The Land of Frozen Suns Part 10

They were gathered in summer villages by the trading posts. Hence we crossed few fresh trails, and bespoke no man, white or red, in the four weeks of our journey.

Before the end of it I was hardened to the saddle; and to many other things. Twice we swam great rivers, the North Saskatchewan, and farther on the Peace-to say nothing of lesser streams that were both deep and swift. Our food supply dwindled to flour and tea. But with game on every hand we suffered no hardship in that respect. The getting of meat Barreau left to me. Strangely enough, after one or two virulent attacks of "buck fever," when the rifle barrel wabbled in a most unseemly manner and the bullet therefrom flew disgracefully wide of the mark, I got into the way of bringing down whatever I shot at. Between my eye and the rifle sights and the shoulder of a deer some mysterious, rapid process of alignment seemed invariably to take place.

"Why not?" Barreau contended, when I remarked upon this sudden attaining to marksmanship. "There are the sights. Your eyes are clear and your arm steady as a rock. That's all there is to good shooting; that and a little experience in judging distance. Some men handle guns all their lives, and never make a decent shot other than by accident. Whenever you run across such an individual you can be sure there is some defect in his vision, or he lacks muscular control over his weapon."

That trip taught me many things besides holding a rifle true; how to build a campfire in wet weather and dry; little labor-saving tricks of the axe; the name and nature of this timber and that; the cooking of plain food; a subtle sense of direction-fundamental trail-wisdom that I was wholly ignorant of, but which a man must know if he would cope with the wilderness of wood and plain. I profited as much by noting how he did these things, as by direct instruction. Nor does a man forget easily the lessons he is taught in the school of necessity.

With Peace River behind us we edged nearer to the base of the mountains, pa.s.sing through a stretch of country alive with caribou and deer.

Bear-monsters, by the track they left-frightened our picketed horses of a night. The moist earth bordering every pond and spring was marked with hoof and claw. The shyer fur-bearing animals, Barreau told me, surrounded us unseen. Barring a thickly wooded plateau south of the Peace we pa.s.sed through no forest oppressively dense. Our way led over ridges and swales, timbered, to be sure, but opening out here and there into pleasant gra.s.sy parks. Once or twice forbidding areas of dead and down trees turned us aside. Again, a vast swamp enforced a detour. But I cannot recall any feature of marked unpleasantness-except the one thing that no man who crosses the North Saskatchewan can escape-the flies.

Mosquitoes of all sizes, equipped with the keenest tools for their nefarious business, green-headed bulldog flies that plagued our horses beyond endurance, black gnats, flying ants, and other winged pests a.s.sailed us day and night in hungry swarms. Some day that particular portion of the Northwest will be a rich field for entomologists and manufacturers of mosquito netting.

We held our own with the buzzing hosts, however, and when our flour sack had nearly reached a stage of ultimate limpness, and our tea was reduced to a tiny package in one corner of the shrunken pack, we rode out of a long belt of quivering poplars and drew up on the brow of a sharp pitch that fell away to the Sicannie River.

"What in the name of the devil has been to the fore here?" Barreau exclaimed. He slid over in his saddle, staring at the scene below.

Down on the flat, just back from the river bank, I made out a clutter of small log buildings enclosed within a stockade. In the center of the enclosure a half-dozen men busied themselves about the gaunt walls of a larger building. Logs and poles strewed the ground about its four sides.

The ring of axe-blades on timber came floating up to us. I saw nothing amiss.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"Nothing that matters greatly," Barreau replied. "Only that ruin you see was a fine upstanding storehouse when I left here in the early spring.

It seems to be undergoing a process of regeneration, for which I cannot account. Likewise, I see no trace of a stable which stood at the west end of the stockade. There are no men missing, by my count, so I dare say no great thing has happened. Anyway, this is the end of our trail for a while. We may as well get down there. I am a bit curious to know the meaning of this."

Presently we were dismounting within the stockade. And as we greeted the men who stopped their work to hail us, it was plain what form of disaster had overtaken the Montell establishment. The standing walls of sixteen-inch logs were smoke-blackened and scorched by fire. The inside was gutted to the floor-joists; the roof gone. A pile of charred poles and timbers laid to one side testified mutely to cause and effect.

"Well, Ben," Barreau addressed one man who came forward. "How did it happen?"

"She burned, that's all. 'N' the stable, too," Ben made laconic answer.

He drew a plug of tobacco from his hip pocket, looked it over with a speculative eye, bit off a piece, and returned it to the pocket. As he masticated the piece contemplatively, Barreau watched him with a whimsical smile. "Yes, sir," he went on, "she took fire in the night, with the boys sleepin' in the doghouse, an' me in the front part uh the store. It started to rain pretty tol'able hard, or I reckon there wouldn't be nothin' left but a pile uh ashes."

"In the night, eh?" Barreau repeated thoughtfully. The three of us walked around the building and peered in through a charred doorway.

"Quite so," Barreau continued. "Save anything? There wasn't much to save, I know."

"Most all the stuff," Ben replied. "Injun name uh Tall Trees drifted in day after yuh all left. He traded out most everythin' we could spare.

An' the pelts was easy to get out. Some grub was burned. Not much, though. We got plenty left."

"A very nasty thing, fire," Barreau commented. "How do you think it started, Ben?"

"I ain't thinkin'," said Ben. "I _know_."

"The deuce you do!" Neither Barreau's tone nor face bespoke more than the mildest surprise. "Had a big fire going, I suppose, and a live coal flew out. Eh?"

"Nary coal," Ben declared. "Some feller climbed the stockade, cut open one uh them deer-skin winders, touched a match to a bucket uh oil an'

gunpowder, boosted it through the window-an' there yuh are. That there's no dream, let me tell yuh."

"And then went on his way rejoicing," Barreau suggested.

"I reckon he did, all right," Ben owned, looking rather downcast at the thought. "I never got to see nothin' but his tracks. If I'd seen _him_ he wouldn't 'a' done much rejoicin'."

"I dare say," Barreau laughed. "Meantime the joke is on the party of the first part, it seems to me. Logs are plenty. You have ample time to put on a roof and lay some sort of floor. It would be a different matter if we should be burned out after our goods arrive; but this is a cheap lesson. I see you have put up a good stock of hay. That's fortunate, for they are bringing more stock than we figured on. Altogether, Ben, you haven't done so badly. Now, hustle us some decent grub-it's near noon, and this boy and I have been living on straight meat for some time."

Thus, we were once more fairly at our ease; the bugaboo of arrest and subsequent lying in jail seemed a remote contingency. The confidence born of successful escape stilled any misgivings I might have had as to the future.

We lay at the post doing naught but eat and sleep and watch the long storehouse creep higher log by log, till the skeleton of a roof took form above the blackened walls. At night the eight of us would sprawl around a fire in the open, talking of everything under the sun, sometimes playing with a soiled and tattered pack of cards that these exiles cherished as their dearest possession. If we were in hostile territory no hint of apprehension cropped out in our intercourse; except as one or another referred casually to incidents past-now a fragmentary sentence which hinted of sharp action, or a joking allusion to the "H.

B. C." It was all in the day's work with them. But I noticed that each night one man stood guard, pacing from corner to corner of the stockade, a rifle slung in the crook of his arm.

Two weeks of this slipped by. Then one morning Barreau sat up on his bed and looked over to where I humped on my blankets, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

"Bob," he announced, "it is high time we bestirred ourselves once more."

After which he got quickly into his clothes, and went rummaging in a box by his bed-we had a little cabin to ourselves. His search bore fruit in the shape of moccasins, a bundle of them.

"Here," he tossed a pair to me. "You'll find these better than riding boots. This time we go afoot."

Later, when breakfast was eaten, he made up a shoulder-pack for himself, and showed me how to prepare its fellow. Only actual necessaries found place therein. Extra moccasins, a few pounds of flour, a little packet of tea, pepper and salt, a tin plate and cup; these were laid upon a pair of heavy blankets, and tightly rolled in a square of thin canvas. A broad band of soft buckskin ran from the upper corners of the pack over one's forehead. A loop slipped over each shoulder, leaving the hands free. I was astonished at the ease with which I could walk under this forty-pound burden. From among the post stores Barreau had long since armed me with a rifle that was twin to his own. Between us we carried a hundred cartridges. A butcher knife and a small hatchet apiece fitted us for all emergencies. Thus equipped we set out, bearing away up the Sicannie toward the grim range of peaks that cut the skyline into ragged notches.

Ten miles upstream Barreau located the cl.u.s.ter of lodges he sought as our first objective point-the summer camp of Two Wolves and his band.

There for two nights and a day we lingered, sitting in comical gravity for hours at a time in the lodge of the chief. The upshot of this lengthy council was that Two Wolves' son girded a pack on his broad shoulders and joined us when we left the camp.

Thereafter I lost count of the days. Possibly, if the need arose, I could detail the camps we made, the streams we crossed, the huge circle we swung upon, the crossing and doubling back upon our own trail; but there is no need. Suffice it to say that we did these things. It was no pleasure jaunt that we three went upon. Crow Feathers was a man of iron in the matter of covering ground.

He knew the haunt of every tribe and offshoot of a tribe, every petty chief's following, and every family group in the North, it seemed to me.

If he did not lead us to them all, he at least tried. The smoky smell of an Indian lodge became as familiar to my nostrils as the odor of food.

And in every camp, over the peace pipe, Barreau talked "trade," with Crow Feathers to vouch for him. Barreau spoke the tongue like a native, but there were lodges wherein neither Cree nor French _patois_ was spoken or understood, and, when we encountered such, the wisdom of Crow Feathers smoothed the way. He used the sign language in all its bewildering variety. I, myself, picked up words and phrases here and there, comprehended a few of the simpler signs, but Crow Feathers lingers with me as a past master in wordless communication with his race. Barreau, even, used to wonder at the astonishing amount of information Crow Feathers could impart with a few languid motions of his hands. He made a right able interpreter.

Insensibly the days shortened. I recollect with what surprise I wakened one morning to find h.o.a.r frost thick on my blanket, and a sc.u.m of ice fringing the little creek beside which we slept. Hard on that I observed the turning of the leaves, the red and yellow tints of autumn. And about this time Crow Feathers left us; took up his pack one day at noon, shook hands solemnly with each of us, and a moment later was lost in the still, far-spreading woods. Three days after that Barreau and I, in the midst of a thinly timbered belt of land, came suddenly upon a clear-cut trail. Even my limited experience told me that it was made by man-guided animals.

"The chumps," Barreau drawled. "They are ten miles out of their way. I didn't expect to hit their trail till to-morrow. Well, they should be at the post now. We may as well follow them in."

"How is it," I voiced a thing that puzzled me, "that there are no wagon tracks? Are you sure this is Montell's outfit?"

"No other," he answered. "For many reasons. By the mule tracks, for one.

You, of course, could not see them in the dark, but there was a mule herd with the bull-train. Loaded wagons are too hard to handle in this woods country. We have always used pack-mules this side of the Peace."

"Oh," said I, and, my mystery solved, I forbore further inquiry. We tramped along the trail in silence. Then, all at once, he flung out an abrupt question. Curiously enough, the thing he spoke of had just drifted into my mind.

"Remember those two Hudson's Bay men, Bob?"

I remembered them very well; two taciturn, buckskin-garbed men, who came to an Indian camp while we were there talking trade. They greeted us civilly enough, slept in the next lodge overnight, and left us a clear field in the morning. But before they took to the trail they drew Barreau aside and the three of them sat upon a fallen tree and conversed thus for an hour.

"Why, yes," I replied. "What of them?"

"I didn't tell you, did I, that they were Company agents with a proposal to buy out _my_ interest in the house of Montell," he said. "Now, that amused me at the time. But the confounded thing has stuck in my mind, and lately I've been thinking-in fact, I've wondered if--"

He broke off as abruptly as he had begun. I was walking abreast of him, and I could see that he was engrossed with some problem; the mental groping in his tone was duplicated in the expression on his face.

"What?" I blurted.