follows northern famine, and a shiver ran through him.  He made the Indian’s balsam shelter snow and wind proof, cut wood, and waited.  The temperature fell again, and the cold became intense.  Each day the provisions grew less, and at last the time came when Roscoe knew that he was standing face to face with the Great Peril.  He went farther and farther from camp in his search for game.  But there was no life.  Even the brush sparrows and snow hawks were gone.  Once the thought came to him that he might take what food was left, and accept the little chance that remained of saving himself.  But the idea never got further than a first thought.  He kept to his post, and each day spent half an hour in writing.  On the twelfth day the Indian died.  It was a terrible day, the beginning of the second great storm of that winter.  There was food for another twenty-four hours, and Roscoe packed it, together with his blankets and a little tinware.  He wondered if the Indian had died of a contagious disease.  Anyway, he made up his mind to put out the warning for others if they came that way, and over the dead Indian’s balsam shelter he planted a sapling, and at the end of the sapling he fastened a strip of red cotton cloth—­the plague-signal of the North.

Then he struck out through the deep snows and the twisting storm, knowing that there was no more than one chance in a thousand ahead of him, and that his one chance was to keep the wind at his back.

* * * * *

This was the beginning of the wonderful experience which Roscoe Cummins afterward described in his book “The First People and the Valley of Silent Men.”  He prepared another manuscript which for personal reasons was never published, the story of a dark-eyed girl of the First People—­but this is to come.  It has to do with the last tragic weeks of this winter of 1907, in which it was a toss-up between all things of flesh and blood in the Northland to see which would win—­life or death—­and in which a pair of dark eyes and a voice from the First People turned a sociologist into a possible Member of Parliament.

* * * * *

At the end of his first day’s struggle Roscoe built himself a camp in a bit of scrub timber, which was not much more than brush.  If he had been an older hand he would have observed that this bit of timber, and every tree and bush that he had passed since noon, was stripped and dead on the side that faced the north.  It was a sign of the Great Barrens, and of the fierce storms that swept over them, destroying even the life of the trees.  He cooked and ate his last food the following day, and went on.  The small timber turned to scrub, and the scrub, in time, to vast snow wastes over which the storm swept mercilessly.  All this day he looked for game, for a flutter of bird life; he chewed bark, and in the afternoon got a mouthful of Fox-bite, which made his throat swell until he could scarcely breathe.