And how's he going to do it,
Uppy? Eh? Answer me that. How's he going to do it?"
In a hole he had dug for himself in the drifted snow under a huge scarp
of ice a hundred yards from the igloo cabin lay Wapi. His bed was red
with the stain of blood, and a trail of blood led from the cabin to the
place where he had hidden himself. Not many hours ago, when by God's sun
it should have been day, he had turned at last on a teasing, snarling,
back-biting little kiskanuk of a dog and had killed it. And Blake and
Uppy had beaten him until he was almost dead.
It was not of the beating that Wapi was thinking as he lay in his wallow.
He was thinking of the fur-clad figure that had come between Blake's club
and his body, of the moment when for the first time in his life he had
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.
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