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hunters, both furred and feathered, were abroad during the night, the short, gray night of the Arctic spring. And when night wore into day the hunters still padded over the snow or beat on strong wings across the tundra, for the night’s kill had not satisfied their hunger.
    Among the hunters was Ookpik, the snowy owl. The coldest months of every winter, the icebound months, Ookpik spent hundreds of miles south of the barren grounds, where it was easier to find the little gray lemming mice that were his favorite food. During the storm nothing living had showed itself to Ookpik as he sailed over the plains and along the ridges that overlooked the sea, but today many small creatures moved over the tundra.
    Along the east bank of the stream a flock of ptarmigans had found a few twigs of willow showing above the snow, part of a shrubby growth that had been as high as the antlers of a barren-grounds caribou until the snow had covered it. Now the ptarmigans could easily reach the topmost branches, and they nipped off the twigs in their bills, content with this food until the tender new buds of spring should be put forth. The flock still wore the white plumage of winter except for one or two of the cocks whose few brown feathers told of approaching summer and the mating season. When a ptarmigan in winter dress feeds on the snow fields, all of color about him is the black of bill and roving eye, and of the under tail feathers when he flies. Even his ancient enemies, the foxes and the owls, are deceived from a distance; but they, too, wear the Arctic’s protective colorings.
    Now Ookpik, as he came up the stream valley, saw among the willows the moving balls of shining black that were the ptarmigans’ eyes. The white foe moved nearer, blending into the pale sky; the white prey moved, unfrightened, over the snow. There was a soft whoosh of wings—a scattering of feathers—and on the snow a red stain spread, red as a new-laid ptarmigan egg before the shell pigments have dried. Ookpik bore the ptarmigan in his talons over the ridge to the higher ground that was his lookout, where his mate awaited him. The two owls tore apart the warm flesh with their beaks, swallowing also the bones and feathers as was their custom, to cast them up later in neat pellets.
    The gnawing pang of hunger was a sensation new to Silverbar. A week before, with the others of the sanderling flock, she had filled her stomach with shellfish gathered on the wide tidal flats of Hudson Bay. Days before that they had gorged on beach fleas on the coasts of New England, and on Hippa crabs on the sunny beaches of the south. In all the eight-thousand-mile journey northward from Patagonia there had been no lack of food.
    The older sanderlings, patient in the acceptance of hardship, waited until the ebb tide, when they led Silverbar and the other year-old birds of the flock to the edge of the harbor ice. The beach was piled with irregular masses of ice and frozen spray, but the last tide had shifted the broken floe and on retreating had left a bare patch of mud flat. Already several hundred shore birds had gathered—all the early migrants from miles around who had escaped death in the snow. They were clustered so thickly that there was scarcely space for the sanderlings to alight, and every square inch of surface had been probed or dug by the bills of the waders. By deep probing in the stiff mud Silverbar found several shells coiled like snails, but they were empty. With Blackfoot and two of the yearling sanderlings, she flew up the beach for a mile, but snow carpeted the ground and the harbor ice and there was no food.
    As the sanderlings hunted fruitlessly among the ice chunks, Tullugak the raven flew overhead and passed up the shore on deliberate wings.
    Cr-r-r-uck! Cr-r-r-uck! he croaked hoarsely.
    Tullugak had been patrolling the beach and the nearby tundra for miles, on the lookout for food. All the known carcasses which the ravens had resorted to