Days added themselves into weeks, until at last they were in the country of the Reindeer waterways.

To the east was Hudson’s Bay; westward lay the black forests and twisting waterways of Upper Saskatchewan; and north—­always north —­beckoned the lonely plains and unmapped wildernesses of the Athabasca, the Slave and the Great Bear—­toward which far country their trail was slowly but surely wending its way.

The woodlands and swamps were now empty of man.  Cabin and shack and Indian tepee were lifeless, and waited in the desolation of abandonment.  No smoke rose in the tree-tops; no howl of dog came with the early dawn and the setting sun; trap lines were over-growing, and laughter and song and the ring of the trapper’s axe were gone, leaving behind a brooding silence that seemed to pulse and thrill like a great heart—­the heart of the wild unchained for a space from its human bondage.

It was the vacation time—­the midsummer carnival weeks of the wilderness people.  Wild things were breeding.  Fur was not good.  Flesh was unfit to kill.  And so they had disappeared, man, woman and child, and their dogs as well, to foregather at the Hudson’s Bay Company’s posts scattered here and there in the fastnesses of the wilderness lands.  A few weeks more and they would return.  Cabins would send up their smoke again.  Brown-faced children would play about the tepee door.  Ten thousand dwellers of the forests, white and half-breed and Indian born, would trickle in twos and threes and family groups back into the age-old trade of a domain that reached from Hudson’s Bay to the western mountains and from the Height of Land to the Arctic Sea.

Until then nature was free, and in its freedom ran in riotous silence over the land.  These were days when the wolf lay with her young, but did not howl; when the lynx yawned sleepily, and hunted but little—­days of breeding, nights of drowsy whisperings, and of big red moons, and of streams rippling softly at lowest ebb while they dreamed of rains and flood-time.  And through it all—­through the lazy drone of insects, the rustling sighs of the tree-tops and the subdued notes of living things ran a low and tremulous whispering, as if nature had found for itself a new language in this temporary absence of man.

To Jolly Roger this was Life, It breathed for him out of the cool earth.  He heard it over him, and under him, and on all sides of him where other ears would have found only a thing vast and oppressive and silent.  On what he called these “motherhood days of the earth” the passing years had built his faith and his creed.