"I scorn, Wherefore my long bow I '11 lay by;

breath coming in painful whooping gasps that reached me clearly even above the thin high shriek of the wind. No doubt but that Small wood and Corazzini had left us to die, but they had made one mistake: they had forgotten Balto. Balto; as always, had been running loose when they had left us, and they had either failed to see him or forgotten all about him. But Balto hadn't forgotten us, he must have known something was far wrong, for all the hours we had been prisoners on the tractor sled he had never come within a quarter-mile of us. But as soon as the tractor had dumped and left us, he had come loping in out of the driving snow and settled to the task of leading us down towards the glacier. At least, we hoped he was doing that. Jackstraw declared that he was following the crimp marks of the Citroen's caterpillars, now deep buried under the flying drift and new-fallen snow. Zagero wasn't so sure. Once, twice, a dozen times that night, I heard him muttering the same words: "I hope to hell that hound knows where it's goinV But Balto knew where he was going. Sometime during the nightit might have been any time between midnight and three o'clock in the morninghe stopped suddenly, stretched out his neck and gave his long eerie wolf call. He seemed to listen for an answer, and if he heard anything it was beyond our range: but he seemed satisfied, for he suddenly changed direction and angled off to the left into the blizzard. At Jackstraw's nod, we followed. Three minutes later we came upon the dog-sledge, with two of the dogs curled up beside it, their backs to the wind, their muzzles to their bellies and long brushes of tails over their faces, the drift wailing high around them. They were comfortable enoughso splendid an insulation does a husky's thick coat provide that snow at forty degrees below zero will lie on its back indefinitely without being melted by body heatbut they preferred freedom to comfort, for they were on their feet and vanished into the swirling whiteness beyond before we could lay hands on them. That left only the sledge. I suppose that after Smallwood had gone far enough to consider that we would never be able to reach that point, he had cut loose dogs and dog-sledge as a needless encumbrancebut not before he had severed all the traces attaching the dogs to the sledge and, I noticed grimly, removed all the wraps and the magnetic compass that had been there. He thought of everything. For a moment, admiration for the man's undoubtedly remarkable qualities came in to supplant what had become the digital camera price review motivating reason for my existence, a reason that, as the hours crawled by, were crowding out even the feelings I had for Margaret Ross: my hatred for Small wood burned like a cold steady flame, an obsession with the . idea of sinking my fingers into that scrawny throat and never Jetting go. Within three minutes of finding the sledge we had tied together the severed remnants of the traces, changed them to the front and were on our way again, Marie LeGarde, Mahler and Helene propped up on the thin wooden slats. We had, of course, to pull the sledge ourselves, but that was nothing: for Jackstraw, Zagero and myself, the relief was beyond measure. But it was only momentary. We were running on to the smooth, slick ice of the Kangalak glacier, but our progress was no faster than it had been before we found the sledge. The wind was climbing up to its maximum now, the blizzard shrieking along horizontally to the ground and coming in great smoking flurries that cut visibility to zero and made us stop and grab one another lest one of us be knocked flying and for ever lost to sight: several times Theodore Mahler, restless in unconsciousness, rolled off the sledge until I at last made Brewster sit at the back and watch. He protested violently, but he was glad to do as I said. I don't remember much after that, I think I must have been unconscious, eyes shut, but still plodding along in my sleep on leaden, frozen feet. My first conscious memory after installing Brewster on the back of the sledge was of someone shaking me urgently by the shoulder. It was Jackstraw. "No more!" he shouted in my ear. "We must stop, Dr Mason, wait till it's blown itself out. We can't live through this." I said something that was unintelligible even to myself, but Jackstraw took it for agreement and began pulling the sledge into the sloping side of the glacier valley and to the leeward side of one of the snowdrifts piled up against some of the ridges on the side of the valley. It wasn't all that much of an improvement, but the wind and the effect of the blizzard were perceptibly less. We unloaded the three sick people on the sledge into what pitiful shelter the ridge offered: I was just about to let my knees buckle and collapse beside them when I realised that someone was missing: it was a fair indication of the toll taken by wind and cold and exhaustion that almost twenty seconds passed before I realised it was Brewster. "Good God!" I cried