Dick did not know, and did not care.
He had chosen his way of life, and now gave himself up to its delight.
He only knew that the wilds he loved were very fair, that the weather
was almost unbroken in its warm sunniness, that food was easily come
by, and that all things, great and small, made for happiness. He
seemed to be one with the clear blue Canadian skies, with the silver
stars, with the free, beautiful things of stream and forest, with the
very blades of grass beneath his moccasined feet. The little owls, the
great wood-peckers, the tiny songsters of the reeds and bushes, he
looked upon as his brethren. He felt no return of the desolate ache at
his heart he had experienced on the night of Peter's struggle with the
lynx. His was that joyous fellowship with nature that knows no
weariness, and he troubled himself as little as possible about
Stephanie. Not yet had his awakening come.

Straight northwest they went, through all the brief splendour of the
northern summer; and the weeks passed in golden dreams of freedom and
of beauty. And thus the year drew slowly, inevitably, to its close.

CHAPTER IX.

On the Prairie.

In after life Dick never forgot those weeks of wandering. The freedom
and beauty of all that summer world was indelibly impressed upon his
memory. His was a nature readily moved to admiration, and had powers
of observation unusual in a lad of his age. But there were two small
scenes, each perfect in pictorial beauty, which he afterwards
recollected with special clearness.

They were tramping steadily along the bottom of a small ravine, one
late July afternoon, through a luxuriance of fern and vine almost
tropical. Dick, watching the dark woods ahead, saw a sudden little
flame of colour leap to life against the black stems of the pines--a
flame so intense in its ruddy gold that it seemed to throb and pulsate
like a tongue of fire. A sunbeam, slanting through the branches, had
been caught and held in the cup of an open red lily--that was all. But
the effect was one which no artist on earth could have reproduced.

Another time, they were paddling up a small stream in a little canoe of
Peter's building--a little canoe he had hurriedly made, with Dick's
help, while they camped for the purpose--a flimsy, crank craft, but
serviceable, and sufficient for their needs. They were gliding slowly
along in the shadow of the bank, when they came upon a tall brown crane
standing quietly on o