drawing
her to the table and spreading out the map. "See, here is the cabin."
He made a little black dot with her pencil, and turning to the four
walls of Bram's stronghold made her understand what it meant. "And
there's the big Barren," he went on, tracing it out with the
pencil-point. "Up here, you see, is the Arctic Ocean, and away over
there the Roes Welcome and Hudson's Bay. That's where the storm starts,
and when it gets out on the Barren, without a tree or a rock to break
its way for five hundred miles--"

He told of the twisting air-currents there and how the storm-clouds
sometimes swept so low that they almost smothered one. For a few
moments he did not look at Celie or he would have seen something in her
face which could not have been because of what he was telling her, and
which she could at best only partly understand. She had fixed her eyes
on the little black dot. THAT was the cabin. For the first time the map
told her where she was, and possibly how she had arrived there.
Straight down to that dot from the blue space of the ocean far to the
north the map-makers had trailed the course of the Coppermine River.
Celie gave an excited little cry and caught Philip's arm, stopping him
short in his explanation of the human wailings in the storm. Then she
placed a forefinger on the river.

"There--there it is!" she told him, as plainly as though her voice was
speaking to him in his own language. "We came down that river. The
Skunnert landed us THERE," and she pointed to the mouth of the
Coppermine where it emptied into Coronation Gulf. "And then we came
down, down, down--"

He repeated the name of the river.

"THE COPPERMINE."

She nodded, her breath breaking a little in an increasing excitement.
She seized the pencil and two-thirds of the distance down the
Coppermine made a cross. It was wonderful, he thought, how easily she
made him understand. In a low, eager voice she was telling him that
where she had put the cross the treacherous Kogmollocks had first
attacked them. She described with the pencil their flight away from the
river, and after that their return--and a second fight. It was then
Bram Johnson had come into the scene. And back there, at the point from
which the wolf-man had fled with her, was her FATHER. That was the
chief thing she was striving to drive home in his comprehension of the
situation. Her FATHER! And she believed he was alive, for it was an
excitement instead of hopelessness or gr