all the time."

RELENTLESS NATURE

She laid her rivers to snare us,
She set her snows to chill,
Her clouds had the cunning of vultures,
Her plants were charged to kill.
The glooms of her forests benumbed us,
On the slime of her ledges we sprawled;
But we set our feet to the northward,
And crawled and crawled and crawled!
We defied her, and cursed her, and shouted:
"To hell with your rain and your snow.
Our minds we have set on a journey,
And despite of your anger we go!"

CHAPTER IX

THE FIRST CROSSING OF THE BULKLEY

We were now following a chain of lakes to the source of the Endako,
one of the chief northwest sources of the Fraser, and were surrounded
by tumultuous ridges covered with a seamless robe of pine forests.
For hundreds of miles on either hand lay an absolutely untracked
wilderness. In a land like this the trail always follows a
water-course, either ascending or descending it; so for some days we
followed the edges of these lakes and the banks of the connecting
streams, toiling over sharp hills and plunging into steep ravines,
over a trail belly-deep in mud and water and through a wood empty of
life.

These were hard days. We travelled for many hours through a burnt-out
tract filled with twisted, blackened uprooted trees in the wake of
fire and hurricane. From this tangled desolation I received the
suggestion of some verses which I call "The Song of the North Wind."
The wind and the fire worked together. If the wind precedes, he
prepares the way for his brother fire, and in return the fire weakens
the trees to the wind.

We had settled into a dull routine, and the worst feature of each
day's work was the drag, drag of slow hours on the trail. We could
not hurry, and we were forced to watch our horses with unremitting
care in order to nurse them over the hard spots, or, rather, the soft
spots, in the trail. We were climbing rapidly and expected soon to
pass from the watershed of the Fraser into that of the Skeena.

We passed a horse cold in death, with his head flung up as if he had
been fighting the wolves in his final death agony. It was a grim
sight. Another beast stood abandoned beside the trail, gazing at us
reproachfully, infinite pathos in his eyes. He seemed not to have the
energy to turn his head, but stood as if propped upon his legs, his
ribs showing with horrible plainness a tragic dejection in every
muscle and limb