His orders were, like the orders of Admiral Dewey, to do certain things—­not merely to try.  He was to go out into the northern night called winter, feel his way up the Athabasca, over the Smoky, follow the Peace River, and find the pass through the Rockies.

If the simple story of that winter campaign could be written out it would be finer than fiction.  But it will never be.  Only Smith the Silent knows, and he won’t tell.

Sometimes, over the pipe, he forgets and gives me glimpses into the winter camp, with the sun going out like a candle:  the hastily made camp with the half-breed spotting the dry wood against the coming moment when night would drop over the forest like a curtain over a stage; the “lean-to” between the burning logs, where he dozes or dreams, barely beyond the reach of the flames; the silence all about, Jaquis pulling at his pipe, and the huskies sleeping in the snow like German babies under the eiderdown.  Sometimes, out of the love of bygone days, he tells of long toilsome journeys with the sun hiding behind clouds out of which an avalanche of snow falls, with nothing but the needle to tell where he hides; of hungry dogs and half starved horses, and lakes and rivers fifty and a hundred miles out of the way.

Once, he told me, he sent an engineer over a low range to spy out a pass.  By the maps and other data they figured that he would be gone three days, but a week went by and no word from the pathfinder.  Ten days and no news.  On the thirteenth day, when Smith was preparing to go in search of the wanderer, the running gear of the man and the framework of the dogs came into camp.  He was able to smile and say to Smith that he had been ten days without food, save a little tea.  For the dogs he had had nothing.

A few days rest and they were on the trail again, or on the “go” rather; and you might know that disciple of Smith the Silent six months or six years before he would, unless you worked him, refer to that ten days’ fast.  They think no more of that than a Jap does of dying.  It’s all in the day’s work.

Suddenly, Smith said, the sun swung north, the days grew longer.  The sun grew hot and the snow melted on the south hills; the hushed rivers, rending their icy bonds, went roaring down to the Lakes and out towards the Arctic Ocean.  And lo, suddenly, like the falling of an Arctic night, the momentary spring passed and it was summer time.

Then it was that Smith came into Edmonton to make his first report, and here we met for the first time for many snows.

Joyously, as a boy kicks the cover off on circus morning, this Northland flings aside her winter wraps and stands forth in her glorious garb of summer.  The brooklets murmur, the rivers sing, and by their banks and along the lakes waterfowl frolic, and overhead glad birds, that seem to have dropped from the sky, sing joyfully the almost endless song of summer.  At the end of the long day, when the sun, as if to make up for its absence, lingers, loath to leave us in the twilight, beneath their wings the song-birds hide their heads, then wake and sing, for the sun is swinging up over the horizon where the pink sky, for an hour, has shown the narrow door through which the day is dawning.