himself each day watching Baree a little more closely.  He made at last a discovery which interested him deeply.  Always, when they halted on the trail, Baree would turn his face to the south.  When they were in camp it was from the south that he nosed the wind most frequently.  This was quite natural, Carvel thought, for his old hunting grounds were back there.  But as the days passed he began to notice other things.  Now and then, looking off into the far country from which they had come, Baree would whine softly, and on that day he would be filled with a great restlessness.  He gave no evidence of wanting to leave Carvel, but more and more Carvel came to understand that some mysterious call was coming to him from out of the south.

It was the wanderer’s intention to swing over into the country of the Great Slave, a good eight hundred miles to the north and west, before the mush snows came.  From there, when the waters opened in springtime, he planned to travel by canoe westward to the Mackenzie and ultimately to the mountains of British Columbia.  These plans were changed in February.  They were caught in a great storm in the Wholdaia Lake country, and when their fortunes looked darkest Carvel stumbled on a cabin in the heart of a deep spruce forest, and in this cabin there was a dead man.  He had been dead for many days, and was frozen stiff.  Carvel chopped a hole in the earth and buried him.

The cabin was a treasure trove to Carvel and Baree, and especially to the man.  It evidently possessed no other owner than the one who had died.  It was comfortable and stocked with provisions; and more than that, its owner had made a splendid catch of fur before the frost bit his lungs, and he died.  Carvel went over them carefully and joyously.  They were worth a thousand dollars at any post, and he could see no reason why they did not belong to him now.  Within a week he had blazed out the dead man’s snow-covered trap line and was trapping on his own account.

This was two hundred miles north and west of the Gray Loon, and soon Carvel observed that Baree did not face directly south in those moments when the strange call came to him, but south and east.  And now, with each day that passed, the sun rose higher in the sky; it grew warmer; the snow softened underfoot, and in the air was the tremulous and growing throb of spring.  With these things came the old yearning to Baree; the heart-thrilling call of the lonely graves back on the Gray Loon, of the burned cabin, the abandoned tepee beyond the pool—­and of Nepeese.  In his sleep he saw visions of things.  He heard again the low, sweet voice of the Willow, felt the touch of her hand, was at play with her once more in the dark shades of the forest—­and Carvel would sit and watch him as he dreamed, trying to read the meaning of what he saw and heard.

In April Carvel shouldered his furs up to the Hudson’s Bay Company’s post at Lac la Biche, which was still farther north.  Baree accompanied him halfway, and then—­at sundown Carvel returned to the cabin and found him there.  He was so overjoyed that he caught the dog’s head in his arms and hugged it.  They lived in the cabin until May.  The buds were swelling then, and the smell of growing things had begun to rise up out of the earth.