Day after day they made their way westward.  It was tremendous, this journey over the backbone of the mountains.  It gave one a different conception of men.  They like ants on these mountains, David thought—­insignificant, crawling ants.  Here was where one might find a soul and a religion if he had never had one before.  One’s littleness, at times, was almost frightening.  It made one think, impressed upon one that life was not much more than an accident in this vast scale of creation, and that there was great necessity for a God.  In Kio’s eyes, as he sometimes looked down into the valleys, there was this thing; the thought which perhaps he couldn’t analyze, the great truth which he couldn’t understand, but felt.  It made a worshipper of him—­a devout worshipper of the totem.  And it occurred to David that perhaps the spirit of God was in that totem even as much as in finger-worn rosaries and the ivory crosses on women’s breasts.

Early on the eleventh day they came to the confluence of the Pitman and the Stikine rivers, and a little later Kio turned back on his homeward journey, and David and Baree were alone.  This aloneness fell upon them like a thing that had a pulse and was alive.  They crossed the Divide and were in a great sunlit country of amazing beauty and grandeur, with wide valleys between the mountains.  It was July.  From up and down the valley, from the breaks between the peaks and from the little gullies cleft in shale and rock that crept up to the snow lines, came a soft and droning murmur.  It was the music of running water.  That music was always in the air, for the rivers, the creeks, and the tiny streams, gushing down from the snow that lay eternally up near the clouds, were never still.  There were sweet perfumes as well as music in the air.  The earth was bursting with green; the early flowers were turning the sunny slopes into coloured splashes of red and white and purple—­splashes of violets and forget-me-nots, of wild asters and hyacinths.  David looked upon it all, and his soul drank in its wonders.  He made his camp, and he remained in it all that day, and the next.  He was eager to go on, and yet in his eagerness he hesitated, and waited.  It seemed to him that he must become acquainted with this empty world before venturing farther into it—­alone; that it was necessary for him to understand it a little, and get his bearings.  He could not lose himself.  Jacques had assured him of that, and Kio had pantomimed it, pointing many times at the broad, shallow stream that ran ahead of him.  All he had to do was to follow the river.  In time, many weeks, of course, it would bring him to the white settlement on the ocean.  Long before that he would strike Firepan Creek.  Kio had never been so far; he had never been farther than this junction of the two streams, Towaskook had informed Jacques.  So it was not fear that held David.  It was the aloneness.  He was taking a long mental breath.  And, meanwhile, he was repairing his boots, and doctoring Baree’s feet, bruised and sore by their travel over the shale of the mountain tops.