The four days that followed broke the last link in the chain that held David Raine to the life from which he was fleeing when the forest Missioner met him in the Transcontinental.  They were four wonderful days, in which they travelled steadily northward; days of splendid sunshine, of intense cold, of brilliant stars and a full moon at night.  The first of these four days David travelled fifteen miles on his snow shoes, and that night he slept in a balsam shelter close to the face of a great rock which they heated with a fire of logs, so that all through the cold hours between darkness and gray dawn the boulder was like a huge warming-stone.  The second day marked also the second great stride in his education in the life of the wild.  Fang and hoof and padded claw were at large again in the forests after the blizzard, and Father Roland stopped at each broken path that crossed the trail, pointing out to him the stories that were written in the snow.  He showed him where a fox had followed silently after a snow-shoe rabbit; where a band of wolves had ploughed through the snow in the trail of a deer that was doomed, and in a dense run of timber where both moose and caribou had sought refuge from the storm he explained carefully the slight difference between the hoofprints of the two.  That night Baree came into camp while they were sleeping, and in the morning they found where he had burrowed his round bed in the snow not a dozen yards from their shelter.  The third morning David shot his moose.  And that night he lured Baree almost to the side of their campfire, and tossed him chunks of raw flesh from where he sat smoking his pipe.

He was changed.  Three days on the trail and three nights in camp under the stars had begun their promised miracle-working.  His face was darkened by a stubble of beard, his ears and cheek bones were reddened by exposure to cold and wind; he felt that in those three days and nights his muscles had hardened, and his weakness had left him.  “It was in your mind—­your sickness,” Father Roland had told him, and he believed it now.  He began to find a pleasure in that physical achievement which he had wondered at in Mukoki and the Missioner.  Each noon when they stopped to boil their tea and cook their dinner, and each night when they made camp, he had chopped down a tree.  To-night it had been an 8-inch jack pine, tough with pitch.  The exertion had sent his blood pounding through him furiously.  He was still breathing deeply as he sat near the fire, tossing bits of meat out to Baree.  They were sixty miles from Thoreau’s cabin, straight north, and for the twentieth time Father Roland was telling him how well he had done.

“And to-morrow,” he added, “we’ll reach Tavish’s.”