The Call of the North

The girl stood on a bank above a river flowing north. At her back crouched a dozen cleanwhitewashed buildings. Before her in interminable journey, day after day, league on leagueinto remoteness, stretched the stern Northern wilderness, untrodden save by the trappers, the Indians, and the beasts. Close about the little settlement crept the balsams and spruce, the birch and poplar, behind which lurked vast dreary muskegs, a chaos of bowlder-splits, the forest. The girl had known nothing different for many years. Once a summer the sailingship from England felt its frozen way through the Hudson Straits, down the Hudson Bay, todrop anchor in the mighty River of the Moose. Once a summer a six-fathom canoe mannedby a dozen paddles struggled down the waters of the broken Abitibi. Once a year a littleband of red-sashed voyageurs forced their exhausted sledge-dogs across the ice from someunseen wilderness trail. That was all. Before her eyes the seasons changed, all grim, but one by the very pathos of brevity sad. Inthe brief luxuriant summer came the Indians to trade their pelts, came the keepers of thewinter posts to rest, came the ship from England bringing the articles of use or ornamentshe had ordered a full year before. Within a short time all were gone, into the wilderness, into the great unknown world. The snow fell; the river and the bay froze. Strange men fromthe North glided silently to the Factor's door, bearing the meat and pelts of the seal. Bitteriron cold shackled the northland, the abode of desolation. Armies of caribou drifted by, ghostly under the aurora, moose, lordly and scornful, stalked majestically along the shore;wolves howled invisible, or trotted dog-like in organized packs along the river banks. Dayand night the ice artillery thundered. Night and day the fireplaces roared defiance to a frostthey could not subdue, while the people of desolation crouched beneath the tyranny ofwinter. Then the upheaval of spring with the ice-jams and terrors, the Moose roaring by untamable, the torrents rising, rising foot by foot to the very dooryard of her father's house. Strangespirits were abroad at night, howling, shrieking, cracking and groaning in voices of ice andflood. Her Indian nurse told her of them all-of Mannabosho, the good; of Nenaubosho theevil-in her lisping Ojibway dialect that sounded like the softer voices of the forest. At last the sudden subsidence of the waters; the splendid eager blossoming of the land intonew leaves, lush grasses, an abandon of sweetbrier and hepatica. The air blew soft, athousand singing birds sprang from the soil, the wild goose cried in triumph. Overheadshone the hot sun of the Northern s