I had
refused to pull pistol on them. Deuce's heart was broken. Then,
finally, we came to cliffs up which we had to scale, and boulders which
we had to climb, and fissures which we had to jump or cross on fallen
trees, and wide, bare sweeps of rock and blueberry bushes which we had
to cover, until at last we stood where we could look all ways at once.
The starfish thrust his insinuating arms in among the distant hills to
the north. League after league, rising and falling and rising again
into ever bluer distance, forest-covered, mysterious, other ranges and
systems lifted, until at last, far out, nearly at the horizon-height of
my eye, flashed again the gleam of water. And so the starfish arms of
the little lake at my feet seemed to have plunged into this wilderness
tangle only to reappear at greater distance. Like swamp-fire, it lured
the imagination always on and on and on through the secret waterways of
the uninhabited North. It was as though I stood on the dividing ridge
between the old and the new. Through the southern haze, hull down, I
thought to make out the smoke of a Great Lake freighter; from the
shelter of a distant cove I was not surprised a moment later to see
emerge a tiny speck whose movements betrayed it as a birch canoe. The
great North was at this, the most southern of the Hudson's Bay posts,
striking a pin-point of contact with the world of men.
Deuce and I angled down the mountain toward the stream.
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