ing laughter chased him through his dreams and spoiled his rest.
The morning broke, wet and squally, with a following wind that ran them with taut sails down to the grey angry line of rough water that began the Traverse. Far off the small, bare islands that flanked the shore were lost in haze, and the naked width of the Great Slave Lake was like a rimless sea about them. The canoes seemed absurdly inadequate and frail to take that passage; but the breeds slid into it, indifferently, with the assured skill of their kind, and the white men's canoes followed, as snaky and alert as they. The rising wind blew up a sea that threatened danger, and the next two hours were full of it. With tunics flung aside, and sleeves rolled, and hats off every man laboured for his life; and the crested waves about them allowed no rest, any more than the stalking Indian of an earlier day had allowed rest to those free-traders who were marked down for punishment on that Long Traverse of an earlier day.
They were dripping with rain and lake-water; exhausted, and stiff with the muscle-ache when they hauled to shore again, two hours later. But the great Traverse was passed, and the beginning of a new world was before them. Dick knew something of that world already. He had trodden part of it himself, and from the tribes gathered in Fort Resolution he had learnt much more. For Fort Resolution is the book which holds the largest and the biggest chapter of the story of Fur. From there men go north to the Barren Lands to hunt the musk ox; from there fur of marten, of wolverine, of brown bear and ermine, and many more go south in the close-pressed bales, by steamer and by portage and by the tracker's pull. And from there, all round about it, the trails of the sturdy hunters drive out into the silences over the chartless hundreds of miles.
At Fond du Lac was a deserted post of the Hudson Bay Company. They left it to rot its way back to the earth again, and followed up the narrowing lake until Charlton Harbour marked the end of it and the beginning of that which all men knew to be the real test of flesh and spirit.
That night's camp was among a cluster of empty tepees
