He coughed incessantly.
"It's a cough I've had half the winter," lied Pierre, careful that Joan saw no sign of blood on his lips or beard.

"I'll keep in the cabin for a week when we get home." Even Kazan, with that strange beast knowledge which man, unable to explain, calls instinct, knew that what he said was not the truth.
Perhaps it was largely because he had heard other men cough like this, and that for generations his sledge-dog ancestors had heard men cough as Radisson coughed--and had learned what followed it.
More than once he had scented death in tepees and cabins, which he had not entered, and more than once he had sniffed at the mystery of death that was not quite present, but near--just as he had caught at a distance the subtle warning of storm and of fire.

And that strange thing seemed to be very near to him now, as he followed at the end of his chain behind the sledge.

It made him restless, and half a dozen times, when the sledge stopped, he sniffed at the bit of humanity buried in the bearskin.

Each time that he did this Joan was quickly at his side, and twice she patted his scarred and grizzled head until every drop of blood in his body leaped riotously with a joy which his body did not reveal.
This day the chief thing that he came to understand was that the little creature on the sledge was very precious to the girl who stroked his head and talked to him, and that it was very helpless.