Close at his heels followed Miki.
Challoner, who was a newly appointed factor of the Great Hudson's
Bay Company, had pitched his camp at tie edge of the lake dose to
the mouth of the creek. There was not much to it--a battered tent,
a still more battered canoe, and a small pile of dunnage. But in
the last glow of the sunset it would have spoken volumes to a man
with an eye trained to the wear and the turmoil of the forests. It
was the outfit of a man who had gone unfearing to the rough edge
of the world. And now what was left of it was returning with him.
To Challoner there was something of human comradeship in these
remnants of things that had gone through the greater part of a
year's fight with him. The canoe was warped and battered and
patched; smoke and storm had blackened his tent until it was the
colour of rusty char, and his grub sacks were next to empty.
Over a small fire title contents of a pan and a pot were brewing
when he returned with Miki at his heels, and close to the heat was
a battered and mended reflector in which a bannock of flour and
water was beginning to brown. In one of the pots was coffee, in
the other a boiling fish.
Miki sat down on his angular haunches so that the odour of the
fish filled his nostrils.
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