Title:  The Country Beyond

Author:  James Oliver Curwood

Release Date:  December, 2003 [Etext #4743] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 12, 2002]

Edition:  10

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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THE COUNTRY BEYOND

A ROMANCE OF THE WILDERNESS

BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

Author of the valley of silent men, the flaming forest, etc.

A glass of wine once lost a kingdom, a nail turned the tide of a mighty battle, and a woman’s smile once upon a time destroyed the homes of a million people.  Thus have trivial things played their potent parts in the history of human lives; yet these things Peter did not know.

THE COUNTRY BEYOND

CHAPTER I

Not far from the rugged and storm-whipped north shore of Lake Superior, and south of the Kaministiqua, yet not as far south as the Rainy River waterway, there lay a paradise lost in the heart of a wilderness world—­and in that paradise “a little corner of hell.”

That was what the girl had called it once upon a time, when sobbing out the shame and the agony of it to herself.  That was before Peter had come to leaven the drab of her life.  But the hell was still there.

One would not have guessed its existence, standing at the bald top of Cragg’s Ridge this wonderful thirtieth day of May.  In the whiteness of winter one could look off over a hundred square miles of freezing forest and swamp and river country, with the gleam of ice-covered lakes here and there, fringed by their black spruce and cedar and balsam—­a country of storm, of deep snows, and men and women whose blood ran red with the thrill that the hardship and the never-ending adventure of the wild.

But this was spring.  And such a spring as had not come to the Canadian north country in many years.  Until three days ago there had been a deluge of warm rains, and since then the sun had inundated the land with the golden warmth of summer.  The last chill was gone from the air, and the last bit of frozen earth and muck from the deepest and blackest swamps, North, south, east and west the wilderness world was a glory of bursting life, of springtime mellowing into summer.  Ridge upon ridge of yellows and greens and blacks swept away into the unknown distances like the billows of a vast sea; and between them lay the valleys and swamps, the lakes and waterways, glad with the rippling song of running waters, the sweet scents of early flowering time, and the joyous voice of all mating creatures.