“But you are not used to these birds,” she said generously. “You’ll learn soon enough.”
The days were growing long. There seemed little reason for haste. For, where were they going, after all? They took time to build a fire and prepare a hearty meal. The birds they saved for supper. For the present they feasted on caribou meat.
“It is well,” said Gordon Duncan, “to build up muscle, fat and bone while you may. So you will be able in the time of want to withstand the pangs of hunger. Savage people everywhere know this. We in our sleek complacency of plenty too soon forget.”
It was mid-afternoon when the thing happened which was destined to change the entire order of their lives and carry them away on a mad quest that might well end in disaster and death.
It often happens as one travels along life’s pathway that he comes of a sudden to that which is to change the very nature of his being. But does he know it? More often than otherwise he does not. It was even so now. As the wandering trio came over the crest of a ridge and began to descend into a valley down a narrow run that led them back to the river, they saw before them a scraggy pine of unusual height. Surrounded as it was by a low growth of cottonwoods, it seemed a beacon.
To one member of the party it was a beacon. Hardly had Gordon Duncan’s eyes fallen upon it than he suddenly pressed a hand to his forehead to exclaim:
“The tree! As I live! The very tree!”
“Why Grandfather! What—” The girl looked at him in alarm.
He was gone. Leading on at a pace that was hard to follow, he headed directly for the lone pine.
Once there, he dropped on hands and knees to point at some object protruding from the gnarled trunk of the giant tree.