Gods Country--And the Woman | Page 2

had pointed his canoe
straight UP the Dubawnt waterways, and was a hundred and twenty
miles nearer to civilization. He had been through these waterways twice
before, and he knew that there was not a white man within a hundred
and fifty miles of him. And as for a white woman--
Weyman stopped his paddling where there was no current, and leaned
back in his canoe for a breathing space, and to fill his pipe. A WHITE
WOMAN! Would he stare at her like a fool when he saw her again for
the first time? Eighteen months ago he had seen a white woman over at
Fort Churchill--the English clerk's wife, thirty, with a sprinkle of gray
in her blond hair, and pale blue eyes. Fresh from the Garden of Eden,
he had wondered why the half-dozen white men over there regarded her
as they did. Long ago, in the maddening gloom of the Arctic night, he
had learned to understand. At Fond du Lac, when Weyman had first
come up into the forest country, he had said to the factor: "It's glorious!
It's God's Country!" And the factor had turned his tired, empty eyes
upon him with the words: "It was--before SHE went. But no country is
God's Country without a woman," and then he took Philip to the lonely
grave under a huge lob-stick spruce, and told him in a few words how
one woman had made life for him. Even then Philip could not fully
understand. But he did now.
He resumed his paddling, his gray eyes alert. His aloneness and the
bigness of the world in which, so far as he knew, he was the only
human atom, did not weigh heavily upon him. He loved this bigness
and emptiness and the glory of solitude. It was middle autumn, and
close to noon of a day unmarred by cloud above, and warm with
sunlight. He was following close to the west shore of the lake. The
opposite shore was a mile away. He was so near to the rock-lined beach
that he could hear the soft throat-cries of the moose-birds. And what he
saw, so far as his eyes could see in all directions, was "God's
Country"--a glory of colour that was like a great master painting. The
birch had turned to red and gold. From out of the rocks rose trees that

were great crimson splashes of mountain-ash berries framed against the
dark lustre of balsam and cedar and spruce.
Without reason, Philip was listening again to the quiet lifeless words of
Jasper, the factor over at Fond du Lac, as he described the day when he
and his young wife first came up through the wonderland of the North.
"No country is God's Country without a woman!" He found the words
running in an unpleasant monotone through his brain. He had made up
his mind that he would strike Fond du Lac on his way down, for
Jasper's words and the hopeless picture he had made that day beside the
little cross under the spruce had made them brothers in a strange sort of
way. Besides, Jasper would furnish him with a couple of Indians, and a
sledge and dogs if the snows came early.
In a break between the rocks Philip saw a white strip of sand, and
turned his canoe in to shore. He had been paddling since five o'clock,
and in the six hours had made eighteen miles. Yet he felt no fatigue as
he stood up and stretched himself. He remembered how different it had
been four years ago when Hill, the Hudson's Bay Company's man down
at Prince Albert, had looked him over with skeptical and uneasy eyes,
encouraging him with the words: "You're going to a funeral, young
man, and it's your own. You won't make God's House, much less
Hudson's Bay!"
Weyman laughed joyously.
"Fooled 'em--fooled 'em all!" he told himself. "We'll wager a dollar to a
doughnut that we're the toughest looking specimen that ever drifted
down from Coronation Gulf, or any other gulf. A DOUGHNUT! I'd
trade a gold nugget as big as my fist for a doughnut or a piece of pie
right this minute. Doughnuts an' pie--real old pumpkin pie--an'
cranberry sauce, 'n' POTATOES! Good Lord, and they're only six
hundred miles away, carloads of 'em!"
He began to whistle as he pulled his rubber dunnage sack out of the
canoe. Suddenly he stopped, his eyes staring at the smooth white floor
of sand. A bear had been there before him, and quite recently. Weyman
had killed fresh meat the day before, but the instinct of the naturalist

and the woodsman kept him from singing or whistling, two things
which he was very much inclined to do on this particular day. He had
no suspicion