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Updated: June 9, 2025
Then he came out upon a plain, and the stillness, the billion stars in the clear vault of the sky, and the keen air that carried with it a breath of the Arctic barrens made him alert and questioning. He faced the direction of the wind. Somewhere off there, far to the south and west, was Gray Wolf.
He sprang from Gallic stock, a descendant of the old coureurs who for two centuries wandered in search of furs across the wilderness, even as far as the northern barrens, before the Briton came to farm. It was a waltz he played at least, that was the time; but the music seemed filled with the sighing of limitless pines, and the air was probably known in France three hundred years ago.
After the plover came the ducks in myriads, filling the ponds and flashets of the vast barrens with tumultuous quacking; and the young wolves learned, like the foxes, to decoy the silly birds by rousing their curiosity.
Always gold that first, and then ice, snow, endless nights, desolate barrens, and craggy mountains frowning everlastingly upon a blasted land in which men fought against odds and only the fittest survived. It was gold that had been Alaska's doom. When people thought of it, they visioned nothing beyond the old stampede days, the Chilkoot, White Horse, Dawson, and Circle City.
Everywhere the small man has been forced to retire into forests, deserts, and icy barrens before the taller and stronger man. The folk-lore of Europe is full of traditions of a race of dwarfs, and its conflict with men of larger mould, and there are various indications that this race was once widespread.
Such spots are found only about the barrens, which are treeless plains scattered here and there throughout the great northern wilderness. The scattered thickets on such plains are, without doubt, the islands of the ancient lakes that once covered them.
But your hat and mighty pretty it is too, as YOU'VE fixed it up is only regular Dunstable stock, which we could put down at Pine Barrens for four and a half cents a piece, net. Yet I suppose you paid nearly twenty-five cents for it at the Agency!" Oddly enough this cool appraisement of her costume did not incense the young lady as it ought to have done.
Again and again the struggling ponies floundered to their ears, or slid head-long down some steep declivity. Twice Hamlin was thrown, and once the Osage was crushed between floating cakes and submerged in the icy stream. Across the open barrens swept the wind into their faces, a ceaseless buffeting, chilling to the marrow; their eyes burned in the snow-glare.
In answer to the stereotyped preliminaries he stated that his name was that of his father's, a descendant of the coureurs du bois. His mother with a shrug of the shoulders and flash of teeth was a breed. He was born somewhere in the Barrens, on a hunting trip, he did not know where. Ah, oui, men called him an old-timer.
"Heigh ho!" he sighed, as he cast a sweeping glance over the widespread waste of waters on which nothing floated save a few belated icebergs, and then inland over weary miles of desolate upland barrens, treeless, moss-covered, and painfully rugged. "It is tough luck to be shut up here like birds in a cage, with no chance of the door being opened before next summer.
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