Cabins would send up their smoke again.
Brown-faced children would play about the tepee door.

Ten thousand dwellers of the forests, white and half-breed and Indian born, would trickle in twos and threes and family groups back into the age-old trade of a domain that reached from Hudson's Bay to the western mountains and from the Height of Land to the Arctic Sea.
Until then nature was free, and in its freedom ran in riotous silence over the land.

These were days when the wolf lay with her young, but did not howl; when the lynx yawned sleepily, and hunted but little--days of breeding, nights of drowsy whisperings, and of big red moons, and of streams rippling softly at lowest ebb while they dreamed of rains and flood-time.

And through it all--through the lazy drone of insects, the rustling sighs of the tree-tops and the subdued notes of living things ran a low and tremulous whispering, as if nature had found for itself a new language in this temporary absence of man.
To Jolly Roger this was Life, It breathed for him out of the cool earth.
He heard it over him, and under him, and on all sides of him where other ears would have found only a thing vast and oppressive and silent.

On what he called these "motherhood days of the earth" the passing years had built his faith and his creed.
One evening he stopped for camp at the edge of the Burntwood.