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Rh than that by which he had hoped to bake his bread. Then, exhausted, he went down the hill, climbed into his canoe, and took up the paddle again.

"Makes a man wish he was a bloomin' caribou," he said. "They can get their fill off of moss—moss, an' like it."

Once, through a grey evening on the Thelon, they came on a musk-ox, lying like a great earth-clod on the flank of a naked hill. He raced across it when their shouts woke him, and the long hair that swept the ground waved and fluttered round him like rags shaken in the wind. He was the one piece of life they had seen that day, and the barren stretches seemed more desolate without him.

And then, slow and slow, came promise of life again. Grass blowing thick along the foreshores; heavy timber skirting the banks; sea-gulls and musk-ox; brown bears sauntering under the sunset; wolverine and foxes crying in the night. On a portage Dick kicked up a carved bone of Exquimaux workmanship. He thrust it into his tunic and trudged on with a new light shining in his eyes. Before long, before very long, he would know if the stamping-grounds of these eastern Esquimaux sheltered Ducane.

It was a year and two months since Ducane had disappeared; and as he had not been found among the peopled roadways of the land, it followed that he must have fled to the waste places. And as the places where a white man can find means of existence are rather clearly defined in Canada, Dick knew that he must be along the river trail if he had gone east. He could not leave the country undetected by any of the northern ways, and Dick did not believe that he would dare to face the congested places of the south. He knew too many men, and would be known by too many. And never for one instant did Dick think him dead. He felt instinctively that he would have known if it had been so. And he felt, almost as instinctively, that it would be for him to find Ducane and carry him back to that justice which he had baffled so long. He owed it to Jennifer; he owed it to himself; he owed it to the work which was beginning to mean more to him than ever before.

Already winter was chasing them with sounding feet; flinging white frost to greet them when they turned out