Brent was about to reply when each glanced for a moment into the other's face, and then both stared into the North. From out of the darkness came a sullen roar, low, and muffled, and mighty, like the roar of surf on the shore of a distant sea.
"It is the wind!" cried the girl, "Quick, take a shoulder of meat! We must find shelter and camp."
"I can't cut a leg bone with this knife!"
"There are no bones! It is like this." She snatched the knife from Brent's hand and with a few deft slashes severed a shoulder from the yearling caribou. "Come, quick," she urged, and led the way toward a dark blotch that showed in the scraggling timber a few hundred yards away: "When the storm strikes, we shall not be able to see," she flung over her shoulder, "We must make that thicket of spruce—or we're bushed."
Louder and louder sounded the roar of the approaching wind. Brent encumbered with his rifle and the shoulder of meat, found it hard to keep up with the girl whose snowshoes fairly flew over the snow. They gained the thicket a few moments before the storm struck. The girl paused before a thick spruce, that had been broken off and lay with its trunk caught across the upstanding butt, some four feet from the ground. Jerking the ax from its sheath she set to work lopping branches from the dead tree.
"Break some live branches for the roof of our shelter!" she commanded. "This stuff will do for firewood, and in a minute you can take the ax and I will build the wikiup." The words were snatched from her lips by the roar of the storm. Full upon them, now, it bent and swayed the thick spruces as if to snap them at the roots. Brent gasped for breath in the first rush of it and the next moment was coughing the flinty dry snow-powder from his lungs. No longer were there snow-flakes in the air—the air itself was snow—snow that seared and stung as it bit into lips and nostrils, that sifted into the collars of capote and mackinaw, and seized neck and throat in a deadly chill. Back and forth Brent stumbled bearing limbs which he tore from the trunks of trees, and as he laid them at her feet the girl deftly arranged them. The ax made the work easier, and at the end of a half-hour the girl shouted in his ear that there were enough branches. Re
moving their rackets, they stood them upright in the snow, and stooping, the girl motioned him to follow as she crawled through a low opening in what appeared to be a mountain of spruce boughs. To his surprise, Brent found that inside the wikiup he could breathe freely. The fine powdered snow, collecting upon the close-lying needles had effectively sealed the roof and walls.
For another half hour, the two worked in the intense blackness of the interior with hands and feet pushing the snow out through the opening, and when the task was finished they spread a thick floor of the small branches that the girl had piled along one side. Only at the opening there were no branches, and there upon the ground the girl proceeded to build a tiny fire. "We must be careful," she cautioned, "and only build a small fire, or our house will burn down." As she talked she opened a light packsack that Brent had noticed upon her shoulders, and drew from its interior a rabbit robe which she spread upon the boughs. Then from the pack she produced a small stew pan and a little package of tea. She filled the pan with snow, and smiled up into Brent's face: "And, now, at last, we are snug and comfortable for the night. We can live here for days if necessary. The caribou are not far away, and we have plenty of tea."
"You are a wonder," breathed Brent, meeting squarely the laughing gaze of the dark eyes, "Do you know that if it had not been for you, I would
have been—would never have weathered this storm?"