The Eternal Maiden Part 13

Covered with glacial snow and ice the slopes of the first ridge of the interior mountains gleamed with frosted silver. Over the white expanse, formed by the countless clefts and indentations of the slope, cyclopean shadows took form, and like eldritch figures joining their hands in a wild dance, loomed terrifyingly before the two men. Their trail now ascended through a gorge which abruptly opened immediately before them. Into this rugged chasm the argent moonlight poured, and from unseen caverns in the pa.s.s glowered monstrous phosph.o.r.escent green and ruby eyes.

From the heights above fragments of clouds descended through the chasm.

In the full moonlight they were transformed into tall aerial beings, of unearthly beauty. They were swathed in luminous robes that fluttered gently upon the air, and like the birds they soared, with tremulous wings resembling films of silver. They moved softly, with great majesty. As he looked upon the descending wraiths, Koolotah saw they had the spirit-semblance of gleaming faces, and that their eyes burned, through the enveloping cloud-veils, like fire. He drew back, afraid.

"The dead . . ." he murmured . . . "We have come unto the land of the dead."

Both stood in silence, reverent, awed, half-afraid.

Then Ootah snapped his whip. He called to the dogs.

"Let us go unto them . . . Let us show that men are not afraid.

_Huk_! _Huk_! _Huk_! Come!"

The dogs howled, the traces tightened, the sleds sped forward. They entered the defile. The trail twisted up the side of the abyss. Less than three feet wide for long stretches, the dogs had to slacken and pa.s.s upward in line, one by one. Covered with new ice it was dangerously slippery, and in climbing the men had to hold to jutting icicles for support.

Ootah was ahead. At times sheer walls of ice confronted him. At certain places there had been drifts, at others glacial fragments had slipped from the mountain above. Before these almost insuperable walls Ootah would pause and with his axe hew steps in the hard ice.

They slowly toiled ahead for an hour. Then a blank sloping ice wall, twice the height of Ootah, blocked the path. He grasped his axe and began hewing a series of ascending steps. He breathed with difficulty; the air in the high alt.i.tude made respiration difficult. He was soon bathed in perspiration. The moisture of his breath and beads of sweat froze about his face, covering him with an icy mask. His eyelashes froze together. He had to pause to melt the quickly congealing tears.

He suffered unendurably. Finally his axe split; the ice was harder than his steel. He uttered an impatient exclamation.

"Thy axe!" he called to Koolotah.

Koolotah swung his axe in the air and over the dog team separating them. Ootah leaped from his feet and caught the axe as it soared above him. In a half hour the step-like trail was cut, and he clambered over the wall. Digging their nails into the indentations, the dogs followed. Then Koolotah and his team scaled the obstruction.

Koolotah felt his heart choking him as it seemed to enlarge within; Ootah, in truth, was not entirely unafraid. Both knew that a slip of the foot would plunge them to instant death. As they ascended the trail, the gathering clouds surrounded them. They could no longer see their dogs. They could not even perceive the blackness of the chasm to their right. Above and below they were enveloped in a silver mist.

Only the reflected glitter of the moonlight on jutting icicles on the opposite indicated the depths so perilously near. Through the mist Koolotah saw the green and crimson eyes of baleful creatures that might, at any moment, spring upon him.

When they reached the inland valley they were both spent in strength.

In sheer relief from the agonized suspense of the journey they sank on their sledges and lay palpitating for an hour or more. But the cold froze their perspiring garments and they had to rise and exercise so as not to freeze to death. Ootah knew that no time could be lost. In the interior mountains the breathing of the hill spirits was becoming more uneasy. And Ootah noted with anxiety the increasing moderation of the atmosphere. That was not well. When the cold relented the hill spirits released the glaciers.

With frantic eagerness they explored the valley. The green gra.s.s whereon Ootah had seen the splendid animals grazing months before was covered with ice. There was no sign of the _ahmingmah_. Ootah's heart sank. He felt very much like weeping.

Suddenly the dogs began to sniff the air and bark hungrily.

"_Ahmingmah_!" Koolotah cried, joyfully.

Ootah released the team--the dogs made a misty black streak in their dash over the ice. The men followed.

In the shelter of a cave they found five musk oxen. They were huddled together and half numb with cold. They roared dully as the howling dogs a.s.saulted them, and rushed lumberingly from the cave into the moonlight. Five great black hulks, with mighty manes of coa.r.s.e hair, they ambled over the ice for a s.p.a.ce of five hundred feet and then, surrounded by the dogs, a.s.sembled in a circle, their backs together, their heads facing the howling dogs. Thus they were prepared to protect themselves from attack.

The dogs, frantic with hunger, made fierce rushes at the animals. Now and then, as the dogs dashed forward, one of the great beasts would charge, its head lowered, and the dogs would leap backward into the air and scatter. Then turning, the animal would rush back to its companions as fast as its numbed legs could carry it.

Through the white vapor of their breath, which half hid their great horned heads, Ootah could see the eyes of the musk-oxen--they were greenish and phosph.o.r.escent. Occasionally the creatures roared sullenly, but the fight was less exciting than it would have been had they been less torpid from hunger and cold.

Ootah called away the dogs, and raised his gun, one which Olafaksoah, in payment for the five sledloads of walrus blubber which he confiscated after Ootah's flight to the mountains, had left with a generous supply of ammunition with a companion. Ootah now realized the value of the payment which he had scorned.

There was a yellow flash in the moonlight--a mighty roar went up. The dogs, with a cyclonic dash, swooped upon the fallen monster, snapping viciously at it as it roared in its death agony. Frightened, the other four scattered--one rushed into the shelter of the cave, the other three, dispersing, soon became diminishing black specks in the moonlight. The dogs would have followed, but Ootah called them back.

One animal was even more than they could manage.

With quick despatch they fell upon the animal with their knives.

Neither spoke--they worked breathlessly. With marvellous skill they peeled off the heavy skin, and with amazing dexterity carved great ma.s.ses of bleeding meat clean from the bones. When they had finished, only a great skeleton remained. Outside the cave, eager, whining, the starving dogs obediently crouched. When they had completed the task of dressing, Ootah lifted his hand and the canines, with howling avidity, fell upon the steaming ma.s.s of entrails.

Upon the two sledges the hunters loaded and lashed securely their treasure of meat. In the moonlight the hot steam rose from the tremulous ma.s.ses and Ootah's nostrils dilated with eager, antic.i.p.atory delight. The blood dripped upon the snow and Ootah's stomach ached.

He had not dared to think of eating until now. Their hands shaking with nervous hunger, the two fell upon the remaining meat. They feasted with that savage hungry joy known only to human creatures who have faced starvation. When they started on the return journey there was a new vibrant elasticity in their steps.

Ootah snapped his whip and sang.

And his heart sang, too, of Annadoah.

Looking at the clouds, as they drifted through the valley, Ootah imagined he saw Annadoah lying upon her couch asleep, and in the faint light of an oil lamp he saw upon her face a pleased smile.

"Of what doth Annadoah dream?" Ootah asked the winds.

"Of springtime when the flowers bloom," the winds replied.

"And Annadoah will move to a new skin tent with Ootah!" he said, joyously, exultantly. "Ootah will bring food unto Annadoah and she will reward him with her love."

"Foolish Ootah," moaned the wind, "love cannot be won with food, neither with _ahmingmah_ meat nor walrus blubber." Ootah felt his heart sink; a vague and heavy misgiving filled him. Being very simple, he had always thought that by securing wealth, in dogs and food, in guns and ammunition, and by achieving pre-eminence on the hunt, he should win Annadoah's confidence and love. But now, upon the breath of the winds, by the voices of nature, doubt came into his heart. The mistake of many men the world over, and of many wiser than he, he could not understand just why this was--this thing the winds said, and which his own heart correspondingly whispered. With food he might possibly win Annadoah's consent to be his wife, yes, he knew that; but Annadoah's love--that was another thing. Surely, he now realized, as he strode along, that by simply giving her food he could not expect to stir in her heart a response to that which throbbed in his. But why?

Singularly he never thought of the bravery of his seeking food on this perilous adventure, an act which, had he known it, had indeed touched the heart of the beautiful maiden.

With the quick atmospheric change of the arctic--a phenomenon common to zones of extreme temperature--the wind steadily increased in velocity and warmth. The shallow moon-shot clouds on the ice thickened and swept softly under the two travellers' feet. Above their waists the air was clear--they saw each other distinctly in the moonlight. Yet their dogs, hidden in the low-lying vapor, were invisible. Great ma.s.ses of clouds slowly piled along the horizon and the moon was often obscured. Then the two walked in a darkness so thick it seemed palpable.

"Hark!" Ootah called, during one of these spells. "What is that?" A shuddering sound split the air; the ice field on which they travelled vibrated with an ominous jar. The echoes of splitting ice came like distant explosions.

"Have we disturbed the spirits of the hills?" asked Koolotah, in a whisper.

"No, no," answered Ootah, anxiously. "_Huk_! _Huk_!" He snapped his whip and urged the dogs. They had not gone twenty paces when from the interior heights of Greenland came a series of m.u.f.fled explosions.

Undoubtedly the hill spirits had wakened, and, angry, were hurling their terrible weapons.

They reached, in due course, the top of a mountain ridge down part of the gla.s.sy slopes of which they had to make their way to the entrance of the cleft in which the trail they had so laboriously hewn lay. The gorge yawned blackly some five hundred feet below. In antic.i.p.ation of their return with loaded sledges, Ootah, on the last reach of their upland climb, had chopped on the smooth snows of the mountainside a narrow path that ran backward and forward in the fashion of a gently inclining elongated spiral. The mountain sloped at an angle of eighty degrees, but by descending cautiously along this circuitous trail a safe descent was possible.

While Ootah and his companion stood on the peak, the moon pa.s.sed behind a veil of clouds and Ootah felt two soft wraith-like hands pa.s.s over his face--cloud-hands which his simple mind believed were sentient things. His heart for the moment seemed to stop. Thus the kind spirits warn men of danger.

At that instant a stinging sound smote the air. The glacial side of the mountain trembled, and as the moon reappeared, on the icy slopes Ootah saw narrow black cracks zigzagging in various directions. A cataclysmic rumbling sounded deep in the earth.

When the echoes died away he turned to Koolotah.

"Be brave of heart. Let us go--there is no time to lose."

"_Huk_! _Huk_! _Huk_!" They urged the dogs gently. Arranging themselves instinctively in single file, the traces slackening, the wonderful dogs, with feline caution, crept ahead. Lowering their bodies, each behind his sledge, Ootah and Koolotah began moving stealthily downward. With one hand each clung to the rough icy projections of the slope; with the other they held the rear upstander of their sleds to prevent them from sliding, with their precious loads of meat, down the mountainside.

Half way down, Ootah uttered a cry.

His quick ear detected a faint splitting noise, like the crack of young ice in forming, under his feet. In an instant he realized their danger.

At the time he had reached a hollow in the perilous slope. The dogs ahead, with quick instinct, retreated and crouched at his feet in the sheltering cradle.