George Tracy Marsh

“ Famine surely had come to more than one camp of the red hunters that winter, and doubtless swift death in the night, also, among some of them who when caught by the rabbit plague and the absence of wintering caribou, like Piquet went mad with hunger. Disease, too, as a hawk strikes a ptarmigan, would have struck down many a helpless child and woman marooned in snow-drifted tepees in the silent places. Old age would have claimed its toll in the bitter January winds.
To the red hunters, starvation and tragic death wore familiar faces. In the wide North they were common enough. ”

“ So, when in the spring, men loosed from the maw of the pitiless snows returned without comrade, wife, or child, seeking succor at the fur posts, with tales of death by starvation or disease, the absence of witnesses or evidence compelled the acceptance of their stories however suspicious the circumstances. ”

“ To them it would all simply amount to this: a camp on the verge of starvation, witnessed by the depleted cache; a dead man stabbed to the heart, with his rifle and outfit beside him; also, the rifle and personal belongings, easily identified by his relatives, of a second man, who, if he were still alive, would have had them in his possession; of the third man, who was to winter with them, no trace at the camp; in short, two men dead and the third possibly alive, if he had not starved out. ”