It was late that afternoon, traveling slowly southward over the trail of the Coppermine, when they heard far behind them the wailing cry of Bram Johnson's wolves. The sound came only once, like the swelling surge of a sudden sweep of wind, yet when they camped at the beginning of darkness Philip was confident the madman and his pack were close behind them. Utter exhaustion blotted out the hours for Celie and himself, while Olaf, buried in two heavy Eskimo coats he had foraged from the field of battle, sat on guard through the night. Twice in the stillness of his long vigil he heard strange cries. Once it was the cry of a beast. The second time it was that of a man.
The second day, with dogs refreshed, they traveled faster, and it was this night that they camped in the edge of timber and built a huge fire. It was such a fire as illumined the space about them for fifty paces or more, and it was into this light that Bram Johnson stalked, so suddenly and so noiselessly that a sharp little cry sprang from Celie's lips, and Olaf and Philip and the Duke of Rugni stared in wide-eyed amazement. In his right hand the wolf-man bore a strange object. It was an Eskimo coat, tied into the form of a bag, and in the bottom of this improvision was a lump half the size of a water pail. Bram seemed oblivious of all presence but that of Celie. His eyes were on her alone as he advanced and with a weird sound in his throat deposited the bundle at her feet. In another moment he was gone. The Swede rose slowly from where he was sitting, and speaking casually to Celie, took the wolf-man's gift up in his hands. Philip observed the strange look in his face as he turned his back to Celie in the firelight and opened the bag sufficiently to get a look inside. Then he walked out into the darkness, and a moment later returned without the bundle, and with a laugh apologized to Celie for his action.
"No need of telling her what it was," he said to Philip then. "I explained that it was foul meat Bram had brought in as a present. As a matter of fact it was Blake's head. You know the Kogmollocks have a pretty habit of pleasing a friend by presenting him with the head of a dead enemy. Nice little package for her to have opened, eh?"
After all, there are some very strange happenings in life, and the adventurers of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police come upon their share. The case of Bram Johnson, the mad wolf-man of the Upper Country, happened to be one of them, and filed away in the archives of the Department is a big envelope filled with official and personal documents, signed and sworn to by various people. There is, for instance, the brief and straightforward deposition of Corporal Olaf Anderson, of the Fort Churchill Division, and there is the longer and more detailed testimony of Mr. and Mrs. Philip Raine and the Duke of Rugni; and attached to these depositions is a copy of an official decision pardoning Bram Johnson and making of him a ward of the great Dominion instead of a criminal. He is no longer hunted. "Let Bram Johnson alone" is the word that had gone forth to the man-hunters of the Service. It is a wise and human judgment. Bram's country is big and wild. And he and his wolves still hunt there under the light of the moon and the stars.
THE END