In the North when a man sets out on a winter journey, or any sort of journey, in fact, his preparations are speedily made.  He loads his sled, hitches his dogs, takes his rifle in hand, hooks his toes in his snowshoes and goes his way.

This is precisely the course Tommy Ashe and Thompson followed.  Having decided to go, they went, and neither of them took it as a serious matter that they were on the first leg of a twelve-hundred-mile jaunt in the deep of winter across a primitive land.

To be exact in dates it was February the first when they touched at Pachugan, where Tommy traded in his furs, and where they took on a capacity load of grub.  West of the lake head they bore across a low, wooded delta and debouched upon Peace River’s frozen surface.

After that it was plod-plod-plod, one day very much like another, cold with coldness of the sub-Arctic, the river a white band through heavy woods, nights that were crisp and still as death, the sky a vast dome sprinkled with flickering stars, brilliant at times with the Northern Lights, that strange glow that flashes and shimmers above the Pole, now a banner of flame, again only a misty sheen.  Sometimes it seemed an unreality, that silence, that immensity of hushed forest, those vast areas in which life was not a factor.  When a blizzard whooped out of the northern quarter, holding them close to the little tent and the tiny sheet-iron stove, when they sat for hours with their hands clasped over their knees, listening to the voice of the wilderness whispering sibilantly in the swaying boughs, it seemed utterly impossible that these frigid solitudes could ever know the kindliness of summer, that those cold white spaces could ever be warm and sunny and bright with flowers.

But there were compensations.  Two men cannot eat out of the same pot—­figuratively speaking—­sleep huddled close together for the warmth that is in their bodies, hear no voices but their own, exert a common effort to a common end day after day, until the days become weeks and the weeks marshal themselves into calendar months—­no two men born of woman can sustain this enforced intimacy over a long period without acquiring a positive attitude toward each other.  They achieve a contemptuous tolerance, or they achieve a rare and lasting friendship.  It was the fortune of Tommy Ashe and Wesley Thompson to cultivate the latter.  They arrived at it by degrees, in many forty-below-zero camps along the Peace, in the shadow of those towering mountains where the Peace cuts through the backbone of North America.  It grew out of mutual respect, a wordless sense of understanding, a conviction that each did his best to play the game fair and square.