With the stub of a pencil Philip had figured out on a bit of paper about where he was that morning.  The whalebone hut of his last Arctic camp was eight hundred miles due north.  Fort Churchill, over on Hudson’s Bay, was four hundred miles to the east, and Fort Resolution, on the Great Slave, was four hundred miles to the west.  On his map he had drawn a heavy circle about Prince Albert, six hundred miles to the south.  That was the nearest line of rail.  Six days back Radisson had died after a mouth’s struggle with that terrible thing they called “le mort rouge,” or the Red Death.  Since then Philip had pointed his canoe straight up the Dubawnt waterways, and was a hundred and twenty miles nearer to civilization.  He had been through these waterways twice before, and he knew that there was not a white man within a hundred and fifty miles of him.  And as for a white woman—­

Weyman stopped his paddling where there was no current, and leaned back in his canoe for a breathing space, and to fill his pipe.  A white woman!  Would he stare at her like a fool when he saw her again for the first time?  Eighteen months ago he had seen a white woman over at Fort Churchill—­the English clerk’s wife, thirty, with a sprinkle of gray in her blond hair, and pale blue eyes.  Fresh from the Garden of Eden, he had wondered why the half-dozen white men over there regarded her as they did.  Long ago, in the maddening gloom of the Arctic night, he had learned to understand.  At Fond du Lac, when Weyman had first come up into the forest country, he had said to the factor:  “It’s glorious!  It’s God’s Country!” And the factor had turned his tired, empty eyes upon him with the words:  “It was—­before she went.  But no country is God’s Country without a woman,” and then he took Philip to the lonely grave under a huge lob-stick spruce, and told him in a few words how one woman had made life for him.  Even then Philip could not fully understand.  But he did now.

He resumed his paddling, his gray eyes alert.  His aloneness and the bigness of the world in which, so far as he knew, he was the only human atom, did not weigh heavily upon him.  He loved this bigness and emptiness and the glory of solitude.  It was middle autumn, and close to noon of a day unmarred by cloud above, and warm with sunlight.  He was following close to the west shore of the lake.  The opposite shore was a mile away.  He was so near to the rock-lined beach that he could hear the soft throat-cries of the moose-birds.  And what he saw, so far as his eyes could see in all directions, was “God’s Country”—­a glory of colour that was like a great master painting.  The birch had turned to red and gold.  From out of the rocks rose trees that were great crimson splashes of mountain-ash berries framed against the dark lustre of balsam and cedar and spruce.