to three, for there
was game on that southern slope,--deer and the white mountain goat and
birds. He hunted the grouse at first, but that gave small return for
ammunition expended, although the flesh of the blue and willow grouse
is pleasant fare. When the big storm abated he looked out one clear
dawn and saw a buck deer standing in the open. At a distance of sixty
yards he shot the animal, not because he hankered to kill, but because
he needed meat. So under the cabin eaves he had quarters of venison,
and he knew that he could go abroad on that snowy slope and stalk a
deer with ease. There was a soothing pleasantness about a great blaze
crackling in the stone fireplace. And he had Doris Cleveland's books.

Yes, Hollister reiterated to himself, it was better than a bedroom off
the blank corridor of a second-rate hotel and the crowded streets that
were more merciless to a stricken man than these silent places.
Eventually he would have to go back. But for the present,--well, he
occupied himself wholly with the present, and he did not permit
himself to look far beyond.

From the deerskin he cut a quantity of fine strips and bent into oval
shape two tough sticks of vine maple. Across these he strung a web of
rawhide, thus furnishing himself with a pair of snowshoes which were a
necessity now that the snow lay everywhere knee-deep and in many
places engulfed him to the waist when he went into the woods.

It pleased him to go on long snowshoe hikes. He reached far up the
ridges that lifted one after another behind his timber. Once he gained
a pinnacle, a solitary outstanding hummock of snow-bound granite
rising above all the rest, rising above all the surrounding forest.
From this summit he gained an eagle's view. The long curve of Toba
Inlet wound like a strip of jade away down to where the islands of the
lower gulf spread with channels of the sea between. He could see the
twin Redondas, Cortez, Raza, the round blob that was Hernando,--a
picturesque nomenclature that was the inheritance of Spanish
exploration before the time of Drake. Beyond the flat reaches of
Valdez, Vancouver Island, an empire in itself, lifted its rocky
backbone, a misty purple against the western sky. He watched a
steamer, trailing a black banner of smoke, slide through Baker Pass.

Out there men toiled at fishing; the woods echoed with the ring of
their axes and the thin twanging of their saws; there would be the
clank of machinery and the hiss of