l, but more
and more Carvel came to understand that some mysterious call was coming
to him from out of the south.

It was the wanderer's intention to swing over into the country of the
Great Slave, a good eight hundred miles to the north and west, before
the mush snows came. From there, when the waters opened in springtime,
he planned to travel by canoe westward to the Mackenzie and ultimately
to the mountains of British Columbia. These plans were changed in
February. They were caught in a great storm in the Wholdaia Lake
country, and when their fortunes looked darkest Carvel stumbled on a
cabin in the heart of a deep spruce forest, and in this cabin there was
a dead man. He had been dead for many days, and was frozen stiff.
Carvel chopped a hole in the earth and buried him.

The cabin was a treasure trove to Carvel and Baree, and especially to
the man. It evidently possessed no other owner than the one who had
died. It was comfortable and stocked with provisions; and more than
that, its owner had made a splendid catch of fur before the frost bit
his lungs, and he died. Carvel went over them carefully and joyously.
They were worth a thousand dollars at any post, and he could see no
reason why they did not belong to him now. Within a week he had blazed
out the dead man's snow-covered trap line and was trapping on his own
account.

This was two hundred miles north and west of the Gray Loon, and soon
Carvel observed that Baree did not face directly south in those moments
when the strange call came to him, but south and east. And now, with
each day that passed, the sun rose higher in the sky; it grew warmer;
the snow softened underfoot, and in the air was the tremulous and
growing throb of spring. With these things came the old yearning to
Baree; the heart-thrilling call of the lonely graves back on the Gray
Loon, of the burned cabin, the abandoned tepee beyond the pool--and of
Nepeese. In his sleep he saw visions of things. He heard again the low,
sweet voice of the Willow, felt the touch of her hand, was at play with
her once more in the dark shades of the forest--and Carvel would sit
and watch him as he dreamed, trying to read the meaning of what he saw
and heard.

In April Carvel shouldered his furs up to the Hudson's Bay Company's
post at Lac la Biche, which was still farther north. Baree accompanied
him halfway, and then--at sundown Carvel returned to the cabin and
found him there. He was so overjoyed that he cau