ushed into the sinuous channel of Lone Moose, breasting
its slow current with steady strokes, startling flocks of waterfowl at
every bend, gliding hour after hour along this shadowy waterway that
split the hushed reaches of the woods. It was very still and very somber
and a little uncanny. The creek was but a thread in that illimitable
forest which pressed so close on either hand. The sun at high noon could
not dissipate the shadows that lurked among the close-ranked trees; it
touched the earth and the creek with patches and streaks of yellow at
rare intervals and left untouched the obscurity where the rabbits and
the fur-bearing animals and all the wild life of the forest went
furtively about its business. Once they startled a cow moose and her
calf knee-deep in a shallow. The crash of their hurried retreat rose
like a blare of brass horns cutting discordantly into the piping of a
flute. But it died as quickly as it had risen. Even the beasts bowed
before the invisible altars of silence.

About four in the afternoon Mike Breyette turned the nose of the canoe
sharply into the bank.

The level of the forest floor lifted ten feet above Thompson's head so
that he could see nothing beyond the earthy rim save the tops of trees.
He kept his seat while Mike tied the bow to a birch trunk with a bit of
rope. He knew that they expected to land him at his destination before
evening fell. This did not impress him as a destination. He did not know
what Lone Moose would be like. The immensity of the North had left him
rather incredulous. Nothing in the North, animate or inanimate,
corresponded ever so little to his preconceived notions of what it would
be like. His ideas of the natives had been tinctured with the flavor of
Hiawatha and certain Leatherstocking tales which he had read with a
sense of guilt when a youngster. He had really started out with the
impression that Lone Moose was a collection of huts and tents about a
log church and a missionary house. The people would be simple and
high-minded, tillers of the soil in summer, trappers of fur in winter,
humble seekers after the Light he was bringing. But he was not a fool,
and he had been compelled to forego that illusion. Then he had surmised
that Lone Moose might be a replica of Fort Pachugan. MacLeod had partly
disabused his mind of that.

But he still could not keep out of his mind's eye a somewhat hazy
picture of Lone Moose as a group of houses on the bank of a stream, w