Having put this subject to rest, she allowed her mind to drift back over the days that had just passed.
She had come all the way from Edmonton, eight hundred miles, in an airplane, her first journey through the air. What a thrilling experience that had been!
As she sat there listening to the roar of the fire, its roar became the thunder of their motor as they went racing across the landing field at Edmonton.
The snow had been soft and sticky that day. It clung to the airplane’s eight-foot skis. Three times they crossed that broad expanse of whiteness. Then came a redoubled roar from the motor, and some one said:
“Up!”
To her surprise, she found that passing through the air was not different from skiing across the snow. Seated beside her father, with his three young partners reposing on a pile of canvas bags before them, she had watched through the narrow window while the houses grew small and then began to pass from sight.
They appeared to be moving very slowly, yet reason told her they were doing better than a hundred miles an hour. The city vanished, and broad stretches of farm land lay beneath them.
“It’s not exciting at all!” she shouted in her father’s ear. “Just like riding in a bobsled.”
Yet this was not entirely true. She did experience a thrill as they passed from the land of broad farms to the world of great silent forests where a lonely river wound its white and silent way.
“We are pioneers!” she whispered to herself. “Adventurers entering an unknown land!” And so they were. When at last they landed on the white surface of Great Slave Lake, they found themselves a full hundred miles from the nearest settlement. And beyond them, hundreds of miles to the north, the east, the south, was a great, white, empty wilderness. Here there was no one.