billows of a vast sea; and between them lay the valleys and
swamps, the lakes and waterways, glad with the rippling song of
running waters, the sweet scents of early flowering time, and the
joyous voice of all mating creatures.

Just under Cragg's Ridge lay the paradise, a meadow-like sweep of
plain that reached down to the edge of Clearwater Lake, with
clumps of poplars and white birch and darker tapestries of spruce
and balsams dotting it like islets in a sea of verdant green. The
flowers were two weeks ahead of their time and the sweet perfumes
of late June, instead of May, rose up out of the plain, and
already there was nesting in the velvety splashes of timber.

In the edge of a clump of this timber, flat on his belly, lay
Peter. The love of adventure was in him, and today he had sallied
forth on his most desperate enterprise. For the first time he had
gone alone to the edge of Clearwater Lake, half a mile away;
boldly he had trotted up and down the white strip of beach where
the girl's footprints still remained in the sand, and defiantly he
had yipped at the shimmering vastness of the water, and at the
white gulls circling near him in quest of dead fish flung ashore.
Peter was three months old. Yesterday he had been a timid pup,
shrinking from the bigness and strangeness of everything about
him; but today he had braved the lake trail on his own nerve, and
nothing had dared to come near him in spite of his yipping, so
that a great courage and a great desire were born in him.

Therefore, in returning, he had paused in the edge of a great
clump of balsams and spruce, and lay flat on his belly, his sharp
little eyes leveled yearningly at the black mystery of its deeper