“Phantom! What is it, you—” Suddenly she broke short off. As her whisper ceased, her lips parted, her eyes bulged in astonishment, for at that instant from behind a clump of low spruce trees a head appeared. The head, long and white with small mottled brown spots, carried a pair of massive antlers. The creature stood staring at them, apparently quite unafraid.
“A—a caribou!” she whispered. “Food, plenty of food for dogs and men. All the rifles gone, too. And yet—”
The creature was beautiful. If a rifle were in her hands could she have killed it? She did not know.
Then like a flash the truth came to her, this was not a caribou but a reindeer, a domestic reindeer. Caribou are brown. Only reindeer are white.
“And there are others,” she said to the dog, “many more. Listen!” As she stood there in silence there came again that confused crack-cracking. That, she realized, was many reindeer crack-cracking their hoofs as they trotted over the snow.
“Reindeer,” she whispered in awed excitement, “many reindeer here, two hundred miles from the nearest range. Something wrong somewhere, that’s sure!”
Truly here was a situation. Her companions were gone. Here was a problem to be solved.
“They might be back any time,” she told herself, “but they may not come before the storm breaks.” Something seemed to tell her that here was a matter that needed looking into. Had this herd wandered away, been stampeded by wolves, or—her heart skipped a beat—had some northern outlaws driven the reindeer into the wilds that they might live upon them and perhaps later sell the unmarked yearlings?
“It might be Eskimo,” she thought. Her grandfather had told how the deer had at one time belonged to the Government and to the Eskimo, and how white men had gained control of great herds, how some of the Eskimo, feeling themselves defeated, had turned bitter and at one time or another killed deer that did not belong to them.
“It might be dangerous to go and see what it’s all about,” she told herself. “Might—”