was a thing beckoning to him, a sentient, living wall beyond which was
his other world. The eight hundred miles meant less to him than the
space between himself and that growing, black rim on the horizon.

He reached it as the twilight of the day was dissolving into the deeper
dusk of the night, and put up his tent in the shelter of a clump of
gnarled and storm-beaten spruce. Then he gathered wood and built
himself a fire. He did not count the sticks as he had counted them for
eighteen months. He was wasteful, prodigal. He had traveled forty miles
since morning but he felt no exhaustion. He gathered wood until he had
a great pile of it, and the flames of his fire leaped higher and higher
until the spruce needles crackled and hissed over his head. He boiled a
pot of weak tea and made a supper of caribou meat and a bit of bannock.
Then he sat with his back to a tree and stared into the flames.

The fire leaping and crackling before his eyes was like a powerful
medicine. It stirred things that had lain dormant within him. It
consumed the heavy dross of four years of stupefying torture and
brought back to him vividly the happenings of a yesterday that had
dragged itself on like a century. All at once he seemed unburdened of
shackles that had weighted him down to the point of madness. Every
fiber in his body responded to that glorious roar of the fire; a thing
seemed to snap in his head, freeing it of an oppressive bondage, and in
the heart of the flames he saw home, and hope, and life--the things
familiar and precious long ago, which the scourge of the north had
almost beaten dead in his memory. He saw the broad Saskatchewan
shimmering its way through the yellow plains, banked in by the
foothills and the golden mists of morning dawn; he saw his home town
clinging to its shore on one side and with its back against the purple
wilderness on the other; he heard the rhythmic chug, chug, chug of the