the valleys hung the odor of wood mold and wet earth.

And one day, with the spring, returned Jean Marcel from his camp on the
Ghost, the northernmost tributary of the Great Whale to the bald ridge,
where, in March, he had seen the sun glitter on a broad expanse of level
snow unbroken by trees, in the hills to the north. His eyes had not
deceived him. The lake was there.

From his commanding position on the bare brow of the isolated mountain,
he looked out on a wilderness of timbered valleys, and high barrens
which rolled away endlessly into the north. Among these lay a large body
of water partly free of ice. Into the northeast he could trace the
divide--even make out where a small feeder of the Ghost headed on the
height of land. And he now knew that he looked upon the dread valleys of
the forbidden country of the Crees--the demon-haunted solitudes of the
land of the Windigo, whose dim, blue hills guarded a region of mystery
and terror--a wilderness, peopled in the tales of the medicine men, with
giant eaters of human flesh and spirits of evil, for generations, taboo
to the hunters of Whale River.

There was no doubt of it. The large lake he saw was a headwater of the
Big Salmon, the southern sources of which tradition placed in the
bad-lands north of the Ghost. Once his canoe floated in this lake, he
could work into the main river and find the Esquimos on the coast.

"Bien!" muttered the Frenchman, "I will go!"

Two days later, back in camp on the Ghost, Marcel announced to his
partners, Antoine Beaulieu and Joe Piquet, his intention of returning to
the Bay by the Big Salmon.

"W'at you say, Jean; you go home tru de Windigo countree?" cried Piquet,
his swart face blanched by the fear which the very mention of the
forbidden land aroused, while Antoine, speechless, stared wide-eyed.

"Oui, nord of de divide, I see beeg lac. Eet ees Salmon water for sure.
I portage cano' to dat lac and reach de coast by de riviere. You go wid
me an' get some dog?" Marcel smiled coolly into the sober faces of his
friends.

"Are you crazee, Jean Marcel?" protested Antoine. "De spirit have run de
game an' feesh away. De Windigo eat you before you fin' de Salmon, an'
eef he not get you first, you starve."

"Ver' well, you go back by de Whale; I go by Salmon an' meet de Husky. I
nevaire hunt anoder long snow widout dogs."

"Ah-hah! Dat ees good joke! You weel nevaire see de Husky," broke in
Piquet. "W'en _Matchi-Manitou_ ees tru w