It was like a vast, many-colored sea with uneven billows rising and falling until the blue sky came down to meet them many miles away.

More than once his heart ached at the thought of the two thin ribs of steel creeping up foot by foot and mile by mile from Edmonton, a hundred and fifty miles away.

It was, to him, a desecration, a crime against Nature, the murder of his beloved wilderness.

For in his soul that wilderness had grown to be more than a thing of spruce and cedar and balsam, of poplar and birch; more than a great, unused world of river and lake and swamp.

It was an individual, a thing.