the forest and the lake. Not until he was a mile away from the
camp did he stop. Then something happened to betray the uneasy
tension to which his nerves were drawn. A sudden crash in the
brush close at hand drew him about with a start, and even while he
laughed at himself he stood with his automatic in his hand.

He heard the whimpering, babyish-like complaint of the porcupine
that had made the sound, and still chuckling over his nervousness
he seated himself on a white drift-log that had lain bleaching for
half a century in the sand.

The moon had fallen behind the western forests; the stars were
becoming fainter in the sky, and about him the darkness was
drawing in like a curtain. He loved this hour that bridged the
northern night with the northern day, and he sat motionless and
still, covering the glow of fire in his pipe bowl with the palm of
his hand.

Out of the brush ambled the porcupine, chattering and talking to
itself in its queer and good-humoured way, fat as a poplar bud
ready to burst, and so intent on reaching the edge of the lake
that it passed in its stupid innocence so close that Philip might
have struck it with a stick. And then there swooped down from out
of the cover of the black spruce a gray cloudlike thing that came
with the silence and lightness of a huge snowflake, hovered for an
instant over the porcupine, and disappeared into the darkness
beyond. And the porcupine, still oblivious of danger and what the
huge owl would have done to him had he been a snowshoe rabbit
instead of a monster of quills, drank his fill leisurely and
ambled back as he had come, chattering his little song of good-