It was with a distinct feeling of homesickness that Marian turned to look back at the campsite. She had spent many happy hours there. Now she was leaving it, perhaps forever. What was more, she was leaving the tundra; the broad-stretching deer pastures of the Arctics. Should their enterprise succeed, she would pass over one of the Canadian trails, southward to the States and back to the University. Should they fail, she might indeed return to the tundra, but she knew it could never be the same to her.
“We must not fail,” she told herself, clenching her hands tight and staring away at the magnificent panorama which lay before her. “We must not! Must not fail!”
As she saw the reindeer, a mass of brown and white moving down the slope, a feeling of sadness swept over her. She had come to love these gentle and half-wild creatures of the North. She was especially fond of the sled-deer, her three; the spotted one, the brown one, and the white. Many hundred miles had she driven them. Nowhere in the world, she was sure, could there be deer who covered more miles in a day, who were quicker to recognize the pull of rein, more willing to stomp the tiresome nights away at the ends of their tethers.
Dearest of all were the three collie dogs; Gold, Copper and Bronze, she whimsically named them, for their coats were just what their names indicated. Copper and Bronze were young dogs. Gold was the pick of the three; an old, well-trained sheep dog. Accustomed to the sunny pastures of California, he had been brought to this cold and barren land to herd reindeer. With the sturdy devotion of his kind, he had endured the biting cold without a whimper, and had gnawed his toes, cut by the crusted snow, in silence. He had done the work assigned to him with a zeal and thoroughness that might have shamed many a human master.
“These, too, I must leave,” she told herself. “Worse than that, I am leading them out into wild desert. Within a week that beautiful herd may be hopelessly scattered; our sled-deers killed by wolves; our dogs—well, anyway, they will never desert us. Together we will fight it out to the bitter end.”
A lump came into her throat. Then, realizing that she was the commander of this expedition and that it was unbecoming of commanders to betray emotion, she quickly conquered her feelings and gave herself over to the work of assisting in keeping the herd moving steadily forward in a compact mass.
Five days later, with their herd still moving steadily on before them, and with hopes rising high because of the continued success of their march, they found themselves crossing a succession of low-lying, grass-covered hills. As they reached the crest of the highest of these, and arrived at a place where they could get an unrestricted view of the tundra that lay beyond, an exclamation escaped Marian’s lips.
“A forest!” she exclaimed.
“A real Arctic forest,” echoed Patsy. “Won’t it be wonderful!”
“Wonderful and dangerous,” Marian replied. “Unless I miss my guess, here is where our troubles begin. It may not be so bad, though,” she quickly amended, as she saw the look of fear that came over her cousin’s face. “That forest is fully ten miles away. The sun is about to set. We’ll drive our herd down into the tundra where there is plenty of moss. We’ll camp there, and get up for an early start in the morning. The forest may be only a narrow belt along a river.”