To Wapi there had come at last a response to the great yearning that was
in him. Instinct, summer and winter, had drawn him south, had turned him
always in that direction, filled with the uneasiness of the mysterious
something that was calling to him through the years of forty generations
of his kind. And now he was going south. He sensed the fact that this
journey would not end at the edge of the Arctic plain and that he was not
to hunt caribou or bear. His mental formulae necessitated no process of
reasoning. They were simple and to the point His world had suddenly
divided itself into two parts; one contained the woman, and the other his
old masters and slavery. And the woman stood against these masters. They
were her enemies as well as his own. Experience had taught him the power
and the significance of firearms, just as it had made him understand the
uses for which spears, and harpoons, and whips were made. He had seen the
woman shoot Blake, and he had seen her ready to shoot at Uppy. Therefore
he understood that they were enemies and that all associated with them
were enemies. At a word from her he was ready to spring ahead and tear
the life out of the Eskimo driver and even out of the dogs that were
pulling the sledge. It did not take him long to comprehend that the man
on the sledge was a part of the woman.
He hung well back, twenty or thirty paces behind the sledge, and unless
Peter or the woman called to him, or the sledge stopped for some reason,
he seldom came nearer.
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