THE CALL OF THE NORTH




Chapter One

The girl stood on a bank above a river flowing north. At her back
crouched a dozen clean whitewashed buildings. Before her in
interminable journey, day after day, league on league into
remoteness, stretched the stern Northern wilderness, untrodden save
by the trappers, the Indians, and the beasts. Close about the
little settlement crept the balsams and spruce, the birch and
poplar, behind which lurked vast dreary muskegs, a chaos of
bowlder-splits, the forest. The girl had known nothing different
for many years. Once a summer the sailing ship from England felt
its frozen way through the Hudson Straits, down the Hudson Bay, to
drop anchor in the mighty River of the Moose. Once a summer a
six-fathom canoe manned by a dozen paddles struggled down the
waters of the broken Abitibi. Once a year a little band of
red-sashed _voyageurs_ forced their exhausted sledge-dogs across
the ice from some unseen wilderness trail. That was all.

Before her eyes the seasons changed, all grim, but one by the very
pathos of brevity sad. In the brief luxuriant summer came the
Indians to trade their pelts, came the keepers of the winter posts
to rest, came the ship from England bringing the articles of use or