The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Call of the North, by Stewart Edward White

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Title: The Call of the North

Author: Stewart Edward White

Release Date: March 3, 2004 [EBook #11426]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE CALL OF THE NORTH

Beyond the butternut, beyond the maple,
beyond the white pine and the red, beyond
the oak, the cedar, and the beech, beyond
even the white and yellow birches lies a
Land, and in that Land the shadows fall
crimson across the snow.

THE CALL OF THE NORTH

Being a Dramatized Version of

CONJURORS HOUSE
A Romance of the Free Forest

BY

Stewart Edward White

AUTHOR OF THE WESTERNERS,
THE BLAZED TRAIL,
ETC.

THE CALL OF THE NORTH

Chapter One

The girl stood on a bank above a river flowing north. At her back
crouched a dozen clean whitewashed buildings. Before her in
interminable journey, day after day, league on league into
remoteness, stretched the stern Northern wilderness, untrodden save
by the trappers, the Indians, and the beasts. Close about the
little settlement crept the balsams and spruce, the birch and
poplar, behind which lurked vast dreary muskegs, a chaos of
bowlder-splits, the forest. The girl had known nothing different
for many years. Once a summer the sailing ship from England felt
its frozen way through the Hudson Straits, down the Hudson Bay, to
drop anchor in the mighty River of the Moose. Once a summer a
six-fathom canoe manned by a dozen paddles struggled down the
waters of the broken Abitibi. Once a year a little band of
red-sashed _voyageurs_ forced their exhausted sledge-dogs across
the ice from some unseen wilderness trail. That was all.

Before her eyes the seasons changed, all grim, but one by the very
pathos of brevity sad. In the brief luxuriant summer came the
Indians to trade their pelts, came the keepers of the winter posts
to rest, came the ship from England bringing the articles of use or
ornament she had ordered a full year before. Within a short time
all were gone, into the wilderness, into the great unknown w