Ick Far was sent on a scouting expedition and shortly returned with the information that the back trail of the two Indians led up the smaller confluent. He was an odd bit of humanity—was Ick Far. A finished product of the lean, lone land of cold. In all the North was no tracker like him. His skill amounted almost to instinct, for he could tell at a glance, by signs invisible to the eyes of white men, not only that a man or an animal had passed, but its kind, the time of its passing, and its rate of speed.
Dour and haughty and silent, he had stepped one day out of a furious blizzard into a police outpost on Teslin. And dour and haughty and silent he had remained, although for five years he had eaten the salt of the king. They asked him where he came from and he answered “far,” and where he was going, and again he answered “far.” And that one word sums up the entire known biography of the leathern-skinned scout. “Ichabod,” someone named him, and down on the roster he went: “Ichabod Far, Indian, tribe unknown. Guide, interpreter, scout.” Not even in his speech did he reveal a clue to his identity, for twenty dialects of the North were his, and the
