zen earth and muck from the deepest and blackest
swamps, North, south, east and west the wilderness world was a glory of
bursting life, of springtime mellowing into summer. Ridge upon ridge of
yellows and greens and blacks swept away into the unknown distances like
the billows of a vast sea; and between them lay the valleys and swamps,
the lakes and waterways, glad with the rippling song of running waters,
the sweet scents of early flowering time, and the joyous voice of all
mating creatures.

Just under Cragg's Ridge lay the paradise, a meadow-like sweep of plain
that reached down to the edge of Clearwater Lake, with clumps of poplars
and white birch and darker tapestries of spruce and balsams dotting it
like islets in a sea of verdant green. The flowers were two weeks ahead
of their time and the sweet perfumes of late June, instead of May,
rose up out of the plain, and already there was nesting in the velvety
splashes of timber.

In the edge of a clump of this timber, flat on his belly, lay Peter. The
love of adventure was in him, and today he had sallied forth on his most
desperate enterprise. For the first time he had gone alone to the edge
of Clearwater Lake, half a mile away; boldly he had trotted up and down
the white strip of beach where the girl's footprints still remained in
the sand, and defiantly he had yipped at the shimmering vastness of the
water, and at the white gulls circling near him in quest of dead fish
flung ashore. Peter was three months old. Yesterday he had been a timid
pup, shrinking from the bigness and strangeness of everything about him;
but today he had braved the lake trail on his own nerve, and nothing had
dared to come near him in spite of his yipping, so that a great courage
and a great desire were born in him.

Therefore, in returning, he had paused in the edge of a great clump of
balsams and spruce, and lay flat on his belly, his sharp little eyes
leveled yearningly at the black mystery of its deeper shadows. The bit
of forest filled a cup-like depression in the plain, and was possibly
half a rifle-shot distance from end to end--but to Peter it was as vast
as life itself. And something urged him to go in.

And as he lay there, desire and indecision struggling for mastery within
him, no power could have told Peter that destinies greater than his own
were working through the soul of the dog that was in him, and that on
his decision to go in or not to go in--on the triumph of courage