It was made of stout birch-bark, and its full surface rested on the snow. Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along behind.
Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost.
Down the frozen waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen- hearted Northland Wild.īut there WAS life, abroad in the land and defiant. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness–a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility.
The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway.
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