Things that were and ever shall be, Things that never, never change. Things that men I see around can never know. Things I know and love for ever, Thro' my wand'ring vision range, Things that whisper in the silence "You must go." You who've never heard them calling, Pleading voices in the night,-- You who've never known the challenge of the wild, Cannot know the aching longing For the freedom and the fight When the loneliness is calling for her child. There's a trail that lies a-waiting In a dim and aged land. There are monuments unbuilded in the gloom. There are epitaphs unwritten, Sleeping men who understand, There's a challenge, there's a fight against the doom. When the wild is closing on you, And defiance you have hurled, And the trail is fading dimly in the night, As the mystic lights are dancing On the frontier of the world You are fighting grim and silent for your life. When you're staking on the limit With a hope that's nearly gone, Then you grit your teeth and bluff the wild again, Till you see the lights a-gleaming In the coulee thro' the storm, And you shout a mocking triumph thro' your pain. There's an awful, awful stillness, There's a something, God knows what. There's a recklessness that, born, can never die. There's a voice you try to silence Of the thing that once you sought, There's a longing in your heart you can't deny. Far away amid the shadows Of the future and the past, Where the Mother waits the breaking of the day When her lands shall rise in splendour And her love be known at last, She is calling, and I know I must obey. WOODEN MIKE (The Rhyme of the Old Cook) There are things you dream, And they often seem To have happened real and true, And the story which I am going to pitch He told while he stirred the stew. He had got his name When at first he came To cook on a grading pike, He had just one leg And a lumber peg, So they called him Wooden Mike. The things he had done With his traps and gun, Were wonderful to relate. But strangest of all Was once in the fall, This story I heard him state. He had gone that fall, At an urgent call, To cook for a lumber firm, Where he worked so quick That he had to lick His hands so they wouldn't burn. When he fried the cakes, That a fellow makes For breakfast, the griddle style, To have worked the way That they do to-day Would have taken quite awhile. So he hired a man For to grease the pan, Its size would be hard to beat; And the guy would skate Right across the plate With bacon rinds on his feet.