Moreover he had none of that intangible dread of the
wilderness which had troubled him when he first came to Lone Moose.

Then it seemed lonely beyond expression, brooding, sinister. It was
lonely still--but that was all. He was beginning to grasp the motif of
the wilderness, to understand in a measure that to those who adapted
themselves thereto it was a sanctuary. The sailor to his sea, the
woodsman to his woods, and the _boulevardier_ to his beloved avenues!
Thompson did not cleave to the North as a woodsman might. But the
natural phenomena of unbroken silences, of vast soundlessness, of miles
upon miles of somber forest aisles did not oppress him now. What a man
understands he does not fear. The unknown, the potentially terrible
which spurs the imagination to horrifying vision, is what bears heavy on
a man's soul.

Thompson's preparation for the trail was simple. That lesson he had
learned from two months' close association with Joe Lamont. He had
acquired a sleeping bag of moosehide, soft tanned. This, his gun and
axe, the grub he got from the Pachugan store, he had lashed on the
toboggan and put his dogs in harness at daybreak. There would be little
enough day to light his steps. Dusk came at midafternoon.

When he had tied the last lashing he shook hands with MacLeod and set
out.

He traversed the sixty miles between Pachugan and Lone Moose in two
days, by traveling late the first night, under a brilliant moon. It gave
him a far vision of the lake shore, black point after black point
thrusting out into the immense white level of the lake. Upon that hard
smooth surface he could tuck the snowshoes under his lashings and trot
over the ice, his dogs at his heels, the frost-bound hush broken by the
tinkle of a little bell Joe Lamont had fastened on the lead dog's
collar. It rang sweetly, a gay note in that chill void.

That night he drew into a spruce grove, cleared a space for his fire and
bed, fed himself hot tea and a bannock, and the hindquarters of a rabbit
potted by his rifle on the way. He went to sleep with drowsy eyes
peeping at the cold stars from under the flap of his sleeping bag, at
the jagged silhouette of spruce tops cut sharp against the sky.

He drew up before the mission quarters in the gray of the next dusk, and
stood again after nigh three months at his own door. The clearing was a
white square, all its unlovely litter of fallen trees and half-burned
stumps hidden under the virgin snow. The c