The Magnetic North Part 37

"Tired? H'm! Something of a walk to Holy Cross even on a nice mild day like this." The Colonel made the reflection with obvious satisfaction, took off his knapsack, and sat down again. The Boy did the same. "The very day you lit out Father Orloff came up from the Russian mission."

"What's he like?"

"Oh, little fella in petticoats, with a beard an' a high pot-hat, like a Russian. And that same afternoon we had a half-breed trader fella here, with two white men. Since that day we haven't seen a human creature. We bought some furs of the trader. Where'd you get yours?"

"Pymeut. Any news about the strike?"

"Well, the trader fella was sure it was all gammon, and told us stories of men who'd sacrificed everything and joined a stampede, and got sold--sold badly. But the two crazy whites with him--miners from Dakotah--they were on fire about Minook. Kept on bragging they hadn't cold feet, and swore they'd get near to the diggins as their dogs'd take 'em. The half-breed said they might do a hundred miles more, but probably wouldn't get beyond Anvik."

"Crazy fools! I tell you, to travel even thirty miles on the Yukon in winter, even with a bully team and old Nick to drive 'em, and not an extra ounce on your back--I tell you, Colonel, it's no joke."

"B'lieve you, sonny."

It wasn't thirty seconds before sonny was adding: "Did that half-breed think it was any use our trying to get dogs?"

"Ain't to be had now for love or money."

"Lord, Colonel, if we had a team--"

"Yes, I know. We'll probably owe our lives to the fact that we haven't."

It suddenly occurred to the Boy that, although he had just done a pretty good tramp and felt he'd rather die than go fifty feet further, it was the Colonel who was most tired.

"How's everybody?"

"Oh, I s'pose we might all of us be worse off."

"What's the matter?"

He was so long answering that the Boy's eyes turned to follow the serious outward gaze of the older man, even before he lifted one hand and swept it down the hill and out across the dim, grey prospect.

"This," said the Colonel.

Their eyes had dropped down that last stretch of the steep snow slope, across the two miles of frozen river, and ran half round the wide horizon-line, like creatures in a cage. Whether they liked it or whether they didn't, for them there was no way out.

"It's the awful stillness." The Colonel arraigned the distant ice-plains.

They sat there looking, listening, as if they hoped their protest might bring some signal of relenting. No creature, not even a crystal-coated willow-twig, nothing on all the ice-bound earth stirred by as much as a hair; no mark of man past or present broke the grey monotony; no sound but their two voices disturbed the stillness of the world. It was a quiet that penetrated, that p.r.i.c.ked to vague alarm. Already both knew the sting of it well.

"It's the kind of thing that gets on a fella's nerves," said the Colonel. "I don't know as I ever felt helpless in any part of the world before. But a man counts for precious little up here. Do you notice how you come to listen to the silence?"

"Oh, yes, I've noticed."

"Stop." Again he lifted his hand, and they strained their ears. "I've done that by the hour since you left and the daft gold-diggers went up trail after you. The other fellas feel it, too. Don't know what we'd have done without Kaviak. Think we ought to keep that kid, you know."

"I could get on without Kaviak if only we had some light. It's this villainous twilight that gets into my head. All the same, you know"--he stood up suddenly--"we came expecting to stand a lot, didn't we?"

The elder man nodded. "Big game, big stakes. It's all right."

Eventless enough after this, except for the pa.s.sing of an Indian or two, the days crawled by.

The Boy would get up first in the morning, rake out the dead ashes, put on a couple of back-logs, bank them with ashes, and then build the fire in front. He broke the ice in the water-bucket, and washed; filled coffee-pot and mush-kettle with water (or ice), and swung them over the fire; then he mixed the corn-bread, put it in the Dutch oven, covered it with coals, and left it to get on with its baking. Sometimes this part of the programme was varied by his mixing a hoe-cake on a board, and setting it up "to do" in front of the fire. Then he would call the Colonel--

"'Wake up Ma.s.sa, De day am breakin'; Peas in de pot, en de Hoe-cake bakin''"--

for it was the Colonel's affair to take up proceedings at this point--make the coffee and the mush and keep it from burning, fry the bacon, and serve up breakfast.

Sat.u.r.day brought a slight variation in the early morning routine. The others came straggling in, as usual, but once a week Mac was sure to be first, for he had to get Kaviak up. Mac's view of his whole duty to man seemed to centre in the Sat.u.r.day scrubbing of Kaviak. Vainly had the Esquimer stood out against compliance with this most repulsive of foreign customs. He seemed to be always ready with some deep-laid scheme for turning the edge of Mac's iron resolution. He tried hiding at the bottom of the bed. It didn't work. The next time he crouched far back under the lower bunk. He was dragged out. Another Sat.u.r.day he embedded himself, like a moth, in a bundle of old clothes. Mac shook him out. He had been very sanguine the day he hid in the library. This was a wooden box nailed to the wall on the right of the door. Most of the bigger books--Byron, Wordsworth, Dana's "Mineralogy," and two Bibles--he had taken out and concealed in the lower bunk very skilfully, far back behind the Colonel's feet. Copps's "Mining" and the two works on "Parliamentary Law" piled at the end of the box served as a pillow. After climbing in and folding himself up into an incredibly small s.p.a.ce, Kaviak managed with superhuman skill to cover himself neatly with a patchwork quilt of _Munsey, Scribner, Century, Strand_, and _Overland_ for August, '97. No one would suspect, glancing into that library, that underneath the usual top layer of light reading, was matter less august than Law, Poetry, Science, and Revelation.

It was the base Byron, tipping the wink to Mac out of the back of the bunk, that betrayed Kaviak.

It became evident that "Farva" began to take a dour pride in the Kid's perseverance. One morning he even pointed out to the camp the strong likeness between Kaviak and Robert Bruce.

"No, sah; the Scottish chief had to have an object-lesson, but Kaviak--Lawd!--Kaviak could give points to any spider livin'!"

This was on the morning that the Esquimer thought to escape scrubbing, even at the peril of his life, by getting up on to the swing-shelf --how, no man ever knew. But there he sat in terror, like a very young monkey in a wind-rocked tree, hardly daring to breathe, his arms clasped tight round the demijohn; but having Mac to deal with, the end of it was that he always got washed, and equally always he seemed to register a vow that, s'help him, Heaven! it should never happen again.

After breakfast came the clearing up. It should have been done (under this regime) by the Little Cabin men, but it seldom was. O'Flynn was expected to keep the well-hole in the river chopped open and to bring up water every day. This didn't always happen either, though to drink snow-water was to invite scurvy, Father Wills said. There was also a daily need, if the Colonel could be believed, for everybody to chop firewood.

"We got enough," was Potts' invariable opinion.

"For how long? S'pose we get scurvy and can't work; we'd freeze to death in a fortnight."

"Never saw a fireplace swalla logs whole an' never blink like this one."

"But you got no objection to sittin' by while the log-swallerin' goes on."

The Colonel or the Boy cooked the eternal beans, bacon and mush dinner, after whatever desultory work was done; as a matter of fact, there was extraordinarily little to occupy five able-bodied men. The fun of snow-shoeing, mitigated by frostbite, quickly degenerated from a sport into a mere means of locomotion. One or two of the party went hunting, now and then, for the scarce squirrel and the shy ptarmigan. They tried, with signal lack of success, to catch fish, Indian fashion, through a hole in the ice.

But, for the most part, as winter darkened round them, they lounged from morning till night about the big fireplace, and smoked, and growled, and played cards, and lived as men do, finding out a deal about each other's characters, something about each other's opinions, and little or nothing about each other's history.

In the appalling stillness of the long Arctic night, any pa.s.ser-by was hailed with enthusiasm, and although the food-supply in the Big Cabin was plainly going to run short before spring, no traveller--white, Indian, or Esquimaux--was allowed to go by without being warmed and fed, and made to tell where he came from and whither he was bound--questions to tax the sage. Their unfailing hospitality was not in the least unexpected or unusual, being a virtue practised even by scoundrels in the great North-west; but it strained the resources of the little camp, a fourth of whose outfit lay under the Yukon ice.

In the state of lowered vitality to which the poor, ill-cooked food, the cold and lack of exercise, was slowly reducing them, they talked to one another less and less as time went on, and more and more--silently and each against his will--grew hyper-sensitive to the shortcomings and even to the innocent "ways" of the other fellow.

Not Mac's inertia alone, but his trick of sticking out his jaw became an offence, his rasping voice a torture. The Boy's occasional ebullition of spirits was an outrage, the Colonel's mere size intolerable. O'Flynn's brogue, which had amused them, grew to be just part of the hardship and barbarism that had overtaken them like an evil dream, coercing, subduing all the forces of life. Only Kaviak seemed likely to come unscathed through the ordeal of the winter's captivity; only he could take the best place at the fire, the best morsel at dinner, and not stir angry pa.s.sions; only he dared rouse Mac when the Nova Scotian fell into one of his bear-with-a-sore-head moods. Kaviak put a stop to his staring angrily by the hour into the fire, and set him to whittling out boats and a top, thereby providing occupation for the morrow, since it was one man's work to break Kaviak of spinning the one on the table during mealtime, and sailing the other in the drinking-water bucket at all times when older eyes weren't watching.

The Colonel wrote up his journal, and read the midsummer magazines and Byron, in the face of Mac's "I do not like Byron's thought; I do not consider him healthy or instructive." In one of his more energetic moods the Colonel made a four-footed cricket for Kaviak, who preferred it to the high stool, and always sat on it except at meals.

Once in a while, when for hours no word had been spoken except some broken reference to a royal flush or a jack-pot, or O'Flynn had said, "Bedad! I'll go it alone," or Potts had inquired anxiously, "Got the joker? Guess I'm euchred, then," the Boy in desperation would catch up Kaviak, balance the child on his head, or execute some other gymnastic, soothing the solemn little heathen's ruffled feelings, afterwards, by crooning out a monotonous plantation song. It was that kind of addition to the general gloom that, at first, would fire O'Flynn to raise his own spirits, at least, by roaring out an Irish ditty. But this was seldomer as time went on. Even Jimmie's brogue suffered, and grew less robust.

In a depressed sort of way Mac was openly teaching Kaviak his letters, and surrept.i.tiously, down in the Little Cabin, his prayers. He was very angry when Potts and O'Flynn eavesdropped and roared at Kaviak's struggles with "Ow Farva." In fact, Kaviak did not shine as a student of civilisation, though that told less against him with O'Flynn, than the fact that he wasn't "jolly and jump about, like white children."

Moreover, Jimmie, swore there was something "bogey" about the boy's intermittent knowledge of English. Often for days he would utter nothing but "Farva" or "Maw" when he wanted his plate replenished, then suddenly he would say something that n.o.body could remember having taught him or even said in his presence.

It was not to be denied that Kaviak loved sugar mightily, and stole it when he could. Mac lectured him and slapped his minute yellow hands, and Kaviak stole it all the same. When he was bad--that is, when he had eaten his daily fill of the camp's scanty store (in such a little place it was not easy to hide from such a hunter as Kaviak)--he was taken down to the Little Cabin, smacked, and made to say "Ow Farva." n.o.body could discover that he minded much, though he learnt to try to shorten the ceremony by saying "I solly" all the way to the cabin.

As a rule he was strangely undemonstrative; but in his own grave little fashion he conducted life with no small intelligence, and learned, with an almost uncanny quickness, each man's uses from the Kaviak point of view. The only person he wasn't sworn friends with was the handy-man, and there came to be a legend current in the camp, that Kaviak's first attempt at spontaneously stringing a sentence under that roof was, "Me got no use for Potts."

The best thing about Kaviak was that his was no craven soul. He was obliged to steal the sugar because he lived with white people who were bigger than he, and who always took it away when they caught him. But once the sugar was safe under his shirt, he owned up without the smallest hesitation, and took his smacking like a man. For the rest, he flourished, filled out, and got as fat as a seal, but never a whit less solemn.