This was his own North!  The stir and vigor in the very air told him that.  This was the land he had dreamed of, under the moon; the primeval forests that had tried him, tested him, staked their cruel might against him, but yet had blessed him with their infinite beneficence and hospitality.  It was ever somber, yet its dusky beauty stirred him more than any richness he had seen in bright cities.  He knew its every mood:  ecstasy in spring; gentleness in summer; brooding melancholy in the gray days of fall; remorseless, savage, but unspeakably beautiful in the winter.  He felt his old pity for the spring flowers, blossoming so hopefully in this gentle season.  How soon they would be covered with many feet of snow!

“It’s all come clear again,” he told Ezram.  And the two men talked over, quietly and happily, old days at Thunder Lake.  He remembered now that Ezram had always been the most intimate friend of his own family:  a spry old godfather to himself and young sister, a boon companion to his once successful rival, Ben’s father.  Ben did not wonder, now, at his own perplexity when Forest had spoken of “Wolf” Darby.  That was his own name known throughout hundreds of square miles of forest and in dozens of little river hamlets in an Eastern province.  Partly the name was in token of his skill as a woodsman and frontiersman, partly in recognition of certain traits that his fellow woodsmen had seen and wondered at in him.  It was not an empty nickname, in his case.  It was simply that the name suited him.

“The boys had reason a-plenty for callin’ you that,” Ezram told him.  “Up here, as you know, men don’t get no complimentary epithets unless they deserve ’em.  Some men, Ben, are like weasels.  You’ve seen ’em.  You’ve seen human rats, too.  As if the souls they carried around with ’em was the souls of rats.  Of course you remember ‘Grizzly’ Silverdale?  Did you ever see any one who in disposition and looks and walk and everything reminded you so much of a grizzly bear?  I’ve known men like sheep, and men with the faithful souls of dogs.  You remember when you got in the big fight in the Le Perray bar?”

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget it again.”

“That’s the night the name came on you, to stay.  You remember how you’d drive into one of them, leap away, then tear into another.  Like a wolf for all the world!  You was always hard to get into a fight, but you know as well as I do, and I ain’t salvin’ you when I say it, that you’re the most terrible, ferocious fighter, forgettin’ everything but blood, that ever paddled a canoe on the Athabaska.  Some men, Ben, seem to have the spirit of the wolf right under their skins, a sort of a wild instinct that might have come straight down from the stone age, for all I know.  You happen to be one of ’em, the worst I ever saw.  Maybe you don’t remember, but you took your bull moose before you was thirteen years old.”