In the cabin a plague-dead man was burning.

It was the law of the North.

And the mystery of the funeral pyre came again to Kazan and Gray Wolf.

This time they did not howl, but slunk down into the farther plain, and did not stop that day until they had buried themselves deep in a dry and sheltered swamp ten miles to the north.
After this they followed the days and weeks which marked the winter of nineteen hundred and ten as one of the most terrible in all the history of the Northland--a single month in which wild life as well as human hung in the balance, and when cold, starvation and plague wrote a chapter in the lives of the forest people which will not be forgotten for generations to come.
In the swamp Kazan and Gray Wolf found a home under a windfall.

It was a small comfortable nest, shut in entirely from the snow and wind.