Canoes when
the ice went out, dogs and toboggans when winter came again to lock
tight the waterways. So during his stay at Porcupine he had accepted the
gift of a dog from a Cree, traded tobacco for another, and he and Lamont
had whiled away the long evenings in making two sets of harness and a
small toboggan. A four-dog team will haul a sizable load. Two would move
all the burden of food and gear that he had in his possession. He had
learned painfully to walk upon snowshoes--enough so that he was over the
poignant ache in the calf of the leg which the North calls _mal de
racquette_. Altogether he felt himself fully equal to fare into the
wilderness alone. Moreover he had none of that intangible dread of the
wilderness which had troubled him when he first came to Lone Moose.
Then it seemed lonely beyond expression, brooding, sinister. It was
lonely still--but that was all. He was beginning to grasp the motif of
the wilderness, to understand in a measure that to those who adapted
themselves thereto it was a sanctuary. The sailor to his sea, the
woodsman to his woods, and the _boulevardier_ to his beloved avenues!
Thompson did not cleave to the North as a woodsman might. But the
natural phenomena of unbroken silences, of vast soundlessness, of miles
upon miles of somber forest aisles did not oppress him now.
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