suddenly, that a dark and purposeless world had slipped behind him.  It was gone.  It was as if he had come out of a dark and gloomy cavern, in which the air had been vitiated and in which he had been cramped for breath—­a cavern which fluttered with the uneasy ghosts of things, poisonous things.  Here was the sun.  A sky blue as sapphire.  A great expanse.  A wonder-world.  Into this he had escaped!

That was the thought in his mind as he looked at Father Roland.  The Little Missioner was looking at him with an effulgent satisfaction in his face, a satisfaction that was half pride, as though he had achieved something that was to his own personal glory.

“You’ve beat me, David,” he exulted.  “The first time I had snow shoes on I didn’t make one half that distance before I was tangled up like a fish in a net!” He turned to Mukoki. “Mey-oo iss e chikao!” he cried.  “Remember?” and the Indian nodded, his leathery face breaking into a grin.

David felt a new pleasure at their approbation.  He had evidently done well, exceedingly well.  And he had been afraid of himself!  Apprehension gave way to confidence.  He was beginning to experience the exquisite thrill of fighting against odds.

He made no objection this time when Father Roland made a place for him on the sledge.

“We’ll have four miles of this lake,” the Missioner explained to him, “and the dogs will make it in an hour.  Mukoki and I will both break trail.”

As they set off David found his first opportunity to see the real Northland in action—­the clean, sinuous movement of the men ahead of him, the splendid eagerness with which the long, wolfish line of beasts stretched forth in their traces and followed in the snow-shoe trail.  There was something imposing about it all, something that struck deep within him and roused strange thoughts.  This that he saw was not the mere labour of man and beast; it was not the humdrum toil of life, not the daily slaving of living creatures for existence—­for food, and drink, and a sleeping place.  It had risen above that.  He had seen ships and castles rise up from heaps of steel and stone; achievements of science and the handiwork of genius had interested and sometimes amazed him, but never had he looked upon physical effort that thrilled him as did this that he was looking upon now.  There was almost the spirit of the epic about it.  They were the survival of the fittest—­these men and dogs.  They had gone through the great test of life in the raw, as the pyramids and the sphinx had outlived the ordeals of the centuries; they were different; they were proven; they were of another kind of flesh and blood than he had known—­and they fascinated him.  They stood for more than romance and adventure, for more than tragedy or possible joy; they were making no fight for riches—­no fight for power, or fame, or great personal achievement.  Their struggle in this great, white world—­terrible in its emptiness, its vastness, and its mercilessness for the weak—­was simply a struggle that they might live.