he knew the lie of it by heart, and when night came the steady push of the paddles still ate up the miles. Once a bull-moose thrashed the undergrowth close by with his wide-branching horns, and far off the shy cow answered with a wild note; harsh, and strangely appealing. Silence dropped, and Dick knew that the huge animal was swinging his mighty bulk and heavy antlers through the woods as noiseless and as swift as a weasel.
It was hot on the river through the days that followed. And it was very lonely. Sometimes across an open sweep of red-top grass coyotes raised their high wild howling and shot from sight like yellow shadows. Sometimes loons rose from desolate marshes and flew into horizon with straight beaks wide open and strident cries that made crazy echoes. Sometimes a brown bear rocked along the rim of their night-camp with his silent shuffle, or the nasal whistle of a night-hawk on the trail of a bat came to them where they lay under the white moon. But the men spoke little, and in silence they thought their own thoughts, still-faced and quiet-eyed, in that reserve which the men of the back-trails know well.
Many times Dick thought of Robison; swarthy, stealthy, ready to die hard when his time came. Of Ducane who would crouch and cry when rounded up for his branding. Of Jennifer—and then his thoughts went no further, and all the great dead of whom the forest told were nothing to him. For the men who loved Canada haunt her silent places still; a ghostly, unforgotten company, grey with the thickening dust of time. Alexander Mackenzie, who broke out the white-man's flag where only the Indian's smoke-flag had blown; Franklin, thrusting his pincer-points down from the naked Pole; Bishop Bompas, that wide-hearted, dauntless "Apostle of the North"; James Robertson; George Munro Grant, and the men of a later day; Strathcona and Mount Stephen, who smote with steel and paved with iron and buckled up coast to coast.
And a thousand untold, and yet another thousand; men who died with shut teeth and fierce eyes on the Long Traverse; trappers whose sleeping places the grey wolf knows; freighters, Indians, Hudson Bay runners, men of the Mounted Police— Canada's lovers all, sowing their bones
