“Where did he come from?” Florence asked as the dog voiced thanks for the food offered him.
“Not from Nome,” said Kennedy. “No such dog there.”
“Some reindeer herder’s dog, or a miner’s, like Jack London’s Buck in the Call of the Wild,” said Jodie. “Find his story and you may learn of tragedy.”
No time now for such musings. The long trail lay ahead.
“We’ll take him along for luck,” said Florence. What luck? How could she know now?
“We’ll have to, of course,” they all agreed. “No true Alaskan ever leaves a starving dog on the trail.”
So the “Phantom Leader” was stowed away on top of the canvas packing on Jodie’s sled, and the little caravan once more moved on into the great unknown.
Long days followed, days of pushing forward along untracked rivers and over low mountains where no man lived, and no living creature moved save the fox, the wolf, and the snowshoe rabbit. Nights there were when the sky was like a blue sea filled with the lights of a thousand ships. An Arctic gale came sweeping down upon them. Blotting out the landscape, it drove them into camp. For two days and nights with their little sheet-iron stove beating back the frost, they lay on their sleeping bags listening to the beat of snow against their tent.
Their food supply dwindled. No wild caribou had been seen, but joy suddenly filled their hearts when at last they came to the spot where the river they followed forked.
“That,” Tom Kennedy exulted, “is the fork. Up this stream we must go.”