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“God! But that tastes good!”

Van Brunt nodded sympathetically. “Five years, you say?”

“Five years.” The man sighed again. “And you, I presume, wish to know about it, being naturally curious, and this a sufficiently strange situation, and all that. But it’s not much. I came in from Edmonton after musk-ox, and like Pike and the rest of them, had my mischances, only I lost my party and outfit. Starvation, hardship, the regular tale, you know, sole survivor and all that, till I crawled into Tantlatch’s, here, on hand and knee.”

“Five years,” Van Brunt murmured retrospectively, as though turning things over in his mind.

“Five years on February last. I crossed the Great Slave early in May–“

“And you are … Fairfax?” Van Brunt interjected.

The man nodded.

“Let me see … John, I think it is, John Fairfax.”

“How did you know?” Fairfax queried lazily, half-absorbed in curling smoke-spirals upward in the quiet air.

“The papers were full of it at the time. Prevanche–“

“Prevanche!” Fairfax sat up, suddenly alert. “He was lost in the Smoke Mountains.”

“Yes, but he pulled through and came out.”

Fairfax settled back again and resumed his smoke-spirals. “I am glad to hear it,” he remarked reflectively. “Prevanche was a bully fellow if he did have ideas about head-straps, the beggar. And he pulled through? Well, I’m glad.”

Five years … the phrase drifted recurrently through Van Brunt’s thought, and somehow the face of Emily Southwaithe seemed to rise up and take form before him. Five years … A wedge of wild-fowl honked low overhead and at sight of the encampment veered swiftly to the north into the smouldering sun. Van Brunt could not follow them. He pulled out his watch. It was an hour past midnight. The northward clouds flushed bloodily, and rays of sombre-red shot southward, firing the gloomy woods with a lurid radiance. The air was in breathless calm, not a needle quivered, and the least sounds of the camp were distinct and clear as trumpet calls. The Crees and voyageurs felt the spirit of it and mumbled in dreamy undertones, and the cook unconsciously subdued the clatter of pot and pan. Somewhere a child was crying, and from the depths of the forest, like a silver thread, rose a woman’s voice in mournful chant:

“O-o-o-o-o-o-a-haa-ha-a-ha-aa-a-a, O-o-o-o-o-o-a-ha-a-ha-a.”

Van Brunt shivered and rubbed the backs of his hands briskly.

“And they gave me up for dead?” his companion asked slowly.

“Well, you never came back, so your friends–“

“Promptly forgot.” Fairfax laughed harshly, defiantly.

“Why didn’t you come out?”

“Partly disinclination, I suppose, and partly because of circumstances over which I had no control. You see, Tantlatch, here, was down with a broken leg when I made his acquaintance,–a nasty fracture,–and I set it for him and got him into shape. I stayed some time, getting my strength back. I was the first white man he had seen, and of course I seemed very wise and showed his people no end of things. Coached them up in military tactics, among other things, so that they conquered the four other tribal villages, (which you have not yet seen), and came to rule the land. And they naturally grew to think a good deal of me, so much so that when I was ready to go they wouldn’t hear of it. Were most hospitable, in fact. Put a couple of guards over me and watched me day and night. And then Tantlatch offered me inducements,–in a sense, inducements,–so to say, and as it didn’t matter much one way or the other, I reconciled myself to remaining.”

“I knew your brother at Freiburg. I am Van Brunt.”

Fairfax reached forward impulsively and shook his hand. “You were Billy’s friend, eh? Poor Billy! He spoke of you often.”

“Rum meeting place, though,” he added, casting an embracing glance over the primordial landscape and listening for a moment to the woman’s mournful notes. “Her man was clawed by a bear, and she’s taking it hard.”

“Beastly life!” Van Brunt grimaced his disgust. “I suppose, after five years of it, civilization will be sweet? What do you say?”