itself, the true nature of the situation stole upon him with an effect
of delight and awe that his imagination was fully capable of
appreciating. It was himself and Défago against a multitude--at least,
against a Titan!

The bleak splendors of these remote and lonely forests rather
overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern quality
of the tangled backwoods which can only be described as merciless and
terrible, rose out of these far blue woods swimming upon the horizon,
and revealed itself. He understood the silent warning. He realized his
own utter helplessness. Only Défago, as a symbol of a distant
civilization where man was master, stood between him and a pitiless
death by exhaustion and starvation.

It was thrilling to him, therefore, to watch Défago turn over the canoe
upon the shore, pack the paddles carefully underneath, and then proceed
to "blaze" the spruce stems for some distance on either side of an
almost invisible trail, with the careless remark thrown in, "Say,
Simpson, if anything happens to me, you'll find the canoe all correc' by
these marks;--then strike doo west into the sun to hit the home camp
agin, see?"

It was the most natural thing in the world to say, and he said it
without any noticeable inflexion of the voice, only it happened to
express the youth's emotions at the moment with an utterance that was
symbolic of the situation and of his own helplessness as a factor in it.
He was alone with Défago in a primitive world: that was all. The canoe,
another symbol of man's ascendancy, was now to be left behind. Those
small yellow patches, made on the trees by the axe, were the only
indications of its hiding place.