He thought that he had experienced the depths of loneliness after leaving the Missioner.  But here it was a much larger thing.  This night, as he sat under the stars and a great white moon, with Baree at his feet, it engulfed him; not in a depressing way, but awesomely.  It was not an unpleasant loneliness, and yet he felt that it had no limit, that it was immeasurable.  It was as vast as the mountains that shut him in.  Somewhere, miles to the east of him now, was Kio.  That was all.  He knew that he would never be able to describe it, this loneliness—­or aloneness; one man, and a dog, with a world to themselves.  After a time, as he looked up at the stars and listened to the droning sound of the waters in the valley, it began to thrill him with a new kind of intelligence.  Here was peace as vast as space itself.  It was not troubled by the struggling existence of men, and women, and it seemed to him that he must remain very still under the watchfulness of those billions of sentinels in the sky, with the white moon floating under them.  The second night he made himself and Baree a small fire.  The third morning he shouldered his pack and went on.

Baree kept close at his master’s side, and the eyes of the two were constantly on the alert.  They were in a splendid game country, and David watched for the first opportunity that would give Baree and himself fresh meat.  The white sand bars and gravelly shores of the stream were covered with the tracks of the wild dwellers of the valley and the adjoining ranges, and Baree sniffed hungrily whenever he came to the warm scent of the last night’s spoor.  He was hungry.  He had been hungry all the way over the mountains.  Three times that day David saw a caribou at a distance.  In the afternoon he saw a grizzly on a green slope.  Toward evening he ran into luck.  A band of sheep had come down from a mountain to drink, and he came upon them suddenly, the wind in his favour.  He killed a young ram.  For a full minute after firing the shot he stood in his tracks, scarcely breathing.  The report of his rifle was like an explosion.  It leaped from mountain to mountain, echoing, deepening, coming back to him in murmuring intonations, and dying out at last in a sighing gasp.  It was a weird and disturbing sound.  He fancied that it could be heard many miles away.  That night the two feasted on fresh meat.

It was their fifth day in the valley when they came to a break in the western wall of the range, and through this break flowed a stream that was very much like the Stikine, broad and shallow and ribboned with shifting bars of sand.  David made up his mind that it must be the Firepan, and he could feel his pulse quicken as he started up it with Baree.  He must be quite near to Tavish’s cabin, if it had not been destroyed.  Even if it had been burned on account of the plague that had infested it, he would surely discover the charred ruins of it.  It was three o’clock when he started up the creek, and he was—­inwardly—­much