Corporal Rand’s bloodshot eyes watched the bannock baking before the fire. It was a small bannock, as bannocks go—a few ounces of flour, water and salt, simmering and bubbling there in the bottom of the frying pan. Unsupported by as much as a single pinch of baking powder, this culinary effort of Rand’s wore an appearance of deep and utter dejection. Either as a work of art or as an achievement in cookery the thing was a failure—an unsavory, unappetizing mess. Yet the corporal regarded it with elation in his heart. His mouth watered and his stomach did an acrobatic flip-flop of happy anticipation. It was a wonderful moment for Rand.
67

Half-starved, almost worn to the bone, in his desperate effort to make Keechewan Mission before the final freeze-up, the young policeman was in dire straits. For several days now he had subsisted chiefly on the dry and withered berries of saskatoon, with an occasional small morsel of bird meat. For hundreds of miles he had trekked along in worn moccasins, flapping miserably about his ankles, the bare soles of his feet pattering monotonously over a rough, difficult, uncertain trail.

Since leaving Mackenzie River barracks one disaster had followed another. First, he had lost his horse and rifle in attempting to ford a difficult river. Three days later, while he slept, there had come in the night a soft-footed Indian prowler who had, without compunction, stolen his only pair of service boots, his shoulder-pack and his revolver.

He had been placed in a terrible predicament. Barefooted, hungry, an unabating rage in his heart, he had struggled on for a distance of nearly twenty miles before luck favored him to the extent of directing him to an Indian encampment, where he ate his first full meal in many days and where, after many threats and much patient dickering, he had been able to purchase a pair of moosehide moccasins.

A few days following this fortunate meeting, he had been reduced almost to his previous condition of want and suffering. Then the tables had turned again. Not more than an hour ago a great good fortune had befallen him.
68

He had come down into a little valley between two hills; hobbling down on tortured feet to a sizeable grove of poplar and jack-pine. Half-cursing, half-moaning to himself, he had crossed a low ravine, then scrambled up in the mellow afternoon sunlight to the edge of a small natural clearing. His incurious gaze swept the view before him. For a moment he paused, leaning somewhat dizzily against a small sapling before continuing his course southward to the Wapiti River, where he had planned to camp for the night.

In the short space of time in which he stood there, shaking with fatigue, there impressed itself presently upon his vision an object of unusual interest. It was the small stump of a tree—an ancient, weather-beaten stump, probably not more than eight or ten inches in diameter. As Rand looked at it, a half-hearted wonderment stole over him, then a sudden quickening of the heart. Here before him was a man-made stump, the first he had seen in the last two hundred miles of steady travelling through the wilderness.

Someone, perhaps a long time ago, had felled a tree here. The corporal could easily make out the imprint of an ax. And looking farther he had found other stumps, upon which trees had once rested—about thirty of them in all—standing there old and rotten at the heart, like so many dreary sentinels in an unsightly garden of desolation.
69

Suddenly Rand gave vent to a sharp, quick cry of excitement. In spite of the fact that his feet hurt him almost beyond endurance, he went forward at a run, racing over the thick dry grass. The trees had been cut down for a purpose, as he had surmised. He could see the cabin now, faintly showing through the screen of underbrush on the opposite side of the clearing.

But his heart fell as he came closer to the cabin. A sickening wave of disgust and disappointment swept over him. He could see plainly that no one lived there. The door, partially open, hung loosely on broken hinges, while across the threshold, the grass had woven a tangled mat which encroached a full twelve inches into the dark interior.

Years had passed probably since a human foot had stepped within that cabin. In its present untenanted, dilapidated state it had very little to offer to a man whose stomach gnawed with the irrepressible pangs of hunger. In a fit of sudden despair, he stood and regarded it darkly.

Nevertheless, he strode through the doorway, for no apparent reason that he could imagine, unless it was to satisfy a somewhat morbid curiosity as to what he would find within. In the dim light of the single room, he moved cautiously forward, peering about him with half-frightened eyes. His feet stirred up a choking dust. There was a smell about the place he did not like. It rose to his nostrils—a faintly sickening odor of decayed plants.
70

A crudely constructed cupboard at one side of the room attracted his attention. He walk............