noon
He prepared another manuscript which for personal reasons was never published , the story of a dark-eyed girl of the First People -- but this is to come . It has to do with the last tragic weeks of this winter of 1907 , in which it was a toss-up between all things of flesh and blood in the Northland to see which would win -- life or death -- and in which a pair of dark eyes and a voice from the First People turned a sociologist into a possible Member of Parliament . * * * * * At the end of his first day 's struggle Roscoe built himself a camp in a bit of scrub timber , which was not much more than brush . If he had been an older hand he would have observed that this bit of timber , and every tree and bush that he had passed since noon , was stripped and dead on the side that faced the north . It was a sign of the Great Barrens , and of the fierce storms that swept over them , destroying even the life of the trees . He cooked and ate his last food the following day , and went on . The small timber turned to scrub , and the scrub , in time , to vast snow wastes over which the storm swept mercilessly .