ack-clack tongue of the Eskimo.

With the stub of a pencil Philip had figured out on a bit of paper
about where he was that morning. The whalebone hut of his last Arctic
camp was eight hundred miles due north. Fort Churchill, over on
Hudson's Bay, was four hundred miles to the east, and Fort Resolution,
on the Great Slave, was four hundred miles to the west. On his map he
had drawn a heavy circle about Prince Albert, six hundred miles to the
south. That was the nearest line of rail. Six days back Radisson had
died after a mouth's struggle with that terrible thing they called "le
mort rouge," or the Red Death. Since then Philip had pointed his canoe
straight UP the Dubawnt waterways, and was a hundred and twenty miles
nearer to civilization. He had been through these waterways twice
before, and he knew that there was not a white man within a hundred and
fifty miles of him. And as for a white woman--

Weyman stopped his paddling where there was no current, and leaned back
in his canoe for a breathing space, and to fill his pipe. A WHITE
WOMAN! Would he stare at her like a fool when he saw her again for the
first time? Eighteen months ago he had seen a white woman over at Fort
Churchill--the English clerk's wife, thirty, with a sprinkle of gray in
her blond hair, and pale blue eyes. Fresh from the Garden of Eden, he
had wondered why the half-dozen white men over there regarded her as
they did. Long ago, in the maddening gloom of the Arctic night, he had
learned to understand. At Fond du Lac, when Weyman had first come up
into the forest country, he had said to the factor: "It's glorious!
It's God's Country!" And the factor had turned his tired, empty eyes
upon him with the words: "It was--before SHE went. But no country is
God's Country without a woman," and then he took Philip to the lonely
grave under a huge lob-stick spruce, and told him in a few words how
one woman had made life for him. Even then Philip could not fully
understand. But he did now.

He resumed his paddling, his gray eyes alert. His aloneness and the
bigness of the world in which, so far as he knew, he was the only human
atom, did not weigh heavily upon him. He loved this bigness and
emptiness and the glory of solitude. It was middle autumn, and close to
noon of a day unmarred by cloud above, and warm with sunlight. He was
following close to the west shore of the lake. The opposite shore was a
mile away. He was so near to the rock-lined beach that he c