ould hear
the soft throat-cries of the moose-birds. And what he saw, so far as
his eyes could see in all directions, was "God's Country"--a glory of
colour that was like a great master painting. The birch had turned to
red and gold. From out of the rocks rose trees that were great crimson
splashes of mountain-ash berries framed against the dark lustre of
balsam and cedar and spruce.

Without reason, Philip was listening again to the quiet lifeless words
of Jasper, the factor over at Fond du Lac, as he described the day when
he and his young wife first came up through the wonderland of the
North. "No country is God's Country without a woman!" He found the
words running in an unpleasant monotone through his brain. He had made
up his mind that he would strike Fond du Lac on his way down, for
Jasper's words and the hopeless picture he had made that day beside the
little cross under the spruce had made them brothers in a strange sort
of way. Besides, Jasper would furnish him with a couple of Indians, and
a sledge and dogs if the snows came early.

In a break between the rocks Philip saw a white strip of sand, and
turned his canoe in to shore. He had been paddling since five o'clock,
and in the six hours had made eighteen miles. Yet he felt no fatigue as
he stood up and stretched himself. He remembered how different it had
been four years ago when Hill, the Hudson's Bay Company's man down at
Prince Albert, had looked him over with skeptical and uneasy eyes,
encouraging him with the words: "You're going to a funeral, young man,
and it's your own. You won't make God's House, much less Hudson's Bay!"

Weyman laughed joyously.

"Fooled 'em--fooled 'em all!" he told himself. "We'll wager a dollar to
a doughnut that we're the toughest looking specimen that ever drifted
down from Coronation Gulf, or any other gulf. A DOUGHNUT! I'd trade a
gold nugget as big as my fist for a doughnut or a piece of pie right
this minute. Doughnuts an' pie--real old pumpkin pie--an' cranberry
sauce, 'n' POTATOES! Good Lord, and they're only six hundred miles
away, carloads of 'em!"

He began to whistle as he pulled his rubber dunnage sack out of the
canoe. Suddenly he stopped, his eyes staring at the smooth white floor
of sand. A bear had been there before him, and quite recently. Weyman
had killed fresh meat the day before, but the instinct of the
naturalist and the woodsman kept him from singing or whistling, two
things which he was very much i