sunshine, of intense cold, of brilliant stars and a full moon at night.
The first of these four days David travelled fifteen miles on his snow
shoes, and that night he slept in a balsam shelter close to the face of
a great rock which they heated with a fire of logs, so that all through
the cold hours between darkness and gray dawn the boulder was like a
huge warming-stone. The second day marked also the second great stride
in his education in the life of the wild. Fang and hoof and padded claw
were at large again in the forests after the blizzard, and Father Roland
stopped at each broken path that crossed the trail, pointing out to him
the stories that were written in the snow. He showed him where a fox had
followed silently after a snow-shoe rabbit; where a band of wolves had
ploughed through the snow in the trail of a deer that was doomed, and in
a dense run of timber where both moose and caribou had sought refuge
from the storm he explained carefully the slight difference between the
hoofprints of the two. That night Baree came into camp while they were
sleeping, and in the morning they found where he had burrowed his round
bed in the snow not a dozen yards from their shelter. The third morning
David shot his moose. And that night he lured Baree almost to the side
of their campfire, and tossed him chunks of raw flesh from where he sat
smoking his pipe.

He was changed. Three days on the trail and three nights in camp under
the stars had begun their promised miracle-working. His face was
darkened by a stubble of beard, his ears and cheek bones were reddened
by exposure to cold and wind; he felt that in those three days and
nights his muscles had hardened, and his weakness had left him. "It was
in your mind--your sickness," Father Roland had told him, and he
believed it now. He began to find a pleasure in that physical
achievement which he had wondered at in Mukoki and the Missioner. Each
noon when they stopped to boil their tea and cook their dinner, and each
night when they made camp, he had chopped down a tree. To-night it had
been an 8-inch jack pine, tough with pitch. The exertion had sent his
blood pounding through him furiously. He was still breathing deeply as
he sat near the fire, tossing bits of meat out to Baree. They were sixty
miles from Thoreau's cabin, straight north, and for the twentieth time
Father Roland was telling him how well he had done.

"And to-morrow," he added, "we'll reach Tavish's."

It h