heartbroken and sad. The whole picture breathes humanity—and the inhumanity of men. And, as people have lived here, instinctively you know that people will live here again; for this is man-made desolation.
Only those to whom it has been given to know the Big North—the gaunt, white, silent land beyond the haunts of men—can realize the true significance of desolation.
Stand surrounded by range upon towering range of unmapped mountains whose clean-cut peaks show clear and sharp through the keen air—air so dry and thin that the slanting rays of the low-hung midday sun gleam whitely upon the outlines of ice crags a hundred miles away. Stand there alone, enveloped by the solitude of the land where men never lived—nor ever will live—where the silence is a thing, pressing closer and closer about you—smothering you—so that, instinctively, you throw out your hands to push it away that you may breathe—then you begin to know desolation—the utter desolation of the frozen wilderness, the cold, dead land of mystery.