“And now,” he said half aloud, “I’ll get supper.  It’s a pity about that flour.”

As those who have sojourned in the bush of that country know, one can sup on reasty pork and green tea alone, when it is impossible to get anything better, but there are more appetizing compounds, and when the edge of his appetite had been blunted, Alton stopped with greasy fingers in the frypan and a little smile upon his face.

“And Somasco’s mine, and Carnaby—­when I ask for it, with all that lies beneath me here,” he said, and sat very still a space, with eyes that had lost their keenness fixed upon the bush.  He did not see the big balsam in front of him nor the dusky firs, for it was once more the picture of a woman with red-gold hair standing in an English rose garden his fancy painted him.

Then he rose abruptly, and the smile faded, while his face grew grim again.  “In the meanwhile I figure there’s a good deal to do,” he said.

He commenced it by picking the remnants of the pork out of the frying-pan, and when he had replaced them carefully in the bag, he filled the former with water and set it on the fire.  That done, he proceeded to hew four square pegs, and spent some little time cutting, “One Discovery,” upon the largest of them.  Then with a compass in his palm he strode with even paces up the slope of the hill, and drove one of the pegs in, turned sharply, and floundered into the bush, where he hammered down a second, and came back along the river until he had paced off and marked down an oblong.

“Now I’ll put in the first shot,” he said.

He toiled assiduously with the axehead and a little drill, bruising his fingers as the light grew dim, and when his left hand was smeared with blood, drew out a plastic yellow roll from one of his bundles.  This he gently rammed into the hole, squeezed down a copper cap upon a strip of fuse, and, lighting the latter, retired expeditiously towards the river.  Standing behind a big cedar, he watched the train of blue vapour and thin red sparks creep on through the dusk until a blaze of yellow flame leapt up, and a stunning detonation rolled across the woods.  The hillsides took up the sound, and flung it from one to another in great reverberations, while the pines, quivering in all their sprays, shook drops of water down.  Alton stood still and listened, silent and intent, while the discord died, until there was once more stillness again, realizing dimly a little of its significance.

It was man’s challenge to the wilderness that had lain sterile long, and he could forecast the grimness, but not the end of the coming struggle with rock and flood and snow.  Other men had gone down vanquished in such a fight, he knew, and the forest they slept in had closed once more upon and hidden the little scars they made.  Jimmy had also challenged savage nature, and Jimmy was dead, while the man who came after him stood alone, dripping still, and weary, amidst the whispering pines:  he had more than the wilderness against him.  Alton turned with a little shiver, strode back to the fire, unrolled a piece of pork, a packet of green tea, and a little bag of sugar from a strip of hide.  The piece of pork was very small, and a good deal of it apparently bad.  Then he laughed curiously.