Even these were beginning to fade when Mukoki halted the panting team on the summit of a mountainous ridge, and pointed into the north.
"The plains!" For several minutes the three stood silent, gazing out into the gloom of the vast solitudes that swept unbroken to Hudson Bay.

Again Rod's blood was thrilled with the romance of what lay at his feet and far beyond, thrilled with the romance and mystery of that land of the wild which reached for hundreds of miles into the North, and into which the foot of the white man had as yet scarce left its imprint.
Before him, enveloped now in the deep gloom of the northern night, slept a vast unexplored world, a land whose story the passing of ages had left unrevealed.

What tragedies of nature had its silent fastnesses beheld?
What treasure did they hold?
Half a century or more ago the men whose skeletons they had found in the old cabin had braved the perils of those trackless solitudes, and somewhere hundreds of miles out in that black gloom they had found gold, the gold that had fallen as an inheritance to them in the discovery of the old birch-bark map.

And somewhere, somewhere out there was Minnetaki! Across the plain at their feet the three adventurers had raced for their lives from the bloodthirsty Woongas only a week or so before; now they crossed it a second time and at even greater speed, for then they had possessed no dogs.

At the end of another hour Mukoki no longer traveled faster than a walk.