When he was old enough Bobby learned to make his hunting implements himself.  Here, indeed, was required patience, perseverance, and resourcefulness, for his only tools were his knife and his ax, and his only material such as the wilderness produced; and to gain Abel’s praise, which was his high ambition, he must needs do his work with care and niceness.  And thus Bobby was learning to be a man and a hunter.

Bobby was still a very young lad when Abel began to teach him the signs of the wilderness and the ways of the wild things that lived in the woods.  He learned to know the tracks of all the animals of the region, and even how long it had been since the animals that made the tracks had passed by.  And he learned to make snares and traps, and how to handle his gun—­the wonderful gun which Abel told him God had sent with him from the Far Beyond—­and shoot it quickly and accurately, for the man who exists upon the wilderness must know how to do these things, and his sense of observation must be keenly trained; and he must train himself to be alert.

One other accomplishment he acquired from Skipper Ed. He learned to swim.  Even in midsummer these northern waters are icy cold.  From the breaking up of the ice in summer until the sea freezes again in winter, the natives spend their time upon the water or near it, yet it is rare, indeed, that one of them can swim.  And so it was with Abel.  He had never in his life voluntarily gone into the sea.  But Skipper Ed was a mighty swimmer, and under his instruction Jimmy had learned the art, and in the fourth summer after Bobby’s arrival nothing would do but he, too, must learn.  Much perseverance was necessary before Abel and Mrs. Abel gave their consent, but finally it was obtained, and in a little while Bobby was as keen for a dip and a dive and a swim as were Skipper Ed and his partner, Jimmy.

And so the years passed in toil, in pleasure, and in attainment—­active years that were filled with glorious doing, and with never a heavy moment or idle wasting of time or vain dawdling.

“Never waste time,” said Skipper Ed, one stormy winter’s day when Bobby was over there, and he and Bobby and Jimmy were luxuriating in their big chairs before the fire.  “If you can’t be busy with your hands, be busy with your brain.  You were put into the world for some purpose, and your destiny is the will of the Almighty.  But we may spoil His will by refusing to do the very best we can.  The Almighty plans some fine thing for each of us, but He leaves it with us to decide whether we will have the fine things or not.  What we’re to be or to do comes to us gradually, just as the sun rises gradually.  We never know ahead what He has planned for us.  That’s His big surprise.

“He may have put us into the world to do some great thing, and to become a great and useful man, or we may be intended just to help other people to be noble and honest and true, by doing our duty always, and setting an example of honesty and nobility.”