She had more of a mastery over the webbed boots of the North than I, it shortly transpired. We went up the river a mile or two, crossed it, and climbed to the top of a bald point that immediately appealed to us as an ideal coasting-place. We were in something of a light-hearted mood, anyway, and like a pair of children on a holiday amused ourselves by sliding down and climbing back to slide down again. Thus we passed two or three hours, at imminent risk of frozen cheeks and noses, for it was bitterly cold, so cold that the snow crunched beneath our feet like powdered rosin. And when we wearied of that we went trailing home over glistening flats that lay between us and the post. Down on the bare bottomlands of the Sicannie a tenuous frost-haze hung in the air. Back from the valley edges the great woods stood in frozen ranks, branches heavy-freighted with the latest fall of snow. To the west towered the mountain range, robed in ermine now instead of summer purple; huge, ragged crests, flashing in the heatless sun. “What insignificant creatures we are, after all,” the girl stopped suddenly and looked back at the white peaks, and to the north and south where the somber woodland stood like twin walls. “For a true sense of his own importance in the universe one has only to face—this.” She nodded toward the surrounding forest, and the Rockies crouching against the far skyline. “It is so big—and so silent. It gives me a feeling of being pitted against a gigantic, remorseless power—a something indefinable, and yet terrible in its strength. Power—when I can understand it—fascinates me. But this makes me shrink. Sometimes I actually feel afraid. They say that men compelled to stay up here alone often go mad. I hardly wonder. I don’t think I like the North.” “So you feel that way,” I rejoined. “So do I, at times.” She assented soberly. “Perhaps we are blessed or cursed, whichever it may be, with too much imagination; and give it overfree rein.” “No,” I returned, blundering on in an attempt to voice that which I had often felt, but could never express. “There is an atmosphere, a something about these immense spaces that sits hard on the nerves. We don’t have to imagine these things; they’re here. It seems to me that any wilderness untamed must have that same effect; it overawes one. And man hasn’t tamed this yet. The North is master—and we feel it.” We plodded a few yards farther. “The North is master—and we feel it,” she repeated presently. “I resent that. I shouldn’t care,” she murmured thoughtfully, “to be wholly at the mercy of the North. It reminds me of the sea, cold and gray and pitiless.” And she fell into a silent reflective mood as we trudged along to the post.