Dolores herself picked out one of the
largest and tossed it to Wapi. Then she sat down again and began to talk
to Peter, bundled up in his furs. After a time they ate, and drank hot
tea, and after he had devoured a chunk of raw meat the size of his two
fists, Uppy rolled himself in his sleeping bag near the dogs. A little at
a time Wapi dragged himself nearer until his head lay on Dolores' coat.
After that there was a long silence broken only by the low voices of the
woman and the man, and the heavy breathing of the tired dogs. Wapi
himself dozed off, but never for long. Then Dolores nodded, and her head
drooped until it found a pillow on Peter's shoulder. Gently Peter drew a
bearskin about her, and for a long time sat wide-awake, guarding Uppy and
baring his ears at intervals to listen. A dozen times he saw Wapi's
bloodshot eyes looking at him, and twice he put out a hand to the dog's
head and spoke to him in a whisper.
Even Peter's eyes were filmed by a growing drowsiness when Wapi drew
silently away and slunk suspiciously into the night. There was no yapping
foxes here, forty miles from the coast. An almost appalling silence hung
under the white stars, a silence broken only by the low and distant
moaning the wind always makes on the barrens. Wapi listened to it, and he
sniffed with his gray muzzle turned to the north. And then he whined. Had
Dolores or Peter seen him or heard the note in his throat, they, too,
would have stared back over the trail they had traveled.
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