James Oliver Curwood

The Flaming Forest James Oliver Curwood

Of that, too, he had been thinking an hour ago. It was the thing which, first of all, had driven him into the north. And though it had twisted and disrupted the earth under his feet for a time, it had brought its compensation. For he had come to love the north with a passionate devotion. It was, in a way, his God. It seemed to him that the time had never been when he had lived any other life than this under the open skies. He was thirty seven now. A bit of a philosopher, as philosophy comes to one in a sun cleaned and unpolluted air, A good humored brother of humanity, even when he put manacles on other men's wrists; graying a little over the temples and a lover of life. Above all else he was that. A lover of life. A worshiper at the shrine of God's Country. So he sat, that hour ago, deep in the wilderness eighty miles north of Athabasca Landing, congratulating himself on the present conditions of his existence.