w of, time.
The spruce grew here, straight and dark and tall, a stalwart army whose
measureless march no human eyes beheld. Already they had come farther
than a pack train could travel, through the same region, in weary days.

Already they were at the border of Back There. They had cut the last
ties with the world of men. There were no trails here, leading slowly
but immutably to the busy centers of civilization; not a blaze on a tree
for the eyes of a woodsman riding on some forest venture, not the ashes
of a dead camp fire or a charred cooking rack, where an Indian had
broiled his caribou flesh. Except by the slow process of exploration
with pack horses, traveling a few miles each day, fording unknown rivers
and encircling impassable ranges, or by waiting patiently until the fall
rains swelled the river, they might never leave this land they had so
boldly entered. They could not go out the way they had come--over those
seething waters--and the river, falling swiftly, would soon be too low
to permit them to push down to its lower waters where they might find
Indian encampments.

Nothing was left but the wilderness, ancient and unchanged. The spruce
forest had a depth and a darkness that even Ben had never seen; the wild
creatures that they sometimes glimpsed on the bank stared at them wholly
without knowledge as to what they were, and likely amazed at the
strength whereby they had braved this seething torrent that swept
through their sylvan home. Here was a land where the grizzly had not yet
learned of a might greater than his, where he had not yet surrendered
his sovereignty to man. Here the moose--mightiest of the antlered
herd--reached full maturity and old age without ever mistaking the call
of a birch-bark horn for that of his rutting cow. Young bulls with only
a fifty-inch spread of horns and ten points on each did not lead the
herds, as in the more accessible provinces of the North. All things were
in their proper balance, since the forest had gone unchanged for time
immemorial; and as the head-hunters had not yet come the bull moose did
not rank as a full-grown warrior until he wore thirty points and had
five feet of spread, and he wasn't a patriarch until he could no longer
walk free between two tree trunks seventy inches apart. Certain of the
lesser forest people were not in unwonted numbers because that fierce
little hunter, the marten, had been exterminated by trappers; the otter,
yet to know the feel of c