myriad stars while he listened to the voices of the forest night. Not a spruce ridge, or swift brook, or wild meadow, with its dead water above the beaver dam where the moose came at sunset to eat the roots of lilies and the sweet grasses, but was a loved and familiar sight to the one who brooded in the dusk.
From the largest of the lakes of The Beautiful Valley, called the Lake of the Islands, lifted sheer a rocky mass crowned by a forest of ancient spruce and jack-pine. There for generations had the dead of his family found their long rest. There lay the mother of his tall sons, his father and father's father with their kinsmen, sleeping the endless sleep beneath the murmuring jack-pines and spruce of the Island of the Dead, the sacred ground of the Makwa.
The last light in the west had long since died. Deep the lake slept at his feet, mirroring the stars. Down among the tepees the voices of the women were hushed. From the opposite shore drifted the hoo-hoo, hoo-hoo, of a gray owl. But the lone figure on the cliff kept vigil far into the night with his vision.
At sunrise the government engineers with their assistants, canoemen, and packers, started north for the summer survey of the Kabenakagami section of the Transcontinental. In the bow of the big birch-bark carrying McDuff and young Gordon paddled the grizzled treaty-chief of the Kabenakagami Ojibways, David Makwa. A hundred miles north, down river to Stevens's flying survey, then months of line running east and west, seeking an easier grade among the
