"peter.

he was here ag‘in to-day—

Mister Roger,“ Nada cried softly.
"And he told me I was pretty

l‘.
COUNTRY BEYOND
The First New Series Short Stories Far Nartlzwest
of

of

of

a the

By

James 0 liv er Curwood

Illustration: by \Yalt Louderback

OT far from the rugged and storm-whipped north shore In the edge of a clump of this timber lay Peter. The love
of Lake Superior. and south of the Kaministiqua, of adventure was in him, and to-day he had sallied forth on his
yet not as far south as the Rainy River waterway. most desperate enterprise. For the first time he had gone
there lay paradise lost in the heart of wilderness alone to the edge of Clearwater Lake, half mile away;
a
a
a

world—and in that paradise “a little corner of hell.” boldly he had trotted up and down the white strip of beach
That was what the girl had called once upon time, when where the girl’s footprints still remained in the sand, and
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sobbing out the shame and the agony of to herself. That was defiantly he had yipped at the shimmering vastness of the
it

before Peter had come to leaven the drab of her life. But the water, and at the white gulls circling near him in quest of dead
hell was still there. fish flung ashore. Peter was three months old. Yesterday he
One would not have guessed its existence, standing at the bald had been timid pup, shrinking from the bigness and strangeness
a

top of Cragg’s Ridge this wonderful thirtieth day of May. In of everything about him; but today he had braved the lake trail
the whiteness of winter one could look off over hundred square on his own nerve, and nothing had dared to come near him, in
a

miles of freezing forest and swamp and river country, with the spite of his yipping, so that great courage and great desire
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gleam of ice-covered lakes here and there, fringed by their black were born in him.
spruce and cedar and balsam—a country of storm, of deep Therefore, in returning, he had paused in the edge of great
a

snows, of men and women whose blood ran red with the thrill clump of balsams and spruce, and lay flat, his sharp little eyes
and the hardship and the never-ending adventure of the wild. leveled yearningly at the black mystery of its deeper shadows.
But this was spring. And such spring as had not come to And as he lay there, desire and indecision struggling for mas
a

the Canadian north country in many years. tery within him, no power could have told Peter that destinies
Just under Cragg's Ridge lay the paradise, meadow-like greater than his own were working through the soul of the (log
a

sweep of plain that reached down to the edge of Clearwater that was him, and that on his decision to go in or not to go
in

Lake, with clumps of poplars and white birch and darker tapes in—on the triumph of courage or cowardice—there rested the
tries of spruce and balsams dot-ting like islets in a sea of ver , fates of lives greater than his own, of men, and women, and of
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dant green. ‘little children still unborn.

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