It was like
medicine to him, and he lay with wide-open eyes, his ears picking
up one after another the voices that marked the change from day to
night. He heard the cry of a loon, its softer, chuckling note of
honeymoon days. From across the river came a cry that was half
howl, half bark. Carrigan knew that it was coyote, and not wolf, a
coyote whose breed had wandered hundreds of miles north of the
prairie country.
The gloom gathered in, and yet it was not darkness as the darkness
of night is known a thousand miles south. It was the dusky
twilight of day where the sun rises at three o'clock in the
morning and still throws its ruddy light in the western sky at
nine o'clock at night; where the poplar buds unfold themselves
into leaf before one's very eyes; where strawberries are green in
the morning and red in the afternoon; where, a little later, one
could read newspaper print until midnight by the glow of the sun--
and between the rising and the setting of that sun there would be
from eighteen to twenty hours of day. It was evening time in the
wonderland of the north, a wonderland hard and frozen and ridden
by pain and death in winter, but a paradise upon earth in this
month of June.
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