Father Roland and Mukoki were up, and a fire was
crackling in the stove.
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.
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