“I guess they’re hungry,” Sandy said. “Is there any meat left?”
“A little,” Jerry said. He went to get the can of food from the front of the sled. As he threw the last chunks of raw horse meat to the huskies, he eyed it forlornly. “I’m so hungry I could eat it myself.”
Sandy grinned. “Even some of that muk-tuk would look good to me now.”
“Are the sandwiches all gone?”
“We finished them last night.”
They had just finished feeding the dogs when a faint “Ha-lo-oo-oo...” floated through the still air. On a distant ridge the figure of a man and a dog were silhouetted against the sky.
“It’s Charley and Titan!” the boys yelled in unison. They began to leap up and down, waving their arms and screaming, “Charley! Over here!”
Less than a quarter of an hour later, the Indian came plowing up the hill with Black Titan floundering behind him. They hugged him joyfully and pounded his back, and even Charley was grinning from ear to ear. He listened solemnly while they related their harrowing experiences with the wolves and how they had been trapped in the lean-to.
Charley had had a pretty bad time of it himself. He admitted that, for the first time in his life, he had lost his way when he went back to look for the boys, and had somehow mistaken east for west. Confused and blinded by the shifting gale winds and whipping snow, he had wandered off to an adjacent ridge. After walking around for hours, he had become exhausted—he had been tired out by running twenty-five miles behind the sled to start with—and erected a lean-to in a clump of thick pine trees in the sheltered valley. He had built a big fire and had fallen asleep beside it almost immediately. The next thing he knew, Black Titan was licking his face and the first streaks of dawn were filtering through the pine branches overhead. He had been searching for the boys when he heard the gunshot.
Using the snowshoes as shovels, the three of them dug the sled out of the snow bank. The intense heat of the sun softened the hard upper crust and melted the ice that had formed around the runners. Then Charley hitched up the dogs and headed for the nearest check point, which was only a few miles away.