"To fight like the tiger!" He turned his head quickly now to where upon a raft some river-drivers were singing: "And when a man in the fight goes down, Why, we will carry him home!" "To fight like the tiger!" Ravage--the struggle to possess from all the world what one wished for one's self, and to do it without mercy and without fear-that was the clear plan in the primitive world, where action was more than speech and dominance than knowledge.

Was not civilisation a mistake, and religion the insinuating delusion designed to cover it up; or, if not designed, accepted by the original few who saw that humanity could not turn back, and must even go forward with illusions, lest in mere despair all men died and the world died with them?
His eyes wandered to the raft where the men were singing, and he remembered the threat made: that if he came again to the Cote Dorion he "would get what for!" He remembered the warning of Rouge Gosselin conveyed by Jolicoeur, and a sinister smile crossed over his face.

The contradictions of his own thoughts came home to him suddenly, for was it not the case that his physical strength alone, no matter what his skill, would be of small service to him in a dark corner of contest?
Primitive ideas could only hold in a primitive world.

His real weapon was his brain, that which civilisation had given him in lieu of primitive prowess and the giant's strength.
They had come to a long piece of corduroy-road, and the horse's hoofs struck rumbling hollow sounds from the floor of cedar logs.

There was a swamp on one side where fire-flies were flickering, and there flashed into Charley Steele's mind some verses he had once learned at school: "They made her a grave too cold and damp For a soul so warm and true--" It kept repeating itself in his brain in a strange dreary monotone.
"Stop the horse.