a thousand
miles from Cragg's Ridge. It was as he had left it three years ago. No
one had opened its door since then. The little box stove was waiting
for a fire. Behind it was a pile of wood. On the table were the old tin
dishes, and hanging from babiche cords fastened to the roof timbers,
out of reach of mice and ermine, were blankets and clothing and other
possessions he had left behind him in that winter break-up of what
seemed like ages ago to him. He raised a small section in the floor,
and there were his traps, thickly coated with caribou grease. For half
an hour before he built a fire he sought eagerly for the things he had
concealed here and there. He found oil, and a tin lamp, and candles,
and as darkness of the first night gathered outside a roaring fire sent
sparks up the chimney, and the little cabin's one window glowed with
light, and the battered old coffee pot bubbled and steamed again, as if
rejoicing at his return.

With the breaking of another day he immediately began preparations for
the season's trapping. In two days' hunting he killed three caribou,
his winter meat. Then he cut wood, and made his strychnine poison
baits, and marked out his trap-lines.

The first of November brought the chill whisperings of an early winter
through the Northland. Farther south autumn was dying, or dead. The
last of the red ash berries hung shriveled and frost-bitten on naked
twigs, freezing nights were nipping the face of the earth, the voices
of the wilderness were filled with a new note and the winds held
warning for every man and beast between Hudson's Bay and the Great
Slave and from the Height of Land to the Arctic Sea. Seven years before
there had come such a winter, and the land had not forgotten it--a
winter sudden and swift, deadly in its unexpectedness, terrific in its
cold, bringing with it such famine and death as the Northland had not
known for two generations.

But this year there was premonition. Omen of it came with the first
wailing night winds that bore the smell of icebergs from over the black
forests north and west. The moon came up red, and it went down red, and
the sun came up red in the morning. The loon's call died a month ahead
of its time. The wild geese drove steadily south when they should have
been feeding from the Kogatuk to Baffin's Bay, and the beaver built his
walls thick, and anchored his alders and his willows deep so that he
would not starve when the ice grew heavy. East, west,