In the morning the camp was astir before the sun.  There had been a light fall of snow during the night and the air was sharp.  Punk had done his duty betimes, for the odors of coffee and fried bacon reached every tent.  All were in good spirits.

“Wind’s shifted!” cried Hank vigorously, watching Simpson and his guide already loading the small canoe.  “It’s across the lake—­dead right for you fellers.  And the snow’ll make bully trails!  If there’s any moose mussing around up thar, they’ll not get so much as a tail-end scent of you with the wind as it is.  Good luck, Monsieur Defago!” he added, facetiously giving the name its French pronunciation for once, “bonne chance!”

Defago returned the good wishes, apparently in the best of spirits, the silent mood gone.  Before eight o’clock old Punk had the camp to himself, Cathcart and Hank were far along the trail that led westwards, while the canoe that carried Defago and Simpson, with silk tent and grub for two days, was already a dark speck bobbing on the bosom of the lake, going due east.

The wintry sharpness of the air was tempered now by a sun that topped the wooded ridges and blazed with a luxurious warmth upon the world of lake and forest below; loons flew skimming through the sparkling spray that the wind lifted; divers shook their dripping heads to the sun and popped smartly out of sight again; and as far as eye could reach rose the leagues of endless, crowding Bush, desolate in its lonely sweep and grandeur, untrodden by foot of man, and stretching its mighty and unbroken carpet right up to the frozen shores of Hudson Bay.

Simpson, who saw it all for the first time as he paddled hard in the bows of the dancing canoe, was enchanted by its austere beauty.  His heart drank in the sense of freedom and great spaces just as his lungs drank in the cool and perfumed wind.  Behind him in the stern seat, singing fragments of his native chanties, Defago steered the craft of birch bark like a thing of life, answering cheerfully all his companion’s questions.  Both were gay and light-hearted.  On such occasions men lose the superficial, worldly distinctions; they become human beings working together for a common end.  Simpson, the employer, and Defago the employed, among these primitive forces, were simply—­two men, the “guider” and the “guided.”  Superior knowledge, of course, assumed control, and the younger man fell without a second thought into the quasi-subordinate position.  He never dreamed of objecting when Defago dropped the “Mr.,” and addressed him as “Say, Simpson,” or “Simpson, boss,” which was invariably the case before they reached the farther shore after a stiff paddle of twelve miles against a head wind.  He only laughed, and liked it; then ceased to notice it at all.

For this “divinity student” was a young man of parts and character, though as yet, of course, untraveled; and on this trip—­the first time he had seen any country but his own and little Switzerland—­the huge scale of things somewhat bewildered him.  It was one thing, he realized, to hear about primeval forests, but quite another to see them.  While to dwell in them and seek acquaintance with their wild life was, again, an initiation that no intelligent man could undergo without a certain shifting of personal values hitherto held for permanent and sacred.