down the trails they blazed that other men might follow after.
All the world was full of summer, from the duck nesting in unknown pools to the reeling rim of the Arctic day, where the reindeer moss pushes green through the snow, and the bergs break out, and the whalers wake and the great seals put to sea. One early dawn, when the portages of Grand Rapid Island were passed, a sleepy breed in his tepee was waked to hear a burnt-skinned, sunk-eyed man in uniform which explained more than his words ask how long it was since the scows had passed the Rapids. His answers seemed jerked from him; and then the man sprang into a canoe, and struck out where the Athabaska ran red under the dawning. The breed grunted rubbing his eyes.
"By gar," he said. "Go roun' wit chip on hees shoulder, dat chap. Carcajou, heem."
Carcajou, the wolverine, was first made of all created things, and he alone has changed neither habit nor form since Kitche Manitou put him into the woods. Therefore Carcajou has knowledge of all his things behind those watchful eyes of his, and the breed on the bank was not the first man who had called Dick Carcajou in uneasy resentment.
Down this wide northern road uncounted men of many lands have gone to the Yukon gold; to the untapped mineral wealth of the hills; to the lip of the Arctic where the kit-fox breeds. Scores had never come back. But their ghostly march did not trouble Dick. Between the great wash of water and the hard naked sky all the past was shrivelled up. He had come with chafed limbs and stiff shoulders to get his man; and that instinct would not die, though the sunset flung mocking colour on drawn, set faces, and the moon saw two figures that crouched lower with humped shoulders as the weary paddles flashed in and flashed out.
Citrons and tender blues swamped the flats of Fort McMurray under daybreak when a man in earth-stained kharki walked drunkenly up the gangway of a little steamer where the bare-foot crew laboured among the hay-bales, boxes and myraid things that collect naturally when
