he had never learnt his drill at Regina. But all his hard-bitten, genial face showed contentment, and Dick recognised him as one of those throw-backs to the restless days which bred Raleigh and Drake and so many more. He had caught his man near Fort Macpherson, and two thousand miles of lonely country and a desperate furtive Indian stood between him and civilisation. But he said good-bye to Dick with a hearty grip and laughing eyes.
"Good fortune to you," he said. "At what end of the earth will we meet next?"
At Little Fort Norman in the Great Bear Lake district there was no word of Andree. Dick did not expect it, and he turned from the English Mission house to his long, silent trail again with certainty growing in him. Andree was seeking the white life. If she had wanted to hide among the Indians she would not have come so far north as this. The creatures of the wild were all about him as he made his night-camps now. The short-necked moose thumping down on their knees to nibble grass in the open places; black bear snuffing down the hole of rabbit or musquash; wolves yowling on some edge of forest at the moon; marten, wolverine; fierce, tuft-eared lynx. He saw the spores of all and heard their cries. At the occasional Indian camps among the white birches and the deep spruces he went ashore, struggling in the little Chipewyan that he knew to make interpretation to these Slave and Dog-Rib Tribes.
Where the big Mission churches and schools, the trading-posts and log-houses of Fort Good Hope stood above its tall ramparts of clay banks, Dick sought the Hudson Bay factor. He slept that night between lavender-scented sheets with the memory of Grieg, played well by the factor's wife, in his ears. There had been silver on the table, too, and cut glass, and the rim of the Arctic Circle was fourteen miles away. Dick left Good Hope reluctantly. The two hundred odd miles separating him from the next post promised so much of that solitude which he was daily finding more terrible.
There was frost in the red mornings, and the yellow evenings when he reached Arctic Red River, and on the little lagoons, where the duck were gathering to take flight,
