"To fight like the tiger!" Ravage--the struggle to possess from all the
world what one wished for one's self, and to do it without mercy and
without fear-that was the clear plan in the primitive world, where action
was more than speech and dominance than knowledge. Was not civilisation
a mistake, and religion the insinuating delusion designed to cover it up;
or, if not designed, accepted by the original few who saw that humanity
could not turn back, and must even go forward with illusions, lest in
mere despair all men died and the world died with them?

His eyes wandered to the raft where the men were singing, and he
remembered the threat made: that if he came again to the Cote Dorion he
"would get what for!" He remembered the warning of Rouge Gosselin
conveyed by Jolicoeur, and a sinister smile crossed over his face. The
contradictions of his own thoughts came home to him suddenly, for was it
not the case that his physical strength alone, no matter what his skill,
would be of small service to him in a dark corner of contest? Primitive
ideas could only hold in a primitive world. His real weapon was his
brain, that which civilisation had given him in lieu of primitive prowess
and the giant's strength.

They had come to a long piece of corduroy-road, and the horse's hoofs
struck rumbling hollow sounds from the floor of cedar logs. There was a
swamp on one side where fire-flies were flickering, and there flashed
into Charley Steele's mind some verses he had once learned at school:

"They made her a grave too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true--"

It kept repeating itself in his brain in a strange dreary monotone.