The Flaming Forest

Flaming Forest, The

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Title: The Flaming Forest
Author: James Oliver Curwood
Release Date: December, 2003 [Etext #4702] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 3,
2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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THE FLAMING FOREST
BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
AUTHOR OF THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN, THE COUNTRY
BEYOND, THE ALASKAN, ETC.

THE FLAMING FOREST

I
An hour ago, under the marvelous canopy of the blue northern sky,
David Carrigan, Sergeant in His Most Excellent Majesty's Royal
Northwest Mounted Police, had hummed softly to himself, and had
thanked God that he was alive. He had blessed McVane, superintendent
of "N" Division at Athabasca Landing, for detailing him to the mission
on which he was bent. He was glad that he was traveling alone, and in
the deep forest, and that for many weeks his adventure would carry him
deeper and deeper into his beloved north. Making his noonday tea over
a fire at the edge of the river, with the green forest crowding like an
inundation on three sides of him, he had come to the conclusion--for
the hundredth time, perhaps--that it was a nice thing to be alone in the
world, for he was on what his comrades at the Landing called a "bad
assignment."
"If anything happens to me," Carrigan had said to McVane, "there isn't
anybody in particular to notify. I lost out in the matter of family a long
time ago."
He was not a man who talked much about himself, even to the
superintendent of "N" Division, yet there were a thousand who loved
Dave Carrigan, and many who placed their confidences in him.
Superintendent Me Vane had one story which he might have told, but
he kept it to himself, instinctively sensing the sacredness of it. Even
Carrigan did not know that the one thing which never passed his lips

was known to McVane.
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