ke rose in the tree-tops; no howl of dog came with
the early dawn and the setting sun; trap lines were over-growing, and
laughter and song and the ring of the trapper's axe were gone, leaving
behind a brooding silence that seemed to pulse and thrill like a great
heart--the heart of the wild unchained for a space from its human
bondage.

It was the vacation time--the midsummer carnival weeks of the
wilderness people. Wild things were breeding. Fur was not good. Flesh
was unfit to kill. And so they had disappeared, man, woman and child,
and their dogs as well, to foregather at the Hudson's Bay Company's
posts scattered here and there in the fastnesses of the wilderness
lands. A few weeks more and they would return. Cabins would send up
their smoke again. Brown-faced children would play about the tepee
door. Ten thousand dwellers of the forests, white and half-breed and
Indian born, would trickle in twos and threes and family groups back
into the age-old trade of a domain that reached from Hudson's Bay to
the western mountains and from the Height of Land to the Arctic Sea.

Until then nature was free, and in its freedom ran in riotous silence
over the land. These were days when the wolf lay with her young, but
did not howl; when the lynx yawned sleepily, and hunted but
little--days of breeding, nights of drowsy whisperings, and of big red
moons, and of streams rippling softly at lowest ebb while they dreamed
of rains and flood-time. And through it all--through the lazy drone of
insects, the rustling sighs of the tree-tops and the subdued notes of
living things ran a low and tremulous whispering, as if nature had
found for itself a new language in this temporary absence of man.

To Jolly Roger this was Life, It breathed for him out of the cool
earth. He heard it over him, and under him, and on all sides of him
where other ears would have found only a thing vast and oppressive and
silent. On what he called these "motherhood days of the earth" the
passing years had built his faith and his creed.

One evening he stopped for camp at the edge of the Burntwood. From his
feet reached out the wide river, ankle deep in places, knee deep in
others, rippling and singing between sandbars and driftwood where in
May and June it had roared with the fury of flood Peter, half asleep
after their day's travel through a hot forests watched his master.
Since their flight from the edge of civilization far south he had grown
heavier and broad