Out of the misery and discomfort of her captivity she had just emerged. She had found her companions and the life for which she had hungered all through those unhappy months. Hardly had she realised the full extent of her good fortune when man reappeared to take it all away from her. But Queen was in no submissive mood. She had fought for her freedom and she would fight again. She would watch with such care that she would not again be caught at a disadvantage. She hardly gave herself time to eat. Her ears were constantly pricked high. Her eyes, afire with her emotions, never for a moment abandoned their vigilance. But her nervous dread of man soured the sweetness of the wilds and Queen moved over the snows with the old feeling of the trap beating in her heart, moved without resting and, out of habit, moved northward.
They came next day to the strip of woodland whose heroic poplars silently guard the Saskatchewan. There they stopped and there the full horror of the trap took possession of Queen. She was afraid of her own shadow and the slightest sound startled her. A partridge drumming in the woods sent her madly loping through space.
The winter evening came early. The distant sun lowered in the southwest with a sad, yellow glare; and in the north a gleaming, pearly streak foretold a brilliant display of northern lights. That streak interested Queen and she watched it as the darkness thickened, and as she watched it, looking up from time to time, it grew brighter. Faint shimmering colours appeared at the eastern end of the streak and slowly moved across it to the west, vanishing in the west and reappearing brighter in the east. Many times she had seen these lights, but only once, somewhere in her half-forgotten childhood, had she seen them so bright and so fascinating.
They were standing directly in front of a cleft in the shadowy wall of trees. The cleft led like a roadway to the banks and the river below. There they could see more of the lights, the portion that glowed in the lower part of the sky and danced about over the shadowy tops of the trees on the other shore.
It was during a moment when the lights were so compelling that all of them had stopped to look when there appeared in the cleft the giant body of a moose, his antlers like a magnificent oak cut clearly against the scintillating colours of the aurora borealis. His coming had been so swift, so sudden and so imperceptible that it took them some time to realise that a living thing stood within a few yards of them, looking at them. The herd hastily retreated a short distance; but as soon as they stopped to look back the enormous animal got frightened, turned and vanished down the banks.