The Heart of Unaga Part 42

The minutes stretched out into the better part of half an hour before the sling was successfully adjusted about the tree-trunk. But at last Marcel stood up from his task and regarded the moose head swinging just beyond the face of the cliff. Then he followed Keeko's gaze, which was in the direction of the upstanding roots of the tree where they had been partially torn from their hold in the ground. It was only for a moment, however. He had no misgivings. Forthwith he divested himself of his pea-jacket and stood ready for the final task.

"What--what can I do now?"

Keeko's voice refused that steadiness which was its wont, and Marcel laughed.

"Do? Why just sit around and act audience while I do the balancing act.

Guess that old moose is yearning for his place out there. He didn't figure on the honour, but--he's earned it."

And, despite her fears Keeko smiled at the boyishness of it all.

In a moment her breath was drawn sharply. Marcel was out on the log. He had pa.s.sed from the cliff edge and was sitting astride of the trunk with his feet and calves gripping tight about it like a horseman on a bucking broncho. His progress was rapid. He lifted the sling and set it out at the full reach of his powerful arms, and then drew himself out after it.

Keeko watched. She watched with wide, apprehensive eyes. It was a fear quite new to her. A vivid imagination possessed her. She saw the great body of this man lying crushed and broken upon the rocks below, and the terror of it left her with nerves and muscles straining. She did not pause to consider the reason of her fears. She knew it, and acknowledged it to herself. In the battle of life which she had been forced to fight a champion had suddenly appeared. A champion such as she had sometimes dreamed of. And with perfect trust and simple faith she had yielded her soul to him.

Foot by foot Marcel moved out, always thrusting his trophy ahead of him.

There was a growing vibration in the leaning tree. It laboured under his weight. He pressed on, his whole mind and purpose concentrated. Keeko watched the roots for a sign of the strain. There was none. She glanced out at the distance he yet had to go. And the length of it prompted a warning cry she dared not utter. Farther and farther he pa.s.sed on. Then came a pause that suggested uncertainty.

Keeko's heart leapt. Was he dizzy? Had he suddenly become aware of the perilous depth below him? Was his nerve----?

The moment pa.s.sed. He was moving on again. The far off head of the tree was coming nearer, but the vibration had increased with his movements.

Would the roots hold? Could they be expected to with the balance so heavily against them? Keeko could look no longer, and, in the agony of the moment, she seized hold of the upstanding roots and clung to them in a ridiculously impotent frenzy of hope that the weight of her own light body might help him.

The vibrations of the tree ceased and Keeko raised her terrified eyes for the meaning.

A wave of partial relief swept over her. Marcel had reached his goal. He had swung up the great moose head to set it in position. It was a breathless moment. She understood that his greatest difficulties had begun, and again she withdrew her gaze. But she clung to the roots of the tree, desperately determined that if the tree fell it should drag her to the disaster waiting upon him.

The suspense seemed endless. But at last there was renewed vibration in the tree. Keeko raised her eyes again. Marcel was moving backwards, and there, right at the broken head of the tree, the fleshless skull with its magnificent antlers was set up in its place.

The girl was still clinging to the upstanding roots when Marcel leapt from his seat on the trunk and stood confronting her. His quick, smiling eyes took in the meaning of the situation at once. He reached out and removed the hands from their task, and, in doing so, he retained them longer than was necessary.

"You guessed you could hold that up if it--fell?" he asked.

And Keeko's reply was full of confusion.

"I didn't think," she stammered. "I didn't know what to do. It was shaking, and I thought--I thought----"

"You didn't want me to get smashed on the rocks below. Well--say--!"

Marcel turned abruptly and pointed at the splendid antlers. "There he is," he laughed. "Isn't he a dandy? You could see him miles. And he's feeling good. He just told me that before I quit him. And he said he'd stop right there and see no harm came along your way. So I patted his darn old head, and told him I'd come along each year and see the rawhide was sound, and, if necessary, I'd fix him up again. Well?"

Keeko's fears had pa.s.sed like a summer storm and the sun of her smile had returned again to her eyes.

"I'm just glad," she said. Then she became serious. "Say, do you believe in omens?" She was gazing out at the great antlers. "I don't guess you do. Only Indians worry with omens. Not folks of sense. Still, I kind of fancy that feller set up that way is our omen. He's going to hand us good luck in plenty. We'll get a great 'catch' where we're going, and we'll get back-safe. Do you think that?"

"Sure. Guess I think a heap more than that, though." Marcel's smile was good to see. "That's not the limit of our luck," he went on. "Not by a lot. Say, I was raised by a feller who handed me a whole heap of wisdom.

Guess there's more wisdom in him than ever I could get a grip on. He always guessed that luck was real in the folk who understood that way.

He said a feller made his luck by faith. The darn fool who squealed because things went wrong queered his own luck, and just chased it out of sight. Get a notion and hammer it through so long as you've a breath in your body, and, if you act that way, luck'll pour itself all over you till you're kind of floating around on a sea of desire fulfilled. That's been his way, and I reckon it's good. I'm out to act as he said, so I don't reckon that hollow-eyed feller out there is the whole meaning of things. I've got all my notions and I'm going to push 'em plumb through."

Keeko nodded.

"That's the grit a man needs," she said. "Maybe a woman does, too, only--she's kind of different."

"Is she?" Marcel shook his head, and his eyes were full of a boyish humour. "She isn't--when it comes to grit. Say, there's only one woman I know except you, and those poor folks you see in Seal Bay, who--who don't know better. But that other woman and you have taught me things about grit most fellers don't ever learn. Most all the time a feller who's built strong can fight to the limit of his muscles. A gal isn't born with muscles worth speaking about, and she spends her life mostly fighting beyond the limit. Say, she's born to troubles and worries all the time. And she mostly gets through all the time. Why? Grit! She doesn't just care a darn. She's going to get through--and she does. Say, let's get along down and leave that wall-eyed old figurehead keeping guard. Come on."

CHAPTER IX

THE CLOSE OF THE SEASON

For days the journey continued through the ever deepening gorge. The stern grey walls remained unbroken, except for occasional sentry trees which had survived the years of storm and flood. Carpets of Arctic lichen sometimes clothed their nakedness, and even wide wastes of noisome fungus. But these things had no power to depress Marcel and Keeko; the Indians, too, pa.s.sed them all unheeded. They were concerned alone with the perils of the waters which were often almost overwhelming.

The journey northward was one continuous struggle by day, and the daylit night was pa.s.sed in the profound slumbers of exhausted bodies, with the canoes beached on some low foresh.o.r.e dank with an atmosphere of hideous decay.

For Keeko and the Indians it seemed as if the land was rising ever higher and higher, and the endless waterway was cutting its course deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth. But there was no question. Marcel was piloting them to a hunting ground of his own, and this pa.s.sage was the highway to it.

Only once did Keeko protest. It was a protest that was natural enough.

But Marcel swept it aside without scruple.

"I call this 'h.e.l.l's Gate,'" he said, with a ready laugh. "Sounds rotten? But I always figger you need to pa.s.s through 'some' h.e.l.l to make Paradise. We're in a mighty big country, and a-top of us are hundreds, and maybe thousands, of miles of forests that never heard tell of man.

Wait. There's a break soon, just beyond the big rapids. That's where these darn old walls of rock fade right out, and make way for a lake that's like a sea."

It was his undisturbed confidence that broke the constant threat of imagination. This north country was Marcel's home. He knew no other. So they drove on, and on, to the goal that he had set.

The great rapids came at them as he had promised. And, in turn, they were pa.s.sed on that narrow margin which is the line drawn between safety and destruction. Then came the mouth of the gorge, and the stretch of open river where it debouched upon the "lake that was like a sea."

For Keeko it was all like some wonderful dream with Marcel the magician who inspired it.

Two days later they had landed in a country whose relation to that which Keeko knew was only in the swarming flies and mosquitoes, and the keen air, which, even in the height of the open season, warned her of the terrors which must reign when the aurora lit the night of winter.

"Guess this is Paradise," Marcel explained, in answer to Keeko's expressed delight at the wide openness of it all, and at the sight of the spa.r.s.e, lean Arctic gra.s.s which replaced the monotony of the shadowed river. "Guess it's a matter of contrasts," he went on. "It's kind of light, I guess, and it makes you think it's green. There's bush, or scrub, and bluffs of timber. But there's other things. It's mostly a sort of tundra and muskeg. There's more flies to the square inch than you'd reckon there's room for. But it's the home of the silver fox that's never been hunted."

His words were lost upon the girl. Her whole attention had become absorbed with her first glance out across the lake. She was staring at a range of tremendous hills far away to the north-east, and her wonder-lit eyes were held by a strange phenomenon that filled the sky.

It was a blaze of ruddy light tinting a world of frothing cloud. To her it looked like a stormy oasis in the steely blue of an almost cloudless sky. It might have been the splendid light of an angry sunset, only that the sun was shining directly behind her. She pointed at it.

"That!" she cried, in a startled, hushed voice. "What's that?"

Marcel regarded the scene for some silent moments. It was a spectacle that stirred him. He was closer to Nature than he knew. The primitive was deeply rooted in him for all the pains at which Uncle Steve had been to widen his outlook through the learning which his dead father had left behind. Here was a caldron of fire playing its reflection upon a tumult of cloud. The cloud itself stood unaccounted in a perfect sky.

But the answer came readily. Marcel knew those streaks of red and gold, those rosy tints in contrast against the threatening cloud. They were the lights of Unaga. The lights from the Heart of Unaga, the dread Heart that haunted the Indian mind, and the secret of which Uncle Steve had so recently disclosed to him.

What could he say to this girl to whom he could not lie?

Doubt and hesitancy pa.s.sed. These things could not long exist in a nature such as his.

"Guess I haven't seen it ever like that before," he said. Then he corrected himself. "Not in my recollection. But I know what it is.

That's the Heart of Unaga. It's a heart always afire. It's real red-hot fire that no man's ever had the nerve to get near. The Eskimo know it.