It was a more sober and earnest young man who faced resolutely about and continued the trek eastward towards Fort Good Faith. The silence of the great forest lay about him. Shadows had lengthened, the sun had slipped down out of sight, the cooler breath of evening stung color in his cheeks and tickled his nostrils with tiny particles of frost.
“I’ll go on for an hour before stopping to make camp for the night,” he decided.
He felt more tired now as he resumed his lonely and monotonous journey. Crossing a narrow valley, thickly studded with clumps of red willow and saskatoon, he commenced scrambling up a sharp incline, until finally he reached a wide plateau. Here, except for an occasional stunted jack-pine, there were no trees. Huge boulders and queer looking rocks, most of them covered thickly with snow, gave a weird appearance to the place.
The wind had full sweep across the plateau. It was bitterly cold here, so cold indeed that even the heavy fur jacket and parka, worn by the mounted police, failed to keep out the insidious penetrating frost. Dick beat his arms against his shivering body and stumbled on across that desolate plain, anxiously scanning the darkening prospect ahead. He hoped that he would come soon to the more friendly forest, where, when a stop became necessary, he could gather wood and kindle a fire. But out there ahead he could see nothing except a long and weary stretch of country covered with snow and bristling with rocks, a land indescribably lonely and terrible just then in the rapidly gathering darkness.
Fully an hour passed before he had traversed the plateau and had come again to the welcome woodland. Breathing a sigh of relief, he started down the slope, faintly outlined in the gloom ahead. It was so steep here that Dick had difficulty in keeping his balance. He slid, stumbled, now and again reaching out for a young sapling to aid him in his somewhat precipitous descent. He had almost reached the bottom when he felt himself being thrown violently forward, falling in a crumpled heap at the foot of a large spruce. A stab of pain in his right ankle, and Dick momentarily lost consciousness.
He realized presently what had happened. The thong of the snowshoe on his right foot had become caught in a snag of brush and had tripped him. His fall had been heavy, but Dick did not become aware of the full extent of his injury until he attempted to rise.
It was useless. His right ankle throbbed with a sickening pain. A bad fracture or torn ligaments—he was not sure which—made it absolutely impossible for him to put any weight at all upon that foot.
A sudden, horrible fear overcame him. In the first moment of weakness, a terror-stricken sob broke from his lips. Here he was absolutely helpless, without wood, water or fire, without shelter of any kind, in weather so bitterly cold that in a few hours time, lying there inactive, he would be frozen as stiff as a block of ice.
Not entirely to Dick’s discredit, he cried like a child, one arm flung out, the other pillowed under him. He lay there, his body shaking with ill-suppressed grief. Face blanched with terror, he sat up finally staring about him with tragic eyes. Everywhere around was deep and utter silence. To all appearances, there was no life anywhere in that dead waste of snow, in that land of bitter, penetrating cold.
And then, suddenly, far away, he heard the familiar wolf-cry. Long and mournful it was, and Dick shivered, remembering a former occasion when he, Sandy and Corporal Richardson and Toma had very nearly given their lives to a hungry pack in the vicinity of the Big Smoky. If there was anything on earth which Dick feared, hated and despised, it was a wolf. Whenever he heard the eerie cry of this species of human hunters in the North, his hair fairly bristled from panic and indignation. In his present predicament, it was the very thing required to put strength and determination in his heart. Groaning in the effort, he rose dizzily to his knees and commenced to scoop away the snow with his hands.