An hour later the two came to a stream where there was a canoe. Because of rapids and the fierceness of the spring floods, portages were many, and progress slow during the whole of that day. They had made twenty miles when the sun began sinking in the west, and they struck camp. After their supper of meat the Cree rolled himself in his blanket and slept. But for long hours Roscoe sat beside their fire. Night dropped about him, a splendid night filled with sweet breaths and stars and a new moon, and with strange sounds which came to him now in a language which he was beginning to understand. From far away there floated faintly to his ears the lonely cry of a wolf, and it no longer made him shudder, but filled him with the mysterious longing of the cry itself. It was the mate-song of the beast of prey, sending up its message to the stars--crying out to all the wilderness for a response to its loneliness. Night birds twittered about him. A loon laughed in its mocking joy. An owl hooted down at him from the black top of a tall spruce. From out of starvation and death the wilderness had awakened. Its sounds spoke to him still of grief, of the suffering that would never know end; and yet there trembled in them a note of happiness and of content. Beside the campfire it came to him that in this world he had discovered two things--a suffering that he had never known, and a peace he had never known. And Oachi stood for them both. He thought of her until drowsiness drew a pale film over his eyes. The birch crackled more and more faintly in the fire and sounds died away. The stillness of sleep fell about him. Scarce had he fallen into slumber than his eyes seemed to open wide and wakeful, and out of the gloom beyond the smouldering fire he saw a human form slowly revealing itself, until there stood clearly within his vision a figure which he at first took to be that of Mukoki, the chief. But in another moment he saw that it was even taller than the tall chief, and that its eyes had searched him out. When he heard a voice, speaking in Cree the words which mean, "Whither goest thou?" he was startled to hear his own voice reply: "I am going back to my people." He stared into vacancy, for at the sound of his voice the vision faded away; but there came a voice to him back through the night, which said: "And it is here that you have found that of which you have dreamed--Life, and the Valley of Silent Men!" Roscoe was wide awake now. The voice and the vision had seemed so real to him that he looked about him tremblingly into the starlit gloom of the forest, as if not quite sure that he had been dreaming. Then he crawled into his balsam shelter, drew his blankets about him, and fell asleep.