In a very few days Dick and the men with him would be across that frontier where once, years before, he and Tempest had trodden together. But when they were gone and the North closed up into its long sleep the caribou would still be there, moving in their countless ranks over the noiseless whiteness.
In the days that came after, the northern limit of trees was passed and the Barren Grounds only lay left and right and north to the Arctic Seas. Here the wind dropped, and the sun poured heat down steadily, until the mosquitoes and flies clung about them in thick, stupid swarms, bringing blood on every naked part, and the clayey untrodden portages slid and quaked beneath the tread, letting the feet through to clogging mud and water that sometimes caught the ankles and flung the man forward violently. Up the Cusba River they tracked the canoes among the snarling rapids. In open reaches sudden, stiff winds bore them back to barren shores that held no anchorage. The one lonely little Indian camp they passed was far behind, and the four men moved alone in the hand of the elements and of the God who made them.
But the fat mosquito-bitten Myers had unfailing jokes for every good or evil; Depache sang his little plaintive French-Canadian songs, untroubled by wind or rain, and the dangerous, alert look softened in Dick's eyes before the touch of the outer places on his soul, and he told his casual yarns of the things he had seen and had done as easily in the cold, wind-beaten tent as round the jovial camp-fires of the south. Tempest's men had been picked with skill, and he had reason to approve the judgment. They were men right through, these roughened, sweating, blood-smudged ruffians who took the tracking-line of the portage-pack, the paddle, the oar, or the straining stays of the sail, cheerfully and without comment, at his word. And he, knowing himself for the king-bolt of the company, laboured with all the inward courage left him to take his part manfully in the daily trials that no man knows until he comes to face them for himself.
The days dropped away, remembered only by "that noon when we couldn't make a landing, and had no dinner"; or, "the night it blew too hard to pitch the tents, and we slept under the canoes"; or, "that bloomin' day
