en George drop a pack in the bush, where
everything for miles around looked alike to me, and without marking the
spot or apparently taking note of any guiding signs, he would go
directly to it again. I was with him one pitch-dark night when he left
a pack among alders and willows in the depth of a marsh, and in the
morning he went back two miles straight to the very spot. How a man
that could do this could get lost was beyond my understanding. I
hurried up to camp.

"How did it happen, George?" I asked.

"I just got turned 'round," he replied. "I didn't have any grub, and I
didn't have a pistol, or a fishhook, or any way to get grub, and I
didn't have a compass, and I was scared."

"But don't you know how you got lost?" I persisted.

"No, I don't," said George. "I just got lost. But I found myself
pretty quick. I never got lost before."

The only way I could account for it was that he had permitted his
thoughts to wander. I asked him what he would have done if he had not
been able to find his way back.

"Gone to the highest hill I could see," he answered with a grin, "and
made the biggest smoke I could make at its top, and waited for you
fellus to find me."

While we were talking George was busily engaged in making the fire,
putting a goose to boil and preparing water for tea. The twilight
deepened, and ere we realised it darkness had come. Every moment we
expected to hear Hubbard, but he did not appear.

"Another man lost," said I, with a forced lightness that illy concealed
the anxiety George and I both felt; we knew that Hubbard not only had
nothing to eat, but no matches to make a fire.

Frequently we stopped our work and talk, to peer into the gathering
night and listen for the breaking of a twig. At length I took my rifle
and fired at intervals half a dozen shots; but the reports echoed and
died away without a reply. A damp north wind chilled the air, and the
gloom seemed particularly oppressive.

"Hubbard will have a hard night out there in the bush," said George.

"Yes," I replied; "I don't suppose we can expect him back now before
morning; and when a man is lost in this wild country it's pretty hard
to find a little tent all by itself."

I was thinking of my own experience farther back, and what might happen
should Hubbard fail to find us or we him. He was not so fortunate as I
had been, in that there was no river to guide his return. However, at
five o'clock in the morning he appear