Without reason, Philip was listening again to the quiet lifeless words of Jasper, the factor over at Fond du Lac, as he described the day when he and his young wife first came up through the wonderland of the North.  “No country is God’s Country without a woman!” He found the words running in an unpleasant monotone through his brain.  He had made up his mind that he would strike Fond du Lac on his way down, for Jasper’s words and the hopeless picture he had made that day beside the little cross under the spruce had made them brothers in a strange sort of way.  Besides, Jasper would furnish him with a couple of Indians, and a sledge and dogs if the snows came early.

In a break between the rocks Philip saw a white strip of sand, and turned his canoe in to shore.  He had been paddling since five o’clock, and in the six hours had made eighteen miles.  Yet he felt no fatigue as he stood up and stretched himself.  He remembered how different it had been four years ago when Hill, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s man down at Prince Albert, had looked him over with skeptical and uneasy eyes, encouraging him with the words:  “You’re going to a funeral, young man, and it’s your own.  You won’t make God’s House, much less Hudson’s Bay!”

Weyman laughed joyously.

“Fooled ’em—­fooled ’em all!” he told himself.  “We’ll wager a dollar to a doughnut that we’re the toughest looking specimen that ever drifted down from Coronation Gulf, or any other gulf.  A doughnut!  I’d trade a gold nugget as big as my fist for a doughnut or a piece of pie right this minute.  Doughnuts an’ pie—­real old pumpkin pie—­an’ cranberry sauce, ‘n’ potatoes!  Good Lord, and they’re only six hundred miles away, carloads of ’em!”

He began to whistle as he pulled his rubber dunnage sack out of the canoe.  Suddenly he stopped, his eyes staring at the smooth white floor of sand.  A bear had been there before him, and quite recently.  Weyman had killed fresh meat the day before, but the instinct of the naturalist and the woodsman kept him from singing or whistling, two things which he was very much inclined to do on this particular day.  He had no suspicion that a bear which he was destined never to see had become the greatest factor in his life.  He was philosopher enough to appreciate the value and importance of little things, but the bear track did not keep him silent because he regarded it as significant, because he wanted to kill.  He would have welcomed it to dinner, and would have talked to it were it as affable and good-mannered as the big pop-eyed moose-birds that were already flirting about near him.

He emptied a half of the contents of the rubber sack out on the sand and made a selection for dinner, and he chuckled in his big happiness as he saw how attenuated his list of supplies was becoming.  There was still a quarter of a pound of tea, no sugar, no coffee, half a dozen pounds of flour, twenty-seven prunes jealously guarded in a piece of narwhal skin, a little salt and pepper mixed, and fresh caribou meat.