For two weeks an early spring had been working its miracle of
change in that wonderful country of the northland between
Jackson's Knee and the Shamattawa River, and from north to south
between God's Lake and the Churchill.

It was a splendid world. From the tall pinnacle of rock on which
they stood it looked like a great sea of sunlight, with only here
and there patches of white snow where the winter winds had piled
it deep. Their ridge rose up out of a great valley. On all sides
of them, as far as a man's eye could have reached, there were blue
and black patches of forest, the shimmer of lakes still partly
frozen, the sunlit sparkle of rivulet and stream, and the greening
open spaces out of which rose the perfumes of the earth. These
smells drifted up like tonic and food to the nostrils of Noozak
the big bear. Down there the earth was already swelling with life.
The buds on the poplars were growing fat and near the bursting
point; the grasses were sending out shoots tender and sweet; the
camas were filling with juice; the shooting stars, the dog-tooth
violets, and the spring beauties were thrusting themselves up into
the warm glow of the sun, inviting Noozak and Neewa to the feast.
All these things Noozak smelled with the experience and the
knowledge of twenty years of life behind her--the delicious aroma
of the spruce and the jackpine; the dank, sweet scent of water-
lily roots and swelling bulbs that came from a thawed-out fen at
the foot of the ridge; and over all these things, overwhelming
their individual sweetnesses in a still greater thrill of life,
the smell of the heart itself!

And Neewa smelled them. His amazed little body trembled and