Hunter?  Trapper?  Prospector?  He shrugged his shoulders No; just sort of knocking round a bit.  Had come up from the Great Slave some time since, and was thinking of trapsing over into the Yukon country.  The factor of Koshim had spoken about the discoveries on the Klondike, and he was of a mind to run over for a peep.  I noticed that he spoke of the Klondike in the archaic vernacular, calling it the Reindeer River—­a conceited custom that the Old Timers employ against the che-chaquas and all tenderfeet in general.  But he did it so naively and as such a matter of course, that there was no sting, and I forgave him.  He also had it in view, he said, before he crossed the divide into the Yukon, to make a little run up Fort o’ Good Hope way.

Now Fort o’ Good Hope is a far journey to the north, over and beyond the Circle, in a place where the feet of few men have trod; and when a nondescript ragamuffin comes in out of the night, from nowhere in particular, to sit by one’s fire and discourse on such in terms of “trapsing” and “a little run,” it is fair time to rouse up and shake off the dream.  Wherefore I looked about me; saw the fly and, underneath, the pine boughs spread for the sleeping furs; saw the grub sacks, the camera, the frosty breaths of the dogs circling on the edge of the light; and, above, a great streamer of the aurora, bridging the zenith from south-east to north-west.  I shivered.  There is a magic in the Northland night, that steals in on one like fevers from malarial marshes.  You are clutched and downed before you are aware.  Then I looked to the snowshoes, lying prone and crossed where he had flung them.  Also I had an eye to my tobacco pouch.  Half, at least, of its goodly store had vamosed.  That settled it.  Fancy had not tricked me after all.

Crazed with suffering, I thought, looking steadfastly at the man—­one of those wild stampeders, strayed far from his bearings and wandering like a lost soul through great vastnesses and unknown deeps.  Oh, well, let his moods slip on, until, mayhap, he gathers his tangled wits together.  Who knows?—­the mere sound of a fellow-creature’s voice may bring all straight again.

So I led him on in talk, and soon I marvelled, for he talked of game and the ways thereof.  He had killed the Siberian wolf of westernmost Alaska, and the chamois in the secret Rockies.  He averred he knew the haunts where the last buffalo still roamed; that he had hung on the flanks of the caribou when they ran by the hundred thousand, and slept in the Great Barrens on the musk-ox’s winter trail.