The Magnetic North Part 75

They had not spoken to each other for many days--or was it only hours?--when the Colonel, looking at the Boy, said:

"You've got to have a face-guard. Those frostbites are eating in."

"'Xpect so."

"You ought to stop it. Make a guard."

"Out of a snow-ball, or chunk o' ice?"

"Cut a piece out o' the canvas o' the bag." But he didn't.

The big sores seemed such small matters beside the vast overshadowing doubt, Shall we come out of this alive?--doubt never to be openly admitted by him, but always knocking, knocking----

"You can't see your own face," the Colonel persisted.

"One piece o' luck, anyhow."

The old habit of looking after the Boy died hard. The Colonel hesitated. For the last time he would remonstrate. "I used to think frost_bite_ was a figure o' speech," said he, "but the teeth were set in _your_ face, sonny, and they've bitten deep; they'll leave awful scars."

"Battles do, I b'lieve." And it was with an effort that he remembered there had been a time when they had been uncomfortable because they hadn't washed their faces. Now, one man was content to let the very skin go if he could keep the flesh on his face, and one was little concerned even for that. Life--life! To push on and come out alive.

The Colonel had come to that point where he resented the Boy's staying power, terrified at the indomitable young life in him. Yes, the Colonel began to feel old, and to think with vague wrath of the insolence of youth.

Each man fell to considering what he would do, how he would manage if he were alone. And there ceased to be any terror in the thought.

"If it wasn't for him"--so and so; till in the gradual deadening of judgment all the hardship was somehow your pardner's fault. Your nerves made him responsible even for the snow and the wind. By-and-by he was The Enemy. Not but what each had occasional moments of lucidity, and drew back from the pit they were bending over. But the realisation would fade. No longer did even the wiser of the two remember that this is that same abyss out of which slowly, painfully, the race has climbed. With the lessened power to keep from falling in, the terror of it lessened. Many strange things grew natural. It was no longer difficult or even shocking to conceive one's partner giving out and falling by the way. Although playing about the thought, the one thing that not even the Colonel was able actually to realise, was the imminent probability of death for himself. Imagination always pictured the other fellow down, one's self somehow forging ahead.

This obsession ended on the late afternoon when the Colonel broke silence by saying suddenly:

"We must camp; I'm done." He flung himself down under a bare birch, and hid his face.

The Boy remonstrated, grew angry; then, with a huge effort at self-control, pointed out that since it had stopped snowing this was the very moment to go on.

"Why, you can see the sun. Three of 'em! Look, Colonel!"

But Arctic meteorological phenomena had long since ceased to interest the Kentuckian. Parhelia were less to him than covered eyes, and the perilous peace of the snow. It seemed a long time before he sat up, and began to beat the stiffness out of his hands against his breast. But when he spoke, it was only to say:

"I mean to camp."

"For how long?"

"Till a team comes by--or something."

The Boy got up abruptly, slipped on his snow-shoes, and went round the shoulder of the hill, and up on to the promontory, to get out of earshot of that voice, and determine which of the two ice-roads, stretching out before them, was main channel and which was tributary.

He found on the height only a cutting wind, and little enlightenment as to the true course. North and east all nimbus still. A brace of sun-dogs following the pale G.o.d of Day across the narrow field of primrose that bordered the dun-coloured west. There would be more snow to-morrow, and meanwhile the wind was rising again. Yes, sir, it was a mean outlook.

As he took Mac's aneroid barometer out of his pocket, a sudden gust cut across his raw and bleeding cheek. He turned abruptly; the barometer slipped out of his numb fingers. He made a lunge to recover it, clutched the air, and, sliding suddenly forward, over he went, flying headlong down the steep escarpment.

He struck a jutting rock, only half snowed under, that broke the sheer face of the promontory, and he bounded once like a rubber ball, struck a second time, caught desperately at a solitary clump of ice-sheathed alders, crashed through the snow-crust just below them, and was held there like a mudlark in its cliff nest, halfway between bluff and river.

His last clear thought had been an intense anxiety about his snow-shoes as they sailed away, two liberated kites, but as he went on falling, clutching at the air--falling--and felt the alder twigs snap under his hands, he said to himself, "This is death," but calmly, as if it were a small matter compared to losing one's snow-shoes.

It was only when he landed in the snow, that he was conscious of any of the supposed natural excitement of a man meeting a violent end. It was then, before he even got his breath back, that he began to struggle frantically to get a foothold; but he only broke down more of the thin ice-wall that kept him from the sheer drop to the river, sixty or seventy feet below. He lay quite still. Would the Colonel come after him? If he did come, would he risk his life to----If he did risk his life, was it any use to try to----He craned his neck and looked up, blinked, shut his eyes, and lay back in the snow with a sound of far-off singing in his head. "Any use?" No, sir; it just about wasn't.

That bluff face would be easier to climb up than to climb down, and either was impossible.

Then it was, that a great tide of longing swept over him--a flood of pa.s.sionate desire for more of this doubtful blessing, life. All the bitter hardship--why, how sweet it was, after all, to battle and to overcome! It was only this lying helpless, trapped, that was evil. The endless Trail? Why, it was only the coming to the end that a man minded.

Suddenly the beauty that for days had been veiled shone out. Nothing in all the earth was glorious with the glory of the terrible white North.

And he had only just been wakened to it. Here, now, lying in his grave, had come this special revelation of the rapture of living, and the splendour of the visible universe.

The sky over his head--he had called it "a mean outlook," and turned away. It was the same sky that bent over him now with a tenderness that made him lift his cramped arms with tears, as a sick child might to its mother. The haloed sun with his attendant dogs--how little the wonder had touched him! Never had he seen them so dim and sad as to-night ...

saying good-bye to one who loved the sun.

The great frozen road out of sight below, road that came winding, winding down out of the Arctic Circle--what other highway so majestic, mysterious?--shining and beckoning on. An earthly Milky Way, leading to the golden paradise he had been travelling towards since summer.

And he was to go no further?--not till the June rains and thaws and winds and floods should carry him back, as he had foreseen, far below there at Holy Cross.

With a sharp contraction of the heart he shut his eyes again. When he opened them they rested on the alder-twig, a couple of yards above, holding out mocking finger-tips, and he turned his head in the snow till again he could see the mock-suns looking down.

"As well try to reach the sky as reach the alder-bush. What did that mean? That he was really going to lie there till he died? _He_ die, and the Colonel and everybody else go on living?"

He half rose on his elbow at the monstrous absurdity of the idea. "I won't die!" he said out loud.

Crack, crack! warned the ice-crust between him and that long fall to the river. With horror at his heart he shrank away and hugged the face of the precipice. Presently he put out his hand and broke the ice-crust above. With mittened fists and palms he pounded firm a little ledge of snow. Reaching out further, he broke the crust obliquely just above, and having packed the snow as well as he could immediately about, and moving lengthwise with an infinite caution, he crawled up the few inches to the narrow ledge, balancing his stiff body with a nicety possible only to acrobat or sleep-walker.

It was in no normal state of ordinary waking senses that the work went on--with never a downward look, nor even up, eyes riveted to the patch of snow on which the mittened hands fell as steady and untrembling as steel hammers. In the seconds of actual consciousness of his situation that twice visited him, he crouched on the ledge with closed eyes, in the clutch of an overmastering horror, absolutely still, like a bird in the talons of a hawk. Each time when he opened his eyes he would stare at the snow-ledge till hypnotised into disregard of danger, balance his slight body, lift one hand, and go on pounding firm another shallow step. When he reached the alder-bush his heart gave a great leap of triumph. Then, for the first time since starting, he looked up. His heart fell down. It seemed farther than ever, and the light waning.

But the twilight would be long, he told himself, and in that other, beneficent inner twilight he worked on, packing the snow, and crawling gingerly up the perilous stair a half-inch at a time.

At last he was on the jutting rock, and could stand secure. But here he could see that the top of the bluff really did shelve over. To think so is so common an illusion to the climber that the Boy had heartened himself by saying, when he got there he would find it like the rest, horribly steep, but not impossible. Well, it _was_ impossible. After all his labour, he was no better off on the rock than in the snow-hole below the alder, down there where he dared not look. The sun and his dogs had travelled down, down. They touched the horizon while he sat there; they slipped below the world's wide rim. He said in his heart, "I'm freezing to death." Unexpectedly to himself his despair found voice:

"Colonel!"

"h.e.l.lo!"

He started violently.

Had he really heard that, or was imagination playing tricks with echo?

"Colonel!"

"Where the devil----"

A man's head appeared out of the sky.

"Got the rope?"

Words indistinguishable floated down--the head withdrawn--silence. The Boy waited a very long time, but he stamped his feet, and kept his blood in motion. The light was very grey when the head showed again at the sky-line. He couldn't hear what was shouted down, and it occurred to him, even in his huge predicament, that the Colonel was "giving him hot air" as usual, instead of a life-line. Down the rope came, nearer, and stopped about fifteen feet over his head.