The prospect for game had not improved, in fact was growing steadily
worse. We were now in a country that had been desolated by a forest
fire within four or five years. The moss under foot had not renewed
itself and where any of it remained at all, it was charred and black.
The trees were dead and the land harbored almost no life. It seemed
to me that even the fish had been scalded out of the water and the
streams had never restocked themselves.

A thorough search was made for Indian signs, but there were absolutely
none. There was nothing to show that any human being had ever been
here before us. Back on Lake Bibiquasin we had lost the trail and now
on Lake Desolation we were far and hopelessly astray, with only the
compass to guide us.

After supper the men sat around the camp fire, smoking and talking of
their friends at home, while I walked alone by the lake shore. It was
a wild scene that lay before me--the aurora, with its waves of
changing color flashing weirdly as they swept and lighted the sky, the
dead trees everywhere like skeletons gray and gaunt, the blazing camp
fire in the foreground, with the figures lying about it and the little
white tent in the background. Somewhere hidden in the depths of that
vast and silent wilderness to the westward lay Michikamau.

There was no mark on the face of the earth to direct us on our road.
We must blaze a new trail up that valley and over those ridges that
looked so dark and forbidding in the uncertain light of the aurora.
We must find Michikamau.