She laid down the things, and in a moment the thickets had hidden her. Swiftly Ben reached for the gun, and for a few speeding seconds his fingers worked at its mechanism. He was busy about the canoe when the girl returned. Evidently Beatrice was in wonderful spirits. The air itself was sparkling, the sun--beloved with an ardor too deep for words by all northern peoples--was warm and genial in the sky; the spruce forest was lush with dew, fragrant with hidden blossoms. It was a Spring Day--nothing less. Both of them knew perfectly that miracle was abroad in the forest,--flowers opening, buds breaking into blossoms, little grass blades stealing, shy as fairies, up through the dead leaves; birds fluttering and gossiping and carrying all manner of building materials for their nests. Spring is not just a time of year to the forest folk, and particularly to those creatures whose homes are the far spruce forests of the North. It is a magic and a mystery, a recreation and a renewed lease on life itself. It is hope come again, the joy of living undreamed of except by such highly strung, nerve-tingling, wild-blooded creatures as these; and in some measure at least it is the escape from Fear. For there is no other name than Fear for the great, white, merciless winter that had just departed. High and low, every woods creature knows this dread, this age-old apprehension of the deepening snow. Perhaps it had its birth in eons past, when the great glaciers brought their curse of gold into the temperate regions, locking land and sea under tons of ice. Never the frost comes, and the snow deepens on the land, and the rivers and lakes are struck silent as if by a cruel magician's magic, but that this old fear returns, creeping like poison into the nerves, bowing down the heart and chilling the warm wheel of the blood. For the rodents and the digging people--even for the mighty grizzly himself--the season means nothing but the cold and the darkness of their underground lairs. For those that try to brave the winter, the portion is famine and cold; the vast, far-spreading silence broken only by the sobbing song of the wolf pack, starving and afraid on the distant ridges. Man is the conqueror, the Mighty One who can strike the fire, but yet he too knows the creepy, haunting dread and deep-lying fear of the northern winter. But that dread season was gone now, yielding for a few happy months to a gay invader from the South; and the whole forest world rejoiced.