three o'clock in the morning
From across the river came a cry that was half howl , half bark . Carrigan knew that it was coyote , and not wolf , a coyote whose breed had wandered hundreds of miles north of the prairie country . The gloom gathered in , and yet it was not darkness as the darkness of night is known a thousand miles south . It was the dusky twilight of day where the sun rises at three o'clock in the morning and still throws its ruddy light in the western sky at nine o'clock at night ; where the poplar buds unfold themselves into leaf before one 's very eyes ; where strawberries are green in the morning and red in the afternoon ; where , a little later , one could read newspaper print until midnight by the glow of the sun -- and between the rising and the setting of that sun there would be from eighteen to twenty hours of day . It was evening time in the wonderland of the north , a wonderland hard and frozen and ridden by pain and death in winter , but a paradise upon earth in this month of June . The beauty of it filled Carrigan 's soul , even as he lay on his back in the damp sand . Far south of him steam and steel were coming , and the world would soon know that it was easy to grow wheat at the Arctic Circle , that cucumbers grew to half the size of a man 's arm , that flowers smothered the land and berries turned it scarlet and black .