es, some smiling and some
looking fierce-haired, take dim shape in the corners of the room.

Beyond the open window, where birds are twittering in the overhanging
ivy, an English landscape of meadow and woodland, hills and hamlets,
rolls far in the sunshine of a June morning. It is the year 1846, in the
reign of her gracious majesty, Queen Victoria. I close my eyes, and I am
back in another world. I see the Great Lone Land--its rivers and lakes,
its plains and peaks, its boundless leagues of wilderness stretching
from sea to sea. I sniff the fragrant odors of snow-clad birch and pine,
of marsh pools glimmering in the dying glow of a summer sun. I hear the
splash of paddles and the glide of sledge-runners, the patter of flying
moose and deer, and the scream of the hungry panther. I feel the weird,
fascinating spell of the solitude and silence.

The Great Lone Land! Truly, to those who have known it, a name to
conjure with! As it was then so it remains to-day, that vast,
mysterious, romantic realm of the Canadas. The territory of the Hudson
Bay Company, chartered remotely and by royal warrant when Charles II was
king; the home of the Red Indian and the voyageur, the half-breed
trapper and hunter, the gentlemen adventurers of England, Scotland and
France; a land of death by Indian treachery and grizzlies, starvation
and freezing, snowslides and rapids; a mighty wilderness, with canoes
and sledges for the vehicles of travel and commerce, and forest trails
joining the scattered trading posts.

There I, Denzil Carew, was born. There was my home from the cradle to
manhood, and there my story lies. In that wild country I was nurtured
and bred, schooled in the lore of the woods, taught to shoot and swim,
to bear fatigue and to navigate dangerous waters. Nor did I grow up in
ignorance of finer arts, for my father, Bertrand Carew, was an
Englishman and a gentleman, and he took pains to give me the benefit of
his own education and culture. Who his people were, or what had brought
him out to the Canadas, were things he never told me.

My mother was the daughter of a company factor in charge of Fort Beaver.
I do not remember her, for she died when I was a year old. At the
factor's death my father succeeded to the post, and ten years later he
was killed by a treacherous Indian. Fort Beaver was then abandoned, a
new post having been recently built, seventy miles farther north. This
was Fort Royal, on the Churchill River, one hundred