It was such a spectacle as few are called upon to witness. A red column of flame rose a sheer hundred feet in air. Dry, rosiny spruce cones and needles rose like feathers high in air, to go rocketing away like sparks from a volcano. The sky, the very snow all about him, seemed on fire.
“And near! So near!” he muttered through parched lips as he tore at the thong which bound his terrified reindeer to the willow bush.
His thought had been to loose the reindeer, and clinging to the sled, attempt to escape.
It was fortunate that the thong resisted his efforts, for just as he was about to succeed in loosing it, he caught above the tremendous roar of the fire a strange crack-cracking. The next instant he saw a vast herd of wild and half tame things, all maddened by the fire, bearing down upon him. There was just time to flash his knife twice, to cut the thong and the sled strap, then to leap astride the white reindeer. Then the surge were upon him. Like a mighty flood they surrounded him, engulfed him, carried him forward.
He saw them as in a dream, reindeer by hundred, caribou by thousands, wolves, a bear, all struggling in a mad effort to rush down the narrow valley from the destroying pillar of fire.
He saw a wolf snap at a caribou’s heels. Saw innumerable hoofs strike the wolf and bear him down to sure destruction.
“Trampled him to death,” he shivered, “trampled him as they would me if I fell from my reindeer.”
He clung to the deer’s neck and to his harness with the grim grip of death.
“Sled’s gone, radiophone set gone. Everything gone but life and a reindeer. And thus far you are lucky.” So his mind seemed to tell him things as he felt himself floating forward as if on the backs of the innumerable host.