“Do you remember when you shot the Athabaska Rapids?” Ezram had asked.  It was all clear enough.  In that life that was forgotten he had evidently lived much in a canoe, knowing every detail of river life.  Perhaps he had been a master canoeist; at least he felt a strange, surging sense of self-confidence and power.  He understood, now, why the image of rushing waters had come so often into his dreams.  Dim pictures of river scenes—­cataracts white with foam, rapids with thunderous voices, perilous eddies, and then, just beyond, glassy waters where the shadow of the canoe was unbroken in the blue depths—­streamed through his mind, but they were not yet bright enough for him to seize and hold.

He enjoyed the first few hours of paddling, but in the long, warm afternoon came indolence, and they were both willing to glide with the current and watch the ever-changing vista of the shore.  For the first time since they had come into the real North, Ben found opportunity to observe and study the country.

Already they were out of sight of the last vestige of a habitation; and the evergreen forests pushed down to the water’s edge.  From the middle of the stream the woods appeared only as a dark wall, but this was immeasurably fascinating to Ben.  It suggested mystery, adventure; yet its deeper appeal, the thing that stirred him and thrilled him to the quick, he could neither understand nor analyze.

Sometimes a little clump of trees stood apart, and from their shape he identified them as the incomparable spruce, perhaps the most distinguished and beautiful of all the evergreens.  He marked their great height, their slender forms, their dark foliage that ever seemed to be silvered with frost; and they seemed to him to answer, to the fullest extent, some vague expectation of which he had scarcely been aware.

The wild life of the river filled him with speechless delight.  Sometimes he saw the waters break and gleam at the leap of a mighty salmon—­the king fish of the North on his spring rush to the headwaters where he would spawn and die—­and often the canoe sent flocks of waterfowl into flight.  Ben dimly felt that on the tree-clad shores larger, more glorious living creatures were standing, hiding, watching the canoe glide past.  The thought thrilled him.

Late afternoon, and they worked closer to the shore.  They were watching for a place to land.  But because the shadows of twilight were already falling, the forest itself was hardly more vivid to their eyes.  Once it seemed to Ben that he saw the underbrush move and waver at the water’s edge, and his heart leaped; but whatever stirred kept itself concealed.  And now, in the gray of twilight, Ezram saw the place to land.

It was a small lagoon into which a creek emptied, and beyond was an open meadow, found so often and so unexpectedly in the North woods.  Swiftly Ben turned the canoe into shore.