For days both men had been cold, and the sensation of complete warmth had come to seem strange and unreal, while their faces cracked where the spots had been.

Willard felt himself on the verge of collapse.  He recalled his words about strong men, gazing the while at Pierre.  The Canadian evinced suffering only in the haggard droop of eye and mouth; otherwise he looked strong and dogged.

Willard felt his own features had shrunk to a mask of loose-jawed suffering, and he set his mental sinews, muttering to himself.

He was dizzy and faint as he stretched himself in the still morning air upon waking, and hobbled painfully, but as his companion emerged from the darkened shelter into the crystalline brightness he forgot his own misery at sight of him.  The big man reeled as though struck when the dazzle from the hills reached him, and he moaned, shielding his sight.  Snow-blindness had found him in a night.

Slowly they plodded out of the valley, for hunger gnawed acutely, and they left a trail of blood tracks from the dogs.  It took the combined efforts of both men to lash them to foot after each pause.  Thus progress was slow and fraught with agony.

As they rose near the pass, miles of Arctic wastes bared themselves.  All about towered bald domes, while everywhere stretched the monotonous white, the endless snow unbroken by tree or shrub, pallid and menacing, maddening to the eye.

“Thank God, the worst’s over,” sighed Willard, flinging himself onto the sled.  “We’ll make it to the summit next time; then she’s down hill all the way to the road house.”

Pierre said nothing.

Away to the northward glimmered the Ass’s Ears, and as the speaker eyed them carelessly he noted gauzy shreds and streamers veiling their tops.  The phenomena interested him, for he knew that here must be wind—­wind, the terror of the bleak tundra; the hopeless, merciless master of the barrens!  However, the distant range beneath the twin peaks showed clear-cut and distinct against the sky, and he did not mention the occurrence to the guide, although he recalled the words of the Indians:  “Beware of the wind through the Ass’s Ears.”

Again they laboured up the steep slope, wallowing in the sliding snow, straining silently at the load; again they threw themselves, exhausted, upon it.  Now, as he eyed the panorama below, it seemed to have suffered a subtle change, indefinable and odd.  Although but a few minutes had elapsed, the coast mountains no longer loomed clear against the horizon, and his visual range appeared foreshortened, as though the utter distances had lengthened, bringing closer the edge of things.  The twin peaks seemed endlessly distant and hazy, while the air had thickened as though congested with possibilities, lending a remoteness to the landscape.

“If it blows up on us here, we’re gone,” he thought, “for it’s miles to shelter, and we’re right in the saddle of the hills.”