“I’ll show you why the wind does that,” he explained to her, drawing her to the table and. spreading out the map.  “See, here is the cabin.”  He made a little black dot with her pencil, and turning to the four walls of Bram’s stronghold made her understand what it meant.  “And there’s the big Barren,” he went on, tracing it out with the pencil-point.  “Up here, you see, is the Arctic Ocean, and away over there the Roes Welcome and Hudson’s Bay.  That’s where the storm starts, and when it gets out on the Barren, without a tree or a rock to break its way for five hundred miles—­ "

He told of the twisting air-currents there and how the storm-clouds sometimes swept so low that they almost smothered one.  For a few moments he did not look at Celie or he would have seen something in her face which could not have been because of what he was telling her, and which she could at best only partly understand.  She had fixed her eyes on the little black dot.  That was the cabin.  For the first time the map told her where she was, and possibly how she had arrived there.  Straight down to that dot from the blue space of the ocean far to the north the map-makers had trailed the course of the Coppermine River.  Celie gave an excited little cry and caught Philip’s arm, stopping him short in his explanation of the human wailings in the storm.  Then she placed a forefinger on the river.

“There—­there it is!” she told him, as plainly as though her voice was speaking to him in his own language.  “We came down that river.  The Skunnert landed us there,” and she pointed to the mouth of the Coppermine where it emptied into Coronation Gulf.  “And then we came down, down, down—­”

He repeated the name of the river.

“The Coppermine.”

She nodded, her breath breaking a little in an increasing excitement.  She seized the pencil and two-thirds of the distance down the Coppermine made a cross.  It was wonderful, he thought, how easily she made him understand.  In a low, eager voice she was telling him that where she had put the cross the treacherous Kogmollocks had first attacked them.  She described with the pencil their flight away from the river, and after that their return—­and a second fight.  It was then Bram Johnson had come into the scene.  And back there, at the point from which the wolf-man had fled with her, was her father.  That was the chief thing she was striving to drive home in his comprehension of the situation.  Her father!  And she believed he was alive, for it was an excitement instead of hopelessness or grief that possessed her as she talked to him.  It gave him a sort of shock.  He wanted to tell her, with his arms about her, that it was impossible, and that it was his duty to make her realize the truth.  Her father was dead now, even if she had last seen him alive.  The little brown men had got him, and had undoubtedly hacked him into small pieces, as was their custom when inspired by war-madness.  It was inconceivable to think of him as still being alive even if there had been armed friends with him.  There was Olaf Anderson and his five men, for instance.  Fighters every one of them.  And now they were dead.  What chance could this other man have?