Under the dreaded lash the shivering team dashed down the bank and headed up the ice of the Klokhok. The steel-shod sled-runners shrieked a shrill tune. The ice boomed to their flying passage.
High in the heavens overhead flashed the brilliant stars and the mid-Winter aurora. There was in the hearts of Blera and Jose no remorse, no regret, not even pity. There was only devilish recklessness and the sheer exultation of escape. Continually they urged on the dogs to greater speed, lashing them till Skookum the leader flung up his nose as he galloped and howled a protest.
And challenging Skookum’s howl, from around the abrupt bend they were taking at express-train speed broke the tumultuous cry of many wolf-dogs on the arctic night.
As if suddenly revealed by a lightning flash Jose and Blera glimpsed them right ahead, the murderous hunt-pack from Tutchi’s Village sweeping the river-ice one hundred strong with one lone cross-fox straining from their jaws. An instant they glimpsed them, then in the belly of the bend, fox, team, sled and hunt-pack collided in a heap.
Cantine had loosened his grip on the sled to grasp the rifle in defense, and the smashing impact catapulted him clear into the heart of the horde.
One moment Blera watched him sink in a sea of bristling fur and slavering fangs before she beheld the same sea surging upon her, the sea which was the concrete force of the inimical wild, strong, sure, more ruthless even than the persecuting Bassett or the avenging hand of Eric Sark.
Two weeks later, Tom Bassett, returning from Dawson City up the Nordenskold River and swinging through the night down the Klokhok River to his partner’s cabin on the Nordenskold Trail, drove over a rattling heap of debris at the first bend above the Klokhok’s mouth. Curiously he swerved his sled back to investigate, and one brief look before he whipped on showed the remnants of a broken sled mingled with gnawed husky and human bones glistening white under a rising moon.
He whipped on fast and burst into the cabin upon Sark who with a bandage over a deep cut on his temple was forking bacon from a frying-pan on the stove on to a plate.
“Eric,” Tom greeted with a tremor of relief in his voice, “I struck somethin’ upriver, and I wasn’t—well, sure, you know!”