back with his face
to the stars. He was eager to get away from timber and to feel the
immeasurable space of the big country, the open country, about him. What
fool had given to it the name of _Barren Lands_? What idiots people were
to lie about it in that way on the maps! He strapped his pack over his
shoulders and seized his rifle. Barren Lands!

He set out, walking like a man in a race. And long before the twilight
hours of sleep they were sweeping out ahead of him in all their
glory--the Barren Lands of the map-makers, _his_ paradise. On a knoll he
stood in the golden sun and looked about him. He set his pack down and
stood with bared head, a whispering of cool wind in his hair. If Mary
Standish could have lived to see _this_! He stretched out his arms, as
if pointing for her eyes to follow, and her name was in his heart and
whispering on his silent lips. Immeasurable the tundras reached ahead of
him--rolling, sweeping, treeless, green and golden and a glory of
flowers, athrill with a life no forest land had ever known. Under his
feet was a crush of forget-me-nots and of white and purple violets,
their sweet perfume filling his lungs as he breathed. Ahead of him lay a
white sea of yellow-eyed daisies, with purple iris high as his knees in
between, and as far as he could see, waving softly in the breeze, was
the cotton-tufted sedge he loved. The pods were green. In a few days
they would be opening, and the tundras would be white carpets.

He listened to the call of life. It was about him everywhere, a melody
of bird-life subdued and sleepy even though the sun was still warmly
aglow in the sky. A hundred times he had watched this miracle of bird
instinct, the going-to-bed of feathered creatures in the weeks and
months when there was no real night. He picked up his pack and went on.
From a pool hidden in the lush grasses of a distant hollow came to him
the twilight honking of nesting geese and the quacking content of wild
ducks. He heard the reed-like, musical notes of a lone "organ-duck" and
the plaintive cries of plover, and farther out, where the shadows seemed
deepening against the rim of the horizon, rose the harsh, rolling notes
of cranes and the raucous cries of the loons. And then, from a clump of
willows near him, came the chirping twitter of a thrush whose throat was
tired for the day, and the sweet, sleepy evening song of a robin.
_Night!_ Alan laughed softly, the pale flush of the sun in his face.
_Bedtime