The beauty of the scene was strangely uplifting.  Simpson smoked the fish and burnt his fingers into the bargain in his efforts to enjoy it and at the same time tend the frying pan and the fire.  Yet, ever at the back of his thoughts, lay that other aspect of the wilderness:  the indifference to human life, the merciless spirit of desolation which took no note of man.  The sense of his utter loneliness, now that even Defago had gone, came close as he looked about him and listened for the sound of his companion’s returning footsteps.

There was pleasure in the sensation, yet with it a perfectly comprehensible alarm.  And instinctively the thought stirred in him:  “What should I—­could I, do—­if anything happened and he did not come back—?”

They enjoyed their well-earned supper, eating untold quantities of fish, and drinking unmilked tea strong enough to kill men who had not covered thirty miles of hard “going,” eating little on the way.  And when it was over, they smoked and told stories round the blazing fire, laughing, stretching weary limbs, and discussing plans for the morrow.  Defago was in excellent spirits, though disappointed at having no signs of moose to report.  But it was dark and he had not gone far.  The brule, too, was bad.  His clothes and hands were smeared with charcoal.  Simpson, watching him, realized with renewed vividness their position—­alone together in the wilderness.

“Defago,” he said presently, “these woods, you know, are a bit too big to feel quite at home in—­to feel comfortable in, I mean!...  Eh?” He merely gave expression to the mood of the moment; he was hardly prepared for the earnestness, the solemnity even, with which the guide took him up.

“You’ve hit it right, Simpson, boss,” he replied, fixing his searching brown eyes on his face, “and that’s the truth, sure.  There’s no end to ’em—­no end at all.”  Then he added in a lowered tone as if to himself, “There’s lots found out that, and gone plumb to pieces!”

But the man’s gravity of manner was not quite to the other’s liking; it was a little too suggestive for this scenery and setting; he was sorry he had broached the subject.  He remembered suddenly how his uncle had told him that men were sometimes stricken with a strange fever of the wilderness, when the seduction of the uninhabited wastes caught them so fiercely that they went forth, half fascinated, half deluded, to their death.  And he had a shrewd idea that his companion held something in sympathy with that queer type.  He led the conversation on to other topics, on to Hank and the doctor, for instance, and the natural rivalry as to who should get the first sight of moose.