Ah, yes, that very afternoon he had come upon the trail of a caribou. It had been this very caribou that led him to disaster. The beast had crossed the river. In attempting to follow he had come near losing his life, and had lost all but one of his arrows.
“Ah, well,” he sighed, “to-morrow my luck will turn. A single arrow is enough for a caribou and I am now on his side of the stream. I will take up the trail in the morning.”
With that, after replenishing his fire, he rolled up in his blankets and prepared for a night’s repose.
Was it the coffee? Was it hunger? Or was it the silence of the night in that strange land that robbed him of coveted slumber? For long his eyes remained closed. Yet sleep did not come.
At last, yielding to the inevitable, he opened his eyes wide to stare upward through sighing pine branches to the infinite heavens above, where a myriad stars twinkled and beamed as they appeared to leap across tossing clusters of pine needles.
Like a story told by a poet, a picture thrown on the screen, his life of the past few months moved before him.
Arriving from dreamy tropical seas and deep tangled swamps of Central America, he had in late Autumn arrived at the mid-western city which was inseparably linked with his childhood.
There, as he felt the crisp tang of autumn mornings and caught the gleams of frost on the corn, he felt again the lure of the North.
Months of hot tropical sun lay behind him. He had come to loathe the soft warmth that saps men’s energies, thins their blood and weakens their wills. He yearned now for the long white trail, the screaming of sled runners, the song of dogs that is an Arctic night.
But at this moment a fresh fancy seized him. Burton Bronson, an old-time friend, had by chance shown him a hunting bow with which he had performed marvelous feats. The wolf, the wild cat, mountain lion and bear had felt the bite of his broadhead arrows.