n he was done he still had the value of
two silver fox skins in cash. He left Chippewyan that same night, and
by the light of a Winter moon made his camp half a dozen miles
northward toward Smith Landing.

He was on the Slave River now and for weeks traveled slowly but
steadily northward on snowshoes. He avoided Fort Smith and Smith
Landing and struck westward before he came to Fort Resolution. It was
in April that he struck Hay River Post, where the Hay River empties
into Great Slave Lake. Until the ice broke up, Kent worked at Hay
River. When it was safe, he started down the Mackenzie in a canoe. It
was late in June when he turned up the Liard to the South Nahani.

"You go straight through between the sources of the North and the South
Nahani," Marette had told him. "It is there you find the Sulphur
Country, and beyond the Sulphur Country is the Valley of Silent Men."

At last he came to the edge of this country. He camped with the stink
of it in his nostrils. The moon rose, and he saw that desolate world as
through the fumes of a yellow smoke. With dawn he went on.

He passed through broad, low morasses out of which rose sulphurous
fogs. Mile after mile he buried himself deeper in it, and it became
more and more a dead country, a lost hell. There were berry bushes on
which there grew no berries. There were forests and swamps, but without
a living creature to inhabit them.

It was a country of water in which there were no fish, of air in which
there were no birds, of plants without flowers--a reeking, stinking
country still with the stillness of death. He began to turn yellow. His
clothing, his canoe, his hands, face--everything turned yellow. He
could not get the filthy taste of sulphur out of his mouth. Yet he kept
on, straight west by the compass Gowen had given him at Hay River. Even
this compass became yellow in his pocket. It was impossible for him to
eat. Only twice that day did he drink from his flask of water.

And Marette had made this journey! He kept telling himself that. It was
the secret way in and out of their hidden world, a region accursed by
devils, a forbidden country to both Indian and white man. It was hard
for him to believe that she had come this way, that she had drunk in
the air that was filling his own lungs, nauseating him a dozen times to
the point of sickness. He worked desperately. He felt neither fatigue
nor the heat of the warm water about him.

Night came, and the moon rose, lig