No man in all the Northland knew its out-of-the-way corners better than he--its unmapped and unexplored places, the far and mysterious patches of terra incognita, where the sun still rose and set without permission of the Law, and God laughed as in the days when prehistoric monsters fed from the tops of trees no taller than themselves.

Once through that window, with the strength to travel, and the Law might seek him for a hundred years without profit to itself.
It was not bravado in his blood that stirred these thoughts.

It was not panic or an unsound excitement.

He was measuring things even as he visioned them.

He would go down-river way, toward the Arctic.