Part 7 (1/2)
Silently the men stared into each other's faces, and then--silently, for none dared trust himself to speak--these big men of the North harnessed their dogs and began the laborious homeward journey with heavy hearts.
And, at that very moment, a small boy, eighty miles beyond the impa.s.sable barrier of the snow-capped divide, tunnelled through a huge drift that sealed the mouth of an ice cavern in the side of an inland glacier, and looked out upon the bewildering tangle of gleaming peaks.
Thanks to the unerring nose of old Boris, and the speed of McDougall's sled dogs, the trail of Waseche had each day become warmer, and the night before the storm, when Connie camped in the convenient ice-cavern, he judged his partner to be only a day ahead. When the storm continued day after day, he chafed at the delay, but comforted himself with the thought that Waseche must also camp.
As he stood at the mouth of his cave gazing at the unfamiliar mountains, towering range upon range, with their peaks glittering in the cold rays of the morning sun, old Boris crowded past him and plunged into the unbroken whiteness of the little valley. Round and round he circled with lowered head. Up and down the jagged ice wall of the glacier he ran, sniffing the snow and whining with eagerness to pick up the trail that he had followed for so many days. And as the boy watched him, a sudden fear clutched at his heart. For instead of starting off with short, joyous yelps of confidence, the old dog continued his aimless circling, and at length, as if giving up in despair, sat upon his haunches, pointed his sharp muzzle skyward, and lifted his voice in howl after quavering howl of disappointment.
”The trail is buried,” groaned the boy, ”and I had almost caught up with him!” He glanced hopelessly up and down the valley, realizing for the first time that the landmarks of the back trail were obliterated. His eyes narrowed and he gritted his teeth:
”I'll find him yet,” he muttered. ”My Dad always played in hard luck--but he never _quit_! I'll find Waseche--but, if I don't find him, the big men back there that knew Sam Morgan--they'll know Sam Morgan's boy was no quitter, either!” He turned away from the entrance and began to harness the dogs.
Way down the valley, high on the surface of the glacier, Waseche Bill stopped suddenly to listen. Faint and far, a sound was borne to his ears through the thin, cold air. He jerked back his _parka_ hood and strained to catch the faint echo. Again he heard it--the long, bell-like howl of a dog--and as he listened, the man's face paled, and a strange p.r.i.c.kling sensation started at the roots of his hair and worked slowly along his spine. For this man of the North knew dogs. Even in the white fastness of the terrible Lillimuit he could not be mistaken.
”Boris! Boris!” he cried, and whirling his wolf-dogs in their tracks, dashed over the windswept surface of the glacier in the direction of the sound.
”I can't be wrong! I can't be wrong!” he repeated over and over again, ”I raised him from a pup!”
CHAPTER VII
IN THE LILLIMUIT
Speak _desolation_. What does it mean to you? What picture rises before your eyes? A land laid waste by the ravages of war? A brain picture of sodden, trampled fields, leaning fences, grey piles of smoking ashes which are the ruins of homes, flanking a long, white, unpeopled highway strewn with litter, broken wagons, abandoned caissons, and, here and there, long fresh-heaved ridges of brown earth that cover the men who were? Isn't that the picture? And isn't it the evening of a dull grey day, just at the time when the gloom of twilight shades into the black pall of night, and way toward the edge of the world, on the indistinct horizon, a lurid red glow tints the low-hung clouds--no flames--only the dull, illusive glow that wavers and fades in the heavens above other burning homes? Yes, that is desolation. And, yet--men have been here--everything about you speaks the presence of people. Here people lived and loved and were happy; and here, also, they were heartbroken and sad. The whole picture breathes humanity--and the inhumanity of men.
And, as people have lived here, instinctively you know that people will live here again; for this is man-made desolation.
Only those to whom it has been given to know the Big North--the gaunt, white, silent land beyond the haunts of men--can realize the true significance of _desolation_.
Stand surrounded by range upon towering range of unmapped mountains whose clean-cut peaks show clear and sharp through the keen air--air so dry and thin that the slanting rays of the low-hung midday sun gleam whitely upon the outlines of ice crags a hundred miles away. Stand there alone, enveloped by the solitude of the land where men never lived--nor ever will live--where the silence is a _thing_, pressing closer and closer about you--smothering you--so that, instinctively, you throw out your hands to push it away that you may breathe--then you begin to know desolation--the utter desolation of the frozen wilderness, the cold, dead land of mystery.
The long howl of the great grey wolf as he lopes over the hunger trail is an eerie sound; so is the cackling, insane laughter of a pack of coyotes in the night-time, and the weird scream of the _loup-cervier_; but of all sounds, the most desolate, the sound that to the ears of man spells the last word of utter solitude and desolation, is the short, quick, single bark of the Arctic fox as he pads invisible as a phantom in his haunts among the echoing rim-rocks. Amid these surroundings, brains give way. Not soften into maudlin idiocy, but explode in a frenzy of violence, so that men rush screaming before the relentless solitude; or fight foolishly and to the death against the powers of cold amid the unreal colours of the aurora borealis whose whizzing hiss roars in their ears when, at the last, they pitch forward into the frozen whiteness--bushed!
This was the scene of desolation that confronted Connie Morgan as McDougall's straining _malamutes_ jerked the sled from the ice-cavern that had served as a shelter through all the days of the great blizzard, when the wind-lashed snow, fine as frozen fog, eddied and whirled across the surface of the glacier which towered above him, and drifted deep in the narrow pa.s.s.
The sled runners squeaked loudly in the flinty snow, and Connie halted the dogs and surveyed the forbidding landscape. Never in his life had he been so utterly alone. For twenty days he had followed the trail of Waseche Bill, and now he stood at the end of the trail--worse than that, for the high piled drifts that buried the trail of Waseche covered his own back trail, completely wiping out the one slender thread that connected him with the land of men. He stood alone in the dreaded Lillimuit! Before him rose a confusion of mountains--tier after tier of naked peaks clear and sharp against the blue sky. Fresh as he was from the great Alaska ranges, the boy was strangely awed by the vastness of it all. It was unreal. He missed the black-green of the timber belt that relieved the long sweep of his own mountains, for here, from rounded foothill to topmost pinnacle, the mountains were as bare of vegetation as floating icebergs. The very silence was unnatural and the boy's lips pressed tightly together as thoughts of Ten Bow crowded his brain: the windla.s.s-capped shafts, the fresh dumps that showed against the white snow of the valley; the red flash and glow of the fires in the night that thawed out the gravel for the next day's digging; the rough log cabins ranged up and down the gulch in two straggling rows--he could almost hear the good-natured banter which was daily exchanged across the frozen creek bed between the rival residents of Broadway and ”Fiff Avenue,” as the two irregular ”streets” of the camp were named. He thought of his own cabin and the long evenings with his big partner, Waseche Bill, sitting close to the roaring little ”Yukon stove,”
puffing contentedly upon his black pipe, which he removed now and then from between his lips to judiciously comment upon the stories that the boy read from the man-thumbed, coverless magazines of other years, which had been pa.s.sed from hand to hand by the big men of the frozen places.
A lump came in his throat and he swallowed hard, and as he looked, the naked peaks blurred and swam together; and two hot, salty tears stung his eyes. At the sting of the tears the little form stiffened and the boy glanced swiftly about him as, with a mittened hand, he dashed the moisture from his eyes. The small fingers clenched hard about the handle of the long-lashed, walrus hide dog whip, and he stepped quickly to the gee-pole of the sled.
”I'm a _piker_!” he cried, ”a _chechako_ and a _kid_ and a _tin-horn_ and a _piker_! Crying like a girl because I'm homesick! _Bah!_ What would Waseche say if he could see me now? And _Dad_? _There_ was a _man_! Sam Morgan!” The little arms extended impulsively toward the great white peaks and the big blue eyes glowed proudly:
”Oh, Dad! _Dad!_ They call you unlucky! But I'd rather have the big men back there think of me like they talk of _you_, than to have all the gold in the world!” He leaped suddenly beyond the sled and shook a tiny clenched fist toward the glittering crags.
”I'm _not_ a piker!” he cried, fiercely. ”I couldn't be a piker, and be Sam Morgan's boy! I got here in spite of the men of Eagle! And I'll find Waseche, too! I'm not afraid of you! You cold, white Lillimuit--with your big, bare, frozen mountains, and your glaciers, and your stillness!
You can't bluff _me_! You may _get_ me--but you can't _turn_ me! _I'm game!_”