g game which his companions
told him was on all sides of them.

Everywhere about them lay white winter. The rocks, the trees, and the
great ridges, which in this north country are called mountains, were
covered with four feet of snow and on it the sun shone with dazzling
brilliancy. But it was not until a long grade brought them to the top of
one of these ridges and Howland looked into the north that he saw the
wilderness in all of its grandeur. As the car stopped he sprang to his
feet with a joyous cry, his face aflame with what he saw ahead of him.
Stretching away under his eyes, mile after mile, was the vast white
desolation that reached to Hudson Bay. In speechless wonder he gazed
down on the unblazed forests, saw plains and hills unfold themselves as
his vision gained distance, followed a frozen river until it was lost in
the bewildering picture, and let his eyes rest here and there on the
glistening, snow-smothered bosoms of lakes, rimmed in by walls of black
forest. This was not the wilderness as he had expected it to be, nor as
he had often read of it in books. It was not the wilderness that Gregson
and Thorne had described in their letters. It was beautiful! It was
magnificent! His heart throbbed with pleasure as he gazed down on it,
the flush grew deeper in his face, and he seemed hardly to breathe in
his tense interest.

One of the four on the car was an old Indian and it was he, strangely
enough, who broke the silence. He had seen the look in Howland's face,
and he spoke softly, close to his ear, "Twent' t'ousand moose down
there--twent' t'ousand caribou-oo! No man--no house--more twent'
t'ousand miles!"

Howland, even quivering in his new emotion, looked into the old
warrior's eyes, filled with the curious, thrilling gleam of the spirit
which was stirring within himself. Then again he stared straight out
into the unending distance as though his vision would penetrate far
beyond the last of that visible desolation--on and on, even to the grim
and uttermost fastnesses of Hudson Bay; and as he looked he knew that in
these moments there had been born in him a new spirit, a new being; that
no longer was he the old Jack Howland whose world had been confined by
office walls and into whose conception of life there had seldom entered
things other than those which led directly toward the achievement of his
ambitions.

The short northern day was nearing an end when once more they saw the
broad Saskatchewan twisti