Yes, Hollister reiterated to himself, it was better than a bedroom off the blank corridor of a second-rate hotel and the crowded streets that were more merciless to a stricken man than these silent places.  Eventually he would have to go back.  But for the present,—­well, he occupied himself wholly with the present, and he did not permit himself to look far beyond.

From the deerskin he cut a quantity of fine strips and bent into oval shape two tough sticks of vine maple.  Across these he strung a web of rawhide, thus furnishing himself with a pair of snowshoes which were a necessity now that the snow lay everywhere knee-deep and in many places engulfed him to the waist when he went into the woods.

It pleased him to go on long snowshoe hikes.  He reached far up the ridges that lifted one after another behind his timber.  Once he gained a pinnacle, a solitary outstanding hummock of snow-bound granite rising above all the rest, rising above all the surrounding forest.  From this summit he gained an eagle’s view.  The long curve of Toba Inlet wound like a strip of jade away down to where the islands of the lower gulf spread with channels of the sea between.  He could see the twin Redondas, Cortez, Raza, the round blob that was Hernando,—­a picturesque nomenclature that was the inheritance of Spanish exploration before the time of Drake.  Beyond the flat reaches of Valdez, Vancouver Island, an empire in itself, lifted its rocky backbone, a misty purple against the western sky.  He watched a steamer, trailing a black banner of smoke, slide through Baker Pass.

Out there men toiled at fishing; the woods echoed with the ring of their axes and the thin twanging of their saws; there would be the clank of machinery and the hiss of steam.  But it was all hidden and muffled in those vast distances.  He swung on his heel.  Far below, the houses of the settlement in the lower Toba sent up blue wisps of smoke.  To his right ran with many a twist and turn the valley itself, winding away into remote fastnesses of the Coast Range, a strip of level, fertile, timbered land, abutted upon by mountains that shamed the Alps for ruggedness,—­mountains gashed by slides, split by gloomy crevasses, burdened with glaciers which in the heat of summer spewed foaming cataracts over cliffs a thousand foot sheer.

    “Where the hill-heads split the tide
      Of green and living air,
    I would press Adventure hard
      To her deepest lair.

    I would let the world’s rebuke
      Like a wind go by,
    With my naked soul laid bare
      To the naked sky.”

Out of some recess in his memory, where they had fixed themselves long before, those lines rose to Hollister’s lips.  And he looked a long time before he turned downhill.