In April Carvel shouldered his furs up to the Hudson's Bay Company's post at Lac la Biche, which was still farther north. Baree accompanied him halfway, and then—at sundown Carvel returned to the cabin and found him there. He was so overjoyed that he caught the dog's head in his arms and hugged it. They lived in the cabin until May. The buds were swelling then, and the smell of growing things had begun to rise up out of the earth.
Then Carvel found the first of the early blue flowers.
That night he packed up.
"It's time to travel," he announced to Baree. "And I've sort of changed my mind. We're going back—there." And he pointed south.
CHAPTER 30
A strange humor possessed Carvel as he began the southward journey. He did not believe in omens, good or bad.
Superstition had played a small part in his life, but he possessed both curiosity and a love for adventure, and his years of lonely wandering had developed in him a wonderfully clear mental vision of things, which in other words might be called a singularly active imagination. He knew that some irresistible force was drawing Baree back into the south—that it was pulling him not only along a given line of the compass, but to an exact point in that line.
For no reason in particular the situation began to interest him more and more, and as his time was valueless, and he had no fixed destination in view, he began to experiment. For the first two days he marked the dog's course by compass. It was due southeast. On the third morning Carvel purposely struck a course straight west. He noted quickly the change in Baree—his restlessness at first, and after that the dejected manner in which he followed at his heels. Toward noon Carvel swung sharply to the south and east again, and almost immediately Baree regained his old eagerness, and ran ahead of his master.
After this, for many days, Carvel followed the trail of the dog.