He pondered deeply upon this, wondering much at the singular attraction this girl held for him, the mystery of that strange quality that drew him so. He lacked knowledge of the way and power of women. It had never touched him before. It was indeed as if he had been asleep and had wakened with a start. He was intensely curious about that, curious to know why he, who had met nice girls and attractive women by the score, had come into the North woods to be stirred out of all reason by a slip of a girl with yellow hair and expressive gray eyes and a precocious manner of thinking.
He looked forward eagerly to seeing her again. He somehow felt a little more sure of himself now. He could think of a number of things he wished to ask her, of ideas he wanted to expand into speech. The hurt of her blank refusal had dulled a little. He could anticipate a keen pleasure just in seeing her.
In the morning he set about outfitting. He had come down from Porcupine with dogs. He had seen dog teams bearing the goods and chattels of innumerable natives. He perceived the essential usefulness of dogs and snowshoes and toboggans in that boundless region of snow. Canoes when the ice went out, dogs and toboggans when winter came again to lock tight the waterways. So during his stay at Porcupine he had accepted the gift of a dog from a Cree, traded tobacco for another, and he and Lamont had whiled away the long evenings in making two sets of harness and a small toboggan. A four-dog team will haul a sizable load. Two would move all the burden of food and gear that he had in his possession. He had learned painfully to walk upon snowshoes—enough so that he was over the poignant ache in the calf of the leg which the North calls mal de racquette. Altogether he felt himself fully equal to fare into the wilderness alone. Moreover he had none of that intangible dread of the wilderness which had troubled him when he first came to Lone Moose.
Then it seemed lonely beyond expression, brooding, sinister. It was lonely still—but that was all. He was beginning to grasp the motif of the wilderness, to understand in a measure that to those who adapted themselves thereto it was a sanctuary. The sailor to his sea, the woodsman to his woods, and the boulevardier to his beloved avenues! Thompson did not cleave to the North as a woodsman might. But the natural phenomena of unbroken silences, of vast soundlessness, of miles upon miles of somber forest aisles did not oppress him now. What a man understands he does not fear. The unknown, the potentially terrible which spurs the imagination to horrifying vision, is what bears heavy on a man's soul.
Thompson's preparation for the trail was simple. That lesson he had learned from two months' close association with Joe Lamont. He had acquired a sleeping bag of moosehide, soft tanned. This, his gun and axe, the grub he got from the Pachugan store, he had lashed on the toboggan and put his dogs in harness at daybreak. There would be little enough day to light his steps. Dusk came at midafternoon.
When he had tied the last lashing he shook hands with MacLeod and set out.
He traversed the sixty miles between Pachugan and Lone Moose in two days, by traveling late the first night, under a brilliant moon. It gave him a far vision of the lake shore, black point after black point thrusting out into the immense white level of the lake. Upon that hard smooth surface he could tuck the snowshoes under his lashings and trot over the ice, his dogs at his heels, the frost-bound hush broken by the tinkle of a little bell Joe Lamont had fastened on the lead dog's collar. It rang sweetly, a gay note in that chill void.
That night he drew into a spruce grove, cleared a space for his fire and bed, fed himself hot tea and a bannock, and the hindquarters of a rabbit potted by his rifle on the way. He went to sleep with drowsy eyes peeping at the cold stars from under the flap of his sleeping bag, at the jagged silhouette of spruce tops cut sharp against the sky.
He drew up before the mission quarters in the gray of the next dusk, and stood again after nigh three months at his own door. The clearing was a white square, all its unlovely litter of fallen trees and half-burned stumps hidden under the virgin snow. The cabin sat squat and brown-walled amid this. On all sides the spruce stood dusky-green. Beyond, over in Lone Moose meadow, Thompson, standing a moment before he opened the door, heard voices faintly, the ringing blows of an axe. Some one laughed.
The frost stirred him out of this momentary inaction. In a few minutes he had a fire glowing in the stove, a lamp lighted, the chill driven from that long deserted room. Except for that chill and a slight closeness, the cabin was as he had left it. Outside, his two dogs snarled and growled over their evening ration of dried fish, and when they had consumed the last scrap curled hardily in the snow bank near the cabin wall.