Of that, too, he had been thinking an hour ago.  It was the thing which, first of all, had driven him into the north.  And though it had twisted and disrupted the earth under his feet for a time, it had brought its compensation.  For he had come to love the north with a passionate devotion.  It was, in a way, his God.  It seemed to him that the time had never been when he had lived any other life than this under the open skies.  He was thirty-seven now.  A bit of a philosopher, as philosophy comes to one in a sun-cleaned and unpolluted air, A good-humored brother of humanity, even when he put manacles on other men’s wrists; graying a little over the temples—­and a lover of life.  Above all else he was that.  A lover of life.  A worshiper at the shrine of God’s Country.

So he sat, that hour ago, deep in the wilderness eighty miles north of Athabasca Landing, congratulating himself on the present conditions of his existence.  A hundred and eighty miles farther on was Fort McMurray, and another two hundred beyond that was Chipewyan, and still beyond that the Mackenzie and its fifteen-hundred-mile trail to the northern sea.  He was glad there was no end to this world of his.  He was glad there were few people in it.  But these people he loved.  That hour ago he had looked out on the river as two York boats had forged up against the stream, craft like the long, slim galleys of old, brought over through the Churchill and Clearwater countries from Hudson’s Bay.  There were eight rowers in each boat.  They were singing.  Their voices rolled between the walls of the forests.  Their naked arms and shoulders glistened in the sun.  They rowed like Vikings, and to him they were symbols of the freedom of the world.  He had watched them until they were gone up-stream, but it was a long time before the chanting of their voices had died away.  And then he had risen from beside his tiny fire, and had stretched himself until his muscles cracked.  It was good to feel the blood running red and strong in one’s veins at the age of thirty-seven.  For Carrigan felt the thrill of these days when strong men were coming out of the north —­days when the glory of June hung over the land, when out of the deep wilderness threaded by the Three Rivers came romance and courage and red-blooded men and women of an almost forgotten people to laugh and sing and barter for a time with the outpost guardians of a younger and more progressive world.  It was north of Fifty-Four, and the waters of a continent flowed toward the Arctic Sea.  Yet soon would the strawberries be crushing red underfoot; the forest road was in bloom, scarlet fire-flowers reddened the trail, wild hyacinths and golden-freckled violets played hide-and-seek with the forget-me-nots in the meadows, and the sky was a great splash of velvety blue.  It was the north triumphant—­at the edge of civilization; the north triumphant, and yet paying its tribute.  For at the other end were waiting the royal Upper Ten Thousand and the smart Four Hundred with all the beau monde behind them, coveting and demanding that tribute to their sex—­the silken furs of a far country, the life’s blood and labor of a land infinitely beyond the pale of drawing-rooms and the whims of fashion.