Of that, too, he had been thinking an hour ago. It was the thing
which, first of all, had driven him into the north. And though it
had twisted and disrupted the earth under his feet for a time, it
had brought its compensation. For he had come to love the north
with a passionate devotion. It was, in a way, his God. It seemed
to him that the time had never been when he had lived any other
life than this under the open skies. He was thirty-seven now. A
bit of a philosopher, as philosophy comes to one in a sun-cleaned
and unpolluted air, A good-humored brother of humanity, even when
he put manacles on other men's wrists; graying a little over the
temples--and a lover of life. Above all else he was that. A lover
of life. A worshiper at the shrine of God's Country.
So he sat, that hour ago, deep in the wilderness eighty miles
north of Athabasca Landing, congratulating himself on the present
conditions of his existence. A hundred and eighty miles farther on
was Fort McMurray, and another two hundred beyond that was
Chipewyan, and still beyond that the Mackenzie and its fifteen-
hundred-mile trail to the northern sea. He was glad there was no
end to this world of his.
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