Tisdale paused to draw his hand across his eyes and met Foster’s look over the table.  “It was there I blundered.  There was a plain traveled trail from that mine down through the lowlands to Susitna, and I failed to see that his tracks left it:  they were partly blotted out in a fresh fall of snow.  I lost six hours there, and when I picked up his trail again, I saw he was avoiding the few way houses; he passed the settlement by; then I missed his camp-fire.  It was plain he was afraid to sleep any more.  But he knew the Susitna country; he kept a true course, and sometimes, in swampy places, turned back to the main thoroughfare.  At last, near the crossing of the Matanuska, I was caught in the first spring thaw.  It was heavy going.  All the streams were out of banks; the valley became a network of small sloughs undermining the snowfields, creating innumerable ponds and lakes.  The earth, bared in patches, gave and oozed like a sponge.  It was impossible to follow Weatherbee’s trail, but I picked it up once more, where it came into the other, along the Chugach foot-hills.  Slides began to block the way; ice glazed the overflows at night; and at last a cold wave struck down from the summits; the track stiffened in an hour and it was hard as steel underfoot.  The wind cut like swords.  Then came snow.”

Tisdale looked off with his far-sighted gaze through the open door.  Every face was turned to him, but no one hurried him.  It was a time when silence spoke.

“I came on Weatherbee’s dogs in a small ravine,” he said.  “They had broken through thin ice in an overflow, and the sled had mired in muck.  The cold wave set them tight; their legs were planted like posts, and I had to cut them out.  Two were done for.”

“You mean,” exclaimed Banks, “Dave hadn’t cut the traces to give his huskies a chance.”

Tisdale nodded slowly.  “But the instant I cut Tyee loose, he went limping off, picking up his master’s trail.  It was a zigzag course up the face of a ridge into a grove of spruce.  Weatherbee took a course like a husky; location was a sixth sense to him; yet I found his tracks up there, winding aimlessly.  It had stopped snowing then, but the first impressions were nearly filled.  In a little while I noticed the spaces were shorter between the prints of the left shoe; they made a dip and blur.  Then I came into a parallel trail, and these tracks were clear, made since the snowstorm, but there was the same favoring of the left foot.  He was traveling in a circle.  Sometimes in unsheltered places, where the wind swept through an avenue of trees, small drifts covered the impressions, but the dog found them again, still doubling that broad circle.  Finally I saw a great dark blotch ahead where the ground sloped up to a narrow plateau.  And in a moment I saw it was caused by a great many fresh twigs of spruce, all stuck upright in the snow and set carefully in rows, like a child’s make-believe garden.”