Before them as they ran
every trail of wolf and caribou and snow-shoe, and every distant
landmark, had vanished; the world was but a chaos of mad rolling snow
clouds; and behind them--Their stout little hearts trembled as they saw
not a vestige of the trail they had just made. With the great world
itself, their own little tracks, as fast as they made them, were swept
and blotted out of existence. Like two sparrows that had dropped blinded
and bewildered on the vast plain out of the snow cloud, they huddled
together without one friendly sign to tell them whence they had come or
whither they were going. Worst of all, the instinct of direction, which
often guides an Indian through the still fog or the darkest night,
seemed benumbed by the cold and the tumult; and not even Old Tomah
himself could have told north or south in the blinding storm.
Still they ran on bravely, bending to the fierce blasts, heading the
wind as best they could, till Mooka, tripping a second time in a little
hollow where a brook ran deep under the snow, and knowing now that they
were but wandering in an endless circle, seized Noel's arm and repeated
her question:
"Are we lost, little brother?"
And Noel, lost and bewildered, but gripping his bow in his fur mitten
and peering here and there, like an old hunter, through the whirling
flakes and rolling gusts to catch some landmark, some lofty crag or low
tree-line that held steady in the mad dance of the world, still made
confident Indian answer:
"Noel not lost; Noel right here.
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