with pack horses, traveling a few miles each day, fording unknown rivers and encircling impassable ranges, or by waiting patiently until the fall rains swelled the river, they might never leave this land they had so boldly entered.  They could not go out the way they had come—­over those seething waters—­and the river, falling swiftly, would soon be too low to permit them to push down to its lower waters where they might find Indian encampments.

Nothing was left but the wilderness, ancient and unchanged.  The spruce forest had a depth and a darkness that even Ben had never seen; the wild creatures that they sometimes glimpsed on the bank stared at them wholly without knowledge as to what they were, and likely amazed at the strength whereby they had braved this seething torrent that swept through their sylvan home.  Here was a land where the grizzly had not yet learned of a might greater than his, where he had not yet surrendered his sovereignty to man.  Here the moose—­mightiest of the antlered herd—­reached full maturity and old age without ever mistaking the call of a birch-bark horn for that of his rutting cow.  Young bulls with only a fifty-inch spread of horns and ten points on each did not lead the herds, as in the more accessible provinces of the North.  All things were in their proper balance, since the forest had gone unchanged for time immemorial; and as the head-hunters had not yet come the bull moose did not rank as a full-grown warrior until he wore thirty points and had five feet of spread, and he wasn’t a patriarch until he could no longer walk free between two tree trunks seventy inches apart.  Certain of the lesser forest people were not in unwonted numbers because that fierce little hunter, the marten, had been exterminated by trappers; the otter, yet to know the feel of cold iron, fished to his heart’s content in rivers where an artificial fly had never fallen and the trout swarmed in uncounted numbers in the pools.

Darting down the rapids Ben felt the beginnings of an exquisite exhilaration.  Part of it arose from the very thrill and excitement of their headlong pace; but partly it had a deeper, more portentous origin.  Here was his own country—­this Back There.  While all the spruce forest in which he had lived had been his natural range and district—­his own kind of land with which he felt close and intimate relations—­this was even more his home than his own birthplace.  By light of a secret quality, hard to recognize, he was of it, and it was of him.  He felt the joy of one who sees the gleam of his own hearth through a distant window.

He knew this land; it was as if he had simply been away, through the centuries, and had come home.  The shadows and the stillness had the exact depth and tone that was true and right; the forest fragance was undefiled; the dark sky line was like something he had dreamed come true.  He felt a strange and growing excitement, as if magnificent adventure were opening out before him.  His gaze fell, with a queer sense of understanding, to Fenris.