The Country Beyond

Country Beyond, The

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Title: The Country Beyond
Author: James Oliver Curwood
Release Date: December, 2003 [Etext #4743] [Yes, we are more than one year ahead of
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THE COUNTRY BEYOND
A ROMANCE OF THE WILDERNESS
BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
AUTHOR OF THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN, THE FLAMING FOREST, ETC.

A glass of wine once lost a kingdom, a nail turned the tide of a mighty battle, and a
woman's smile once upon a time destroyed the homes of a million people. Thus have
trivial things played their potent parts in the history of human lives; yet these things Peter
did not know.

THE COUNTRY BEYOND
CHAPTER I
Not far from the rugged and storm-whipped north shore of Lake Superior, and south of
the Kaministiqua, yet not as far south as the Rainy River waterway, there lay a paradise
lost in the heart of a wilderness world--and in that paradise "a little corner of hell."
That was what the girl had called it once upon a time, when sobbing out the shame and
the agony of it to herself. That was before Peter had come to leaven the drab of her life.
But the hell was still there.
One would not have guessed its existence, standing at the bald top of Cragg's Ridge this
wonderful thirtieth day of May. In the whiteness of winter one could look off over a
hundred square miles of freezing forest and swamp and river country, with the gleam of
ice-covered lakes here and there, fringed by their black spruce and cedar and balsam--a
country of storm, of deep snows, and men and women whose blood ran red with the thrill
that the hardship and the never-ending adventure of the wild.
But this was spring. And such a spring as had not come to the Canadian north country in
many years. Until three days ago there had been a deluge of warm rains, and since then
the sun had inundated the land with the golden warmth of summer. The last chill was
gone from the air, and the last bit of frozen earth and muck from the deepest and blackest
swamps, North, south, east and west the wilderness world was a glory of bursting life, of
springtime mellowing into summer. Ridge upon ridge of yellows and greens and blacks
swept away into the unknown distances like the billows of a vast sea; and between them
lay the valleys and swamps, the lakes and waterways, glad with the rippling song of
running waters, the sweet scents of early flowering time, and the joyous voice of all
mating creatures.

Just under Cragg's Ridge lay the paradise, a meadow-like sweep of plain that reached
down to the edge of Clearwater Lake, with clumps of poplars and white birch and darker
tapestries of spruce and balsams dotting it like islets in a sea of verdant green. The
flowers were two weeks ahead of their time and the sweet perfumes of late June, instead
of May, rose up out of the plain, and already there was nesting in the velvety splashes of
timber.
In the edge of a clump of this timber, flat on his belly, lay Peter. The love of adventure
was in him, and today he had sallied forth on his most desperate enterprise. For the first
time he had gone alone to the edge of Clearwater Lake, half a mile away; boldly he had
trotted up and down the white strip of beach where the girl's footprints still remained in
the sand, and defiantly he had yipped at the shimmering