love forever. Her
last message to him. Her last promise of love and faith until the end of
time.

He guessed only the beginning of the truth. And Peter, denied the power
of thought transmission because of an error in the creation of things,
ran back a little way over the trail, trying to tell his master that
Nada had come with him through the storm, and was back in the deep
forest calling for him to return.

But McKay's mind saw nothing beyond the dimly lighted room of the
Missioner's cabin.

He pressed his lips to the silken tress of Nada's hair, still damp with
the rain; and after that, with the care of a miser he smoothed it out,
and tied the end of the tress tightly with a string, and put it away in
the soft buckskin wallet which he carried.

There was a new singing in his heart as he gathered sticks with which to
build a small fire, for after this he would not travel quite alone.

That day they went on; and day followed day, until August came, and
north--still farther north they went into the illimitable wilderness
which reached out in the drowsing stillness of the Flying-up-Month--the
month when newly fledged things take to their wings, and the deep
forests lie asleep.

Days added themselves into weeks, until at last they were in the country
of the Reindeer waterways.

To the east was Hudson's Bay; westward lay the black forests
and twisting waterways of Upper Saskatchewan; and north--always
north--beckoned the lonely plains and unmapped wildernesses of the
Athabasca, the Slave and the Great Bear--toward which far country their
trail was slowly but surely wending its way.

The woodlands and swamps were now empty of man. Cabin and shack and
Indian tepee were lifeless, and waited in the desolation of abandonment.
No smoke 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
mo