Simpson, the employer,

and Defago, the employed, among these primitive forces, were simply -two men, the “guider,” and the “guided.” Superior knowledge, of course,

assumed control, and the younger man fell without a second thought into

the quasi-

subordinate position. He never dreamed of objecting when Defago

dropped the “Mr.,” and addressed him as “Say, Simpson,” or “Simpson,

boss,” which was invariably the cast before they reached the farther

shore after a stiff paddle of twelve miles against a head wind. He only

laughed, and liked it; then ceased to notice it at all.

For this “divinity student” was a young man of parts and character,

though as yet, of course, untravelled; and on this trip — the first

time he had seen any country but his own and little Switzerland — the

huge scale of things somewhat bewildered him. It was one thing, he

realized, to hear about primeval forests, but quite another to see

them. While to dwell in them and seek acquaintance with their wild life

was, again, an initiation that no intelligent man could undergo without

a certain shifting of personal values hitherto held for permanent and

sacred.

Simpson knew the first faint indication of this emotion when he

held the new .303 rifle in his hands and looked along its pair of

faultless, gleaming barrels. The three days’ journey to their

headquarters, by lake and portage, had carried the process a stage

farther. And now that he was about to plunge beyond even the fringe of

wilderness where they were camped into the virgin heart of uninhabited

regions as vast as Europe itself, the true nature of the situation

stole upon him with an effect of delight and awe that his imagination

was fully capable of appreciating. It was himself and Defago against a

multitude — at least, against a Titan!

The bleak splendours of these remote and lonely forests rather

overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern

quality of the tangled backwoods which can only be described as

merciless and terrible, rose out of these far blue woods swimming upon

the horizon, and revealed itself. He understood the silent warning. He

realized his own utter helplessness. Only Defago, as a symbol of a

distant civilization where man was master, stood between him and a

pitiless death by exhaustion and starvation.

It was thrilling to him, therefore, to watch Defago turn over the

canoe upon the shore, pack the paddles carefully underneath, and then

proceed to “blaze” the spruce stems for some distance on either side of

an almost invisible trail, with the careless remark thrown in, “Say

Simpson, if anything happens to me, you’ll find the canoe all correc’

by these marks; — then strike doo west into the sun to hit the home

camp agin, see?”

It was the most natural thing in the world to say, and he said it

without any noticable inflexion of the voice, only it happened to

express the youth’s emotions at the moment with an utterance that was

symbolic of the situation and of his own helplessness as a factor in

it. He was alone with Defago in a primitive world; that was all. The

canoe, another symbol of man’s ascendancy, was not to be left behind.

Those small yellow patches, made on the trees by the axe, were the only

indications of its hiding-place.

Meanwhile, shouldering the packs between them, each man carrying

his own rifle, they followed the slender trail over rocks and fallen

trunks and across half-frozen swamps; skirting numerous lakes that

fairly gemmed the forest, their borders fringed with mist; and towards

five o’clock found themselves suddenly on the edge of the woods,

looking out across a large sheet of water in front of them, dotted with

pine-clad islands of all describable shapes and sizes.

“Fifty Island Water,” announced Defago wearily, “and the sun jest

goin’ to dip his bald old head into it!” he added, with unconscious

poetry; and immediately they set about pitching camp for the night.

In a very few minutes, under those skillful hands that never made a

movement too much or a movement too little, the silk tent stood taut

and cosy, the beds of balsam boughs ready laid, and a brisk

cooking-fire burned with the minimum of smoke. While the young

Scotchman cleaned the fish they had caught trolling behind the canoe,

Defago “guessed” he would “jest as soon” take a turn through the Bush

for indications of moose. “May come across a trunk where they bin and

rubbed horns,” he said, as he moved off, “or feedin’ on the last of the

maple leaves,” — and he was gone.

His small figure melted away like a shadow in the dusk, while

Simpson noted with a kind of admiration how easily the forest absorbed

him into herself. A few steps, it seemed, and he was no longer visible.

Yet there was little underbrush hereabouts; the trees stood

somewhat apart, well spaced; and in the clearings grew silver-birch and

maple, spearlike and slender, against the immense stems of spruce and

hemlock. But for occasional prostrate monsters, and the boulders of

grey rock that thrust uncouth shoulders here and there out of the

ground, it might well have been a bit of park in the Old Country.

Almost, one might have seen in it the hand of man. A little to the

right, however, began the great burnt section, miles in extent,

proclaiming its real character — brule, as it is called, where the

fires of the previous year had raged for weeks, and the blackened

stumps now rose gaunt and ugly, bereft of branches, like gigantic

match-heads stuck into the ground, savage and desolate beyond words.

The perfume of charcoal and rain-soaked ashes still hung faintly about

it.