From Shelton, Alan and his companion visited the eighty or ninety people at Candle, and thence continued down the Keewalik River to Keewalik, on Kotzebue Sound.  A Lomen power-boat, run by Lapps, carried them to Choris Peninsula, where for a week Alan remained with Lomen and his huge herd of fifteen thousand reindeer.  He was eager to go on, but tried to hide his impatience.  Something was urging him, whipping him on to greater haste.  For the first time in months he heard the crackling thunder of reindeer hoofs, and the music of it was like a wild call from his own herds hurrying him home.  He was glad when the week-end came and his business was done.  The power-boat took him to Kotzebue.  It was night, as his watch went, when Paul Davidovich started up the delta of the Kobuk River with him in a lighterage company’s boat.  But there was no darkness.  In the afternoon of the fourth day they came to the Redstone, two hundred miles above the mouth of the Kobuk as the river winds.  They had supper together on the shore.  After that Paul Davidovich turned back with the slow sweep of the current, waving his hand until he was out of sight.

Not until the sound of the Russian’s motor-boat was lost in distance did Alan sense fully the immensity of the freedom that swept upon him.  At last, after months that had seemed like so many years, he was alone.  North and eastward stretched the unmarked trail which he knew so well, a hundred and fifty miles straight as a bird might fly, almost unmapped, unpeopled, right up to the doors of his range in the slopes of the Endicott Mountains.  A little cry from his own lips gave him a start.  It was as if he had called out aloud to Tautuk and Amuk Toolik, and to Keok and Nawadlook, telling them he was on his way home and would soon be there.  Never had this hidden land which he had found for himself seemed so desirable as it did in this hour.  There was something about it that was all-mothering, all-good, all-sweetly-comforting to that other thing which had become a part of him now.  It was holding out its arms to him, understanding, welcoming, inspiring him to travel strongly and swiftly the space between.  And he was ready to answer its call.

He looked at his watch.  It was five o’clock in the afternoon.  He had spent a long day with the Russian, but he felt no desire for rest or sleep.  The musk-tang of the tundras, coming to him through the thin timber of the river-courses, worked like an intoxicant in his blood.  It was the tundra he wanted, before he lay down upon his back with his face to the stars.  He was eager to get away from timber and to feel the immeasurable space of the big country, the open country, about him.  What fool had given to it the name of Barren Lands?  What idiots people were to lie about it in that way on the maps!  He strapped his pack over his shoulders and seized his rifle.  Barren Lands!