The past was dead. A new life was beginning for him. It had to be so, for if word went back that the Snow-Burner was still alive the men of Cameron-Dam Camp would come clamouring to the hunt. To die, and yet to live; to slough one life, as an old coat, and to take up another, not having the slightest notion of what it might hold—that was the great adventure, that was something so interesting that the humiliation of defeat never so much as reached beneath Reivers’ skin. He stood for a moment, looking back at the camp, and he smiled. He waved his left hand in a polished gesture of contemptuous farewell. “Good-by, Mr. Hell-Camp Reivers,” he growled. “Hello, Mr. New Man, whoever you are. Let’s go and lay up till the puncture in your hide heals. Then we’ll go out and see what you can do to this silly old world.” With his fingers clutching the hole in his shoulder, he turned and lurched drunkenly away into the blackness of the thick timber. The icy waters of the river had been kind to him in more ways than one. They had congealed the warm blood-spurts from his wound into a solid red clot, and his thick woolen shirt and mackinaw were frozen stiff and tight against the clot. He held to his staggering run for an hour, seeking bare spots in the timber, travelling on top of windfalls when he found them, hiding his trail in uncanny fashion, before his body grew warm enough to thaw the icy bandages. Then he halted and, by the light of the cold moon, bared his shoulder and took stock. It was a bad, ragged wound. He moved the shoulder and smiled sardonically as he noted that no bone was touched. From the butt of a shattered windfall he tore a flat sliver of clean pine. With his teeth he worried it down to a proper size, and with handkerchief and belt he bound it over the wound so tightly that it sunk deep into the muscles of the shoulder. It chafed and cut the skin and started the blood in half a dozen places, but he pulled the belt up another hole despite the inclination to grimace from pain. “Suffer, Body,” he muttered, “suffer all you please. You’ve nothing to say about this. Your job for the present is merely to serve life by keeping it going. Later on you may grow whole again. I shall need you.” He buttoned his mackinaw with difficulty and, finding an open space, turned and took his bearings. Far behind him a dull red glow on the sky marked the location of Cameron-Dam Camp. From this he turned, carefully scanning the heavens, until above the top of the timber he caught the weird glint of the northern lights. That way lay his course.