It
was a thing beckoning to him, a sentient, living wall beyond which was
his other world. The eight hundred miles meant less to him than the
space between himself and that growing, black rim on the horizon.
He reached it as the twilight of the day was dissolving into the deeper
dusk of the night, and put up his tent in the shelter of a clump of
gnarled and storm-beaten spruce. Then he gathered wood and built
himself a fire. He did not count the sticks as he had counted them for
eighteen months. He was wasteful, prodigal. He had traveled forty miles
since morning but he felt no exhaustion. He gathered wood until he had
a great pile of it, and the flames of his fire leaped higher and higher
until the spruce needles crackled and hissed over his head. He boiled a
pot of weak tea and made a supper of caribou meat and a bit of bannock.
Then he sat with his back to a tree and stared into the flames.
The fire leaping and crackling before his eyes was like a powerful
medicine. It stirred things that had lain dormant within him. It
consumed the heavy dross of four years of stupefying torture and
brought back to him vividly the happenings of a yesterday that had
dragged itself on like a century.
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