a compass with him, as some nature writers would like to have you
believe, and yet he can go from this mountain to a den a hundred miles
away as straight as a bird can fly. That's instinct."

"Then Wolf--" mused Rod slowly.

"Is with the hunt pack," finished the young Indian.

Mukoki spoke softly, as though to himself.

"Last winter the snow came, and now it is water. Two moons past, Wolf,
heem tame. Now wild. The Great Spirit say that is right, I guess so."

"He means that it is nature," said Wabi.

For an hour after the others had wrapped themselves in their blankets
Rod sat alone beside the fire, listening, and thinking. And after that
he went to the edge of the plateau, and watched the great spring moon
as it floated slowly over the vast, still wilderness. How wonderful
these solitudes were, how little the teeming millions of civilization
knew about them! Somehow, in those moments, as he watched the
shivering Northern Lights playing far beyond the farthest footstep of
man, there came to Roderick Drew the thought that God must be nearer
to earth here than anywhere else in the world. For the first time his
soul was filled with something that was almost love for the red man's
Great Spirit. And why not? For was not that Great Spirit his own God?
Sad, lonely, silent, mysterious, a whole world lay before him, a world
that was the Indian Bible, that contained for the red man of the North
the teachings and the voice of the Creator of all things. A wind had
risen and was whispering over the plains; he heard the hushed voices
of the quivering poplar boughs, and there came from far below him the
soft, chuckling, mating hoot of an owl. Gradually his eyes closed,
and he leaned more heavily upon the rock against which he had seated
himself. After that he dreamed of what he had looked upon, while
the fire at the camp died away, and Mukoki and Wabigoon slumbered,
oblivious of his absence.

Of how long he slept Rod had no idea. He was suddenly brought back
into wakefulness by a sound that startled him to the marrow of his
bones, a terrible scream close to his ears. He sat bolt upright,
quaking in every limb. For a moment he tried to cry out, but his
tongue clove to the roof of his mouth. What had happened? Was it Wabi,
or Mukoki?

A dozen paces away was a huge rock and as he looked he saw something
move upon it, a long, lithe object that shone a silvery white in the
moonlight, and he knew that it was a lynx. Stealthily Ro