Isobel : A Romance of the Northern Trail Part 19

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HER

W. M. April 15, 1908

He did not stop when it was time for dinner, but carried rocks from a ridge a couple of hundred yards away, and built a cairn four feet high around the sapling, so that storm or wild animals could not knock it down. Then he began a search in the warmest and sunniest parts of the forest, where the green tips of plant life were beginning to reveal themselves. He found snowflowers, redglow, and bakneesh, and dug up root after root, and at last, peeping out from between two rocks, he found the arrowlike tip of a blue flower. The bakneesh roots he planted about the cairn, and the blue flower he planted by itself at the head of the grave.

It was long past midday when he returned to the cabin, and once more he was oppressed by the appalling loneliness of it. It was not as he had thought it would be. Deane's spirit and companionship had seemed to be nearer to him beside his campfires and in the forest. He cooked a meal over the stove, but the snapping of the fire seemed strange and unnatural in the deserted room. Even the air he breathed was heavy with the oppression of death and broken hopes. He found it difficult to swallow the food he had cooked, though he had eaten nothing since morning. When he was done he looked at his watch. It was four o'clock.

The northern sun had dropped behind the distant forests and was followed now by the thickening gloom of early evening. For a few moments Billy stood motionless outside the cabin. Behind him an owl hooted its lonely mating-song. Over his head a brush sparrow twittered. It was that hour, just between the end of day and the beginning of night, when the wilderness holds its breath and all is still. Billy clenched his hands and listened. He could not keep back the break that was in his breath. Something out there in the silence and the gathering darkness was calling him-- calling him away from the cabin, away from the grave, and the gray, dead waste of the Barren. He turned back into the cabin and put his things into the pack. He took the little mitten to keep with his other treasures, and then he went out and closed the door behind him. He pa.s.sed close to the grave and for the last time gazed upon the spot where Deane lay buried.

"Good-by, old man," he whispered. Goodby--"

The owl hooted louder as he turned his face into the west. It made him shiver, and he hurried his steps into the unbroken wilderness that lay for hundreds of miles between him and the post at Fond du Lac.

XX

THE LETTER

Days and weeks and months of a loneliness which Billy had never known before followed after his pilgrimage to Deane's grave. It was more than loneliness. He had known loneliness, the heartbreak and the longing of it, in the black and silent chaos of the arctic night; he had almost gone mad of it, and he had seen Pelliter nearly die for a glimpse of the sun and the sound of a voice. But this was different.

It was something that ate deeper at his soul each day and each night that he lived. He had believed that thought of Isobel and his memories of her would make him happier, even though he never saw her again. But in this he was mistaken. The wilderness does not lend to forgetfulness, and each day her voice seemed nearer and more real to him, and she became more and more insistently a part of his thoughts.

Never an hour of the day pa.s.sed that he did not ask himself where she was. He hoped that she and the baby Isobel had returned to the old home in Montreal, where they would surely find friends and be cared for. And yet the dread was upon him that she had remained in the wilderness, that her love for Deane would keep her there, and that she would find a woman's work at some post between the Height of Land and the Barrens. At times there possessed him an overwhelming desire to return to McTabb's cabin and find where they had gone. But he fought against this desire as a man fights against death. He knew that once he surrendered himself to the temptation to be near her again he would lose much that he had won in his struggle during the days of plague in Couchee's cabin.

So his feet carried him steadily westward, while the invisible hands tugged at him from behind. He did not go straight to Fond du Lac, but spent nearly three weeks with a trapper whom he ran across on the Pipestone River. It was June when he struck Fond du Lac, and he remained there a month. He had more than half expected to pa.s.s the winter there, but the factor at the post proved a disagreeable acquaintance, and he did not like the country. So early in July he set out deeper into the Athabasca country to the west, followed the northern sh.o.r.e of the big lake, and two months later came to Fort Chippewyan, near the mouth of the Slave River.

He struck Chippewyan at a fortunate time. A government geological and map-making party was just preparing to leave for the terra incognita between the Great Slave and the Great Bear, and the three men who had come up from Ottawa urged Billy to join them. He jumped at the opportunity, and remained with them until the party returned to the Mackenzie River by the way of Fort Providence five months later. He remained at Fort Providence until late spring, and then came down to Fort Wrigley, where he had several friends in the service. Fifteen months of wandering had had their effect upon him. He could no longer resist the call of the wanderl.u.s.t. It urged him from place to place, and stronger and stronger grew in him the desire to return to his old country along the sh.o.r.es of the big Bay far to the west. He had partly planned to join the railroad builders on the new trans-continental in the mountains of British Columbia, but in August, instead of finding himself at Edmonton or Tete Jaune Cache, he was at Prince Albert, three hundred and fifty miles to the east. From this point he struck northward with a party of company men into the Lac La Ronge country, and in October swung eastward alone through the Sissipuk and Burntwood waterways to Nelson House. He continued northward after a week's rest, and on the eighteenth of December the first of the two great storms which made the winter of 1909-10 one of the most tragic in the history of the far northern people overtook him thirty miles from York Factory. It took him five days to reach the post, where he was held up for several weeks. These were the first of those terrible weeks of famine and intense cold during which more than fifteen hundred people died in the north country. From the Barren Lands to the edge of the southern watershed the earth lay under from four to six feet of snow, and from the middle of December until late in January the temperature did not rise above forty degrees below zero, and remained for the most of the time between fifty and sixty. From all points in the wilderness reports of starvation and death came to the company's posts. Trap lines could not be followed because of the intense cold. Moose, caribou, and even the furred animals had buried themselves under the snow. Indians and half-breeds dragged themselves into the posts. Twice at York Factory Billy saw mothers who brought dead babies in their arms. One day a white trapper came in with his dogs and sledge, and on the sledge, wrapped in a bearskin, was his wife, who had died fifty miles back in the forest.

During these terrible weeks Billy found it impossible to keep Isobel and the baby Isobel out of his mind night or day. The fear grew in him that somewhere in the wilderness they were suffering as others were suffering. So obsessed did he become with the thought that he had a terrible dream one night, and in that dream baby Isobel's face appeared to him, a deathlike mask, white and cold and thinned by starvation. The vision decided him. He would go to Fort Churchill, and if McTabb had not been driven in he would go to his cabin, over on the Little Beaver, and learn what had become of Isobel and the little girl. A few days later, on the twenty-seventh day of January, there came a sudden rise in the temperature, and Billy prepared at once to take advantage of the change. A half-breed, on his way to Churchill, accompanied him, and they set out together the following morning. On the twentieth of February they arrived at Fort Churchill.

Billy went immediately to detachment headquarters. There had been several changes in two years, and there was only one of the old force to shake hands with him. His first inquiry was about McTabb and Isobel Deane. Neither was at Churchill, nor had been there since the arrival of the new officer in charge. But there was mail for Billy-- three letters. There had been half a dozen others, but they were now following up his old trails somewhere out in the wilderness. These three had been returned recently from Fond du Lac. One was from Pelliter, the fourth he had written, he said, without an answer. The "kid" had come-- a girl-- and he wondered if Billy was dead. The second letter was from his Cobalt partner.

The third he turned over several times before he opened it. It did not look much like a letter. It was torn and ragged at the edges, and was so soiled and water-stained that the address on it was only partly legible. It had been to Fond du Lac, and from there it had followed him to Fort Chippewyan. He opened it and found that the writing inside was scarcely more legible than the inscription on the envelope. The last words were quite plain, and he gave a low cry when he found that it was from Rookie McTabb.

He went close to a window and tried to make out what McTabb had written. Here and there, where water had not obliterated the writing, he could make out a line or a few words. Nearly all was gone but the last paragraph, and when Billy came to this and read the first words of it his heart seemed all at once to die within him, and he could not see. Word by word he made out the rest after that, and when he was done he turned his stony face to the white whirl of the storm outside the window, his lips as dry as though he had pa.s.sed through a fever.

A part of that last paragraph was unintelligible, but enough was left to tell him what had happened in the cabin down on the Little Beaver.

McTabb had written:

"We thought she was getting well... took sick again.... did everything... could. But it didn't do any good,... died just five weeks to a day after you left. We buried her just behind the cabin.

G.o.d... that kid... You don't know how I got to love her, Billy....

give her up..."

McTabb had written a dozen lines after that, but all of them were a water-stained and unintelligible blur.

Billy crushed the letter in his hand. The new inspector wondered what terrible news he had received as he walked out into the blinding chaos of the storm.

XXI

THE FIGHTING SPARK

For ten minutes Billy buried himself blindly in the storm. He scarcely knew which direction he took, but at last he found himself in the shelter of the forest, and he was whispering Isobel's name over and over again to himself.

"Dead-- dead--" he moaned. "She is dead-- dead--"

And then there rushed upon him, crushing back his deeper grief, a thought of the baby Isobel. She was still with McTabb down on the Little Beaver. In the blur of the storm he read again what he could make out of Rookie's letter. Something in that last paragraph struck him with a deadly fear. "G.o.d... that kid... You, don't know how I got to love her, Billy,... give her up..."

What did it mean? What had McTabb told him in that part of the letter that was gone?

The reaction came as he put the letter back into his pocket. He walked swiftly back to the inspector's office.

"I'm going down to the Little Beaver. I'm going to start to-day," he said. "Who is there in Churchill that I can get to go with me?"

Two hours later Billy was ready to start, with an Indian as a companion. Dogs could not be had for love or money, and they set out on snowshoes with two weeks' supply of provisions, striking south and west. The remainder of that day and the next they traveled with but little rest. Each hour that pa.s.sed added to Billy's mad impatience to reach McTabb's cabin.

With the morning of the third day began the second of those two terrible storms which swept over the northland in that winter of famine and death. In spite of the Indian's advice to build a permanent camp until the temperature rose again Billy insisted on pushing ahead.

The fifth night, in the wild Barren country west of the Etawney, his Indian failed to keep up the fire, and when Billy investigated he found him half dead with a strange sickness. He made the Indian's balsam shelter snow and wind proof, cut wood, and waited. The temperature continued to fall, and the cold became intense. Each day the provisions grew less, and at last the time came when Billy knew that he was standing face to face with the Great Peril. He went farther and farther from camp in his search for game. Even the brush sparrows and snow-hawks were gone. Once the thought came to him that be might take what food was left and accept the little chance that remained of saving himself. But the idea never got farther than a first thought. On the twelfth day the Indian died. It was a terrible day. There was food for another twenty-four hours.

Billy packed it, together with his blankets and a few pieces of tinware. He wondered if the Indian had died of a contagious disease.

Anyway, he made up his mind to put out the warning for others if they came that way, and over the dead Indian's balsam shelter he planted a sapling, and at the end of the sapling he fastened a strip of red cotton cloth-- the plague signal of the north.

Than he struck out through the deep snows and the twisting storm, knowing that there was no more than one chance in a thousand ahead of him, and that the one chance was to keep the wind at his back.

At the end of his first day's struggle Billy built himself a camp in a bit of scrub timber which was not much more than bush. He had observed that the timber and that every tree and bush he had pa.s.sed since noon was stripped and dead on the side that faced the north. 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. All this day he looked for game, for a flutter of bird life; he chewed bark, and in the afternoon got a mouthful of foxbite, which made his throat swell until he could scarcely breathe. At night he made tea, but had nothing to eat. His hunger was acute and painful. It was torture the next day-- the third-- for the process of starvation is a rapid one in this country where only the fittest survive on from four to five meals a day. He camped, built a small bush-fire at night, and slept. He almost failed to rouse himself on the morning that followed, and when he staggered to his feet and felt the cutting sting of the storm still in his face and heard the swishing wail of it over the Barren he knew that at last the hour had come when he was standing face to face with the Almighty.

For some strange reason he was not frightened at the situation. He found that even over the level s.p.a.ces he could scarce drag his snow-shoes, but this had ceased to alarm him as he had been alarmed at first. He went on, hour after hour, weaker and weaker. Within himself there was still life which reasoned that if death were to come it could not come in a better way. It at least promised to be painless-- even pleasant. The sharp, stinging pains of hunger, like little electrical knives piercing him, were gone; he no longer experienced a sensation of intense cold; he almost felt that he could lie down in the drifted snow and sleep peacefully. He knew what it would be-- a sleep without end, with the arctic foxes to pick his bones afterward-- and so he resisted the temptation and forced himself onward. The storm still swept straight west from Hudson's Bay, bringing with it endless volleys of snow, round and hard as fine shot, snow that had at first seemed to pierce his flesh and which swished past his feet as if trying to trip him and tossed itself in windrows and mountains in his path. If he could only find timber, shelter! That was what he worked for now. When he had last looked at his watch it was nine o'clock in the morning; now it was late in the afternoon. It might as well have been night. The storm had long since half blinded him. He could not see a dozen paces ahead. But the little life in him still reasoned bravely. It was a heroic spark of life, a fighting spark, and hard to put out. It told him that when he came to shelter he would at least feel it, and that he must fight until the last. The pack on his back held no significance and no weight for him. He might have traveled a mile or ten miles an hour and he would not have sensed the difference.

Most men would have buried themselves in the snow and died in comfort, dreaming the pleasant dreams that come as a sort of recompense to the unfortunate who dies of starvation and cold. But the fighting spark commanded Billy to die upon his feet if he died at all. It was this spark which brought him at last to a bit of timber thick enough to give him shelter from wind and snow. It burned a little more warmly then. It flared up and gave him new vision. And then, for the first time, he realized that it must be night. For a light was burning ahead of him, and all else was gloom. His first thought was that it was a campfire miles and miles away. Then it drew nearer, until he knew that it was a light in a cabin window. He dragged himself toward it, and when he came to the door he tried to shout. But no sound fell from his swollen lips. It seemed an hour before he could twist his feet out of his snow-shoes. Then he groped for a latch, pressed against the door, and plunged in.

What he saw was like a picture suddenly revealed for an instant by a flashlight. In the cabin there were four men. Two sat at a table directly in front of him. One held a dice box poised in the air, and had turned a rough, bearded face toward him. The other was a younger man, and in this moment it struck Billy as strange that he should be clutching a can of beans between his hands. A third man stared from where he had been looking down upon the dice-play of the other two. As Billy came in he was in the act of lowering a half-filled bottle from his lips. The fourth man sat on the edge of a bunk, with a face so white and thin that he might have been taken for a corpse if it had not been for the dark glare in his sunken eyes. Billy smelled the odor of whisky; he smelled food. He saw no sign of welcome in the faces turned toward him, but he advanced upon them, mumbling incoherently.

And then the spark, the fighting spark in him, gave out, and he crumpled down on the floor. He heard a voice which came to him from a great distance, and which said, "Who the h.e.l.l is this?" and then, after what seemed to be a long time, he heard that same voice say, "Pitch him back into the snow."

After that he lost consciousness. But in that last moment between light and darkness he experienced a strange thrill that made him want to spring to his feet, for it seemed to him that he had recognized the voice that had said "Pitch him back into the snow."

XXII

INTO THE SOUTH

A long time before he awoke Billy knew that he was not in the snow, and that hot stuff was running down his throat. When he opened his eyes there was no longer a light burning in the cabin. It was day. He felt strangely comfortable, but there was thing in the cabin that stirred him from his rest. It was the odor of frying bacon. All of his hunger had come back. The joy of life, of antic.i.p.ation, shone in his thin face as he pulled himself up. Another face-- the bearded face-- red-eyed, almost animal-like in its fierce questioning, bent over him.

"Where's your grub, pardner?"

The question was like a stab. Billy did not hear his own voice as he explained.

"Got none!" The bearded man's voice was like a bellow as he turned upon the others, "He's got no grub!"

In that moment Billy choked back the cry on his lips. He knew the voice now-- and the man. It was Bucky Smith! He half rose to his feet and then dropped back. Bucky had not recognized him. His own beard, s.h.a.ggy hair, and pinched face had saved him from recognition. Fate had played his way.

"We'll divvy up, Bucky," came a weak voice. It was from the thin, white-faced man who had sat corpselike on the edge of his bunk the night before.

"Divvy h.e.l.l!" growled the other. "It's up to you-- you 'n' Sweedy.