seen the face of a white woman. She had stopped Blake's club. He had
heard her voice. She had bent over him, and she would have put her hand
on him if his master had not dragged her back with a cry of warning. She
had gone into the cabin then, and he had dragged himself away.

Since then a new and thrilling flame had burned in him. For a time his
senses had been dazed by his punishment, but now every instinct in him
was like a living wire. Slowly he pulled himself from his retreat and sat
down on his haunches. His gray muzzle was pointed to the sky. The same
stars were there, burning in cold, white points of flame as they had
burned week after week in the maddening monotony of the long nights near
the pole. They were like a million pitiless eyes, never blinking, always
watching, things of life and fire, and yet dead. And at those eyes, the
little white foxes yapped so incessantly that the sound of it drove men
mad. They were yapping now. They were never still. And with their yapping
came the droning, hissing monotone of the aurora, like the song of a vast
piece of mechanism in the still farther north. Toward this Wapi turned
his bruised and beaten head. Out there, just beyond the ghostly pale of
vision, was the ship. Fifty times he had slunk out and around it,
cautiously as the foxes themselves. He had caught its smells and its
sounds; he had come near enough to hear the voices of men, and those
voices were like the voice of Blake, his master. Therefore, he had never
gone nearer.

There was a change in him now. His big pads fell noiselessly as he slunk
back to the cabin and sniffed for a scent in the snow. He found it. It
was the trail of the white woman. His blood tingled again, as it had
tingled when her face bent over him and her hand reached out, and in his
soul there rose up the ghost of Tao to whip him on. He followed the
woman's footprints slowly, stopping now and then to listen, and each