The sun was already up almost to its highest point, a little more than half-way between the horizon and the zenith, performing the apparent miracle of rising in the north and traveling east instead of west.  Alan knew the men-folk of the village had departed hours ago for the distant herds.  Always, when the reindeer drifted into the higher and cooler feeding-grounds of the foothills, there was this apparent abandonment, and after last night’s celebration the women and children were not yet awake to the activities of the long day, where the rising and setting of the sun meant so little.

As he rose from the table, he glanced again toward Sokwenna’s cabin.  A solitary figure had climbed up out of the ravine and stood against the sun on the clough-top.  Even at that distance, with the sun in his eyes, he knew it was Mary Standish.

He turned his back stoically to the window and lighted his pipe.  For half an hour after that he sorted out his papers and range-books in preparation for the coming of Tautuk and Amuk Toolik, and when they arrived, the minute hand of his watch was at the hour of eight.

That the months of his absence had been prosperous ones he perceived by the smiling eagerness in the brown faces of his companions as they spread out the papers on which they had, in their own crude fashion, set down a record of the winter’s happenings.  Tautuk’s voice, slow and very deliberate in its unfailing effort to master English without a slip, had in it a subdued note of satisfaction and triumph, while Amuk Toolik, who was quick and staccato in his manner of speech, using sentences seldom of greater length than three or four words, and who picked up slang and swear-words like a parrot, swelled with pride as he lighted his pipe, and then rubbed his hands with a rasping sound that always sent a chill up Alan’s back.

“A ver’ fine and prosper’ year,” said Tautuk in response to Alan’s first question as to general conditions.  “We bean ver’ fortunate.”

“One hell-good year,” backed up Amuk Toolik with the quickness of a gun.  “Plenty calf.  Good hoof.  Moss.  Little wolf.  Herds fat.  This year—­she peach!”

After this opening of the matter in hand Alan buried himself in the affairs of the range, and the old thrill, the glow which comes through achievement, and the pioneer’s pride in marking a new frontier with the creative forces of success rose uppermost in him, and he forgot the passing of time.  A hundred questions he had to ask, and the tongues of Tautuk and Amuk Toolik were crowded with the things they desired to tell him.  Their voices filled the room with a paean of triumph.  His herds had increased by a thousand head during the fawning months of April and May, and interbreeding of the Asiatic stock with wild, woodland caribou had produced a hundred calves of the super-animal whose flesh was bound to fill the markets of the States within a few years.  Never had the moss been thicker under the winter snow;