by John Buchan
“Odd we should meet here in about the wildest spot in North America. It’s easy enough to come by air, like you, but Matthew and Mark and I have taken two blessed months canoeing and portaging from railhead, and it will take us about the same time to get back.”
“Can corporation lawyers like you take four months’ holiday?”
Mr. Taverner’s serious face relaxed in a smile. “Not usually. But I had to quit or smash. No, I wasn’t sick. I was just tired of the dam’ racket. I had to get away from the noise. The United States is getting to be a mighty noisy country.”
The cry of a loon broke the stillness, otherwise there was no sound but the gurgle of the river and the grunting of one of the Indians as he cleaned a gun.
“You get silence here,” said Leithen.
“I don’t mean physical noise so much. The bustle in New York doesn’t worry me more than a little. I mean noise in our minds. You can’t get peace to think nowadays.” He broke off. “You here for the same cause?”
“Partly,” said Leithen. “But principally to meet a friend.”
“I hope you’ll hit him off. It’s a biggish country for an assignation. But you don’t need an excuse for cutting loose and coming here. I pretend I come to fish and hunt, but I only fish and shoot for the pot. I’m no sort of sportsman. I’m just a poor devil that’s been born in the wrong century. There’s quite a lot of folk like me. You’d be surprised how many of us slip off here now and then to get a little quiet. I don’t mean the hearty, husky sort of fellow who goes into the woods in a fancy mackinaw and spends his time there drinking whisky and playing poker. I mean quiet citizens like myself, who’ve simply got to breathe fresh air and get the din out of their ears. Canada is becoming to some of us like a mediæval monastery to which we can retreat when things get past bearing.”
Taverner, having been without white society for so long, seemed to enjoy unburdening himself.
“I’m saying nothing against my country. I know it’s the greatest on earth. But my God! I hate the mood it has fallen into. It seems to me there isn’t one section of society that hasn’t got some kind of jitters — big business, little business, politicians, the newspaper men, even the college professors. We can’t talk except too loud. We’re bitten by the exhibitionist bug. We’re all boosters and high-powered salesmen and propagandists, and yet we don’t know what we want to propagand, for we haven’t got any kind of common creed. All we ask is that a thing should be colourful and confident and noisy. Our national industry is really the movies. We’re one big movie show. And just as in the movies we worship languishing Wops and little blonde girls out of the gutter, so we pick the same bogus deities in other walks of life. You remember Emerson speaks about some nations as having guano in their destiny. Well, I sometimes think that we have got celluloid in ours.”
There was that in Leithen’s face which made Taverner pause and laugh.
“Forgive my rigmarole,” he said. “It’s a relief to get one’s peeves off the chest, and I reckon I’m safe with you. You see, I come of New England stock, and I don’t fit in too well with these times.”
“Do you know a man called Galliard?” Leithen asked. “Francis Galliard — a partner in Ravelstons?”
“A little. He’s a friend of Bronson Jane, and Bronson’s my cousin. Funny you should mention him, for if I had to choose a fellow that fitted in perfectly to the modern machine, I should pick Galliard. He enjoys all that riles me. He’s French, and that maybe explains it. I’ve too much of the Puritan in my blood. You came through New York, I suppose. Did you see Galliard? How is he? I’ve always had a liking for him.”
“No. He was out of town.”
Leithen got up to go. The long after-glow in the west was fading, and the heavens were taking on the shadowy violet which is all the northern summer darkness.
“When do you plan to end your trip?” Taverner asked as he shook hands.
“I don’t know. I’ve no plans. I’ve been ill, as you see, and it will depend on my health.”
“This will set you up, never fear. I was a sick man three years ago and I came back from Great Bear Lake champing like a prize-fighter. But take my advice and don’t put off your return too late. It don’t do to be trapped up here in winter. The North can be a darn cruel place.”
14
Late next afternoon they reached the Ghost River delta, striking in upon it at an angle from the southwest. The clear skies had gone, and the “ceiling” was not more than a thousand feet. Low hills rimmed the eastern side, but they were cloaked in a light fog, and the delta seemed to have no limits, but to be an immeasurable abscess of decay. Leithen had never imagined such an abomination of desolation. It was utterly silent, and the only colours were sickly greens and drabs. At first sight he thought he was looking down on a bit of provincial Surrey, broad tarmac roads lined with asphalt footpaths, and behind the trim hedges smooth suburban lawns. It took a little time to realise that the highways were channels of thick mud, and the lawns bottomless quagmires. He was now well inside the Circle, and had expected from the Arctic something cold, hard, and bleak, but also clean and tonic. Instead he found a horrid lushness — an infinity of mire and coarse vegetation, and a superfluity of obscene insect life. The place was one huge muskeg. It was like the no-man’s-land between the trenches in the War — a colossal no-man’s-land created in some campaign of demons, pitted and pocked with shell-holes from some infernal artillery.
They skirted the delta and came down at its western horn on the edge of the sea. Here there was no mist, and he could look far into the North over still waters eerily lit by the thin evening sunlight. It was like no ocean he had ever seen, for it seemed to be without form or reason. The tide licked the shore without purpose. It was simply water filling a void, a treacherous, deathly waste, pale like a snake’s belly, a thing beyond humanity and beyond time. Delta and sea looked as if here the Demiurge had let His creative vigour slacken and ebb into nothingness. He had wearied of the world which He had made and left this end of it to ancient Chaos.
Next morning the scene had changed, and to his surprise he felt a lightening of both mind and body. Sky and sea were colourless, mere bowls of light. There seemed to be no tides, only a gentle ripple on the grey sand. Very far out there were blue gleams which he took to be ice. The sun was warm, but the body of the air was cold, and it had in it a tonic quality which seemed to make his breathing easier. He remembered hearing that there were no germs in the Arctic, that the place was one great sanatorium, but that did not concern one whose trouble was organic decay. Still, he was grateful for a momentary comfort, and he found that he wanted to stretch his legs. He walked to the highest point of land at the end of a little promontory.
It was a place like a Hebridean cape. The peaty soil was matted with berries, though a foot or two beneath was eternal ice. The breeding season was over and the migration not begun, so there was no bird life on the shore; the wild fowl were all in the swamps of the delta. The dead-level of land and sea made the arc of sky seem immense, the “intense inane” of Shelley’s poem. The slight recovery of bodily vigour quickened his imagination. This was a world not built on the human scale, a world made without thought of mankind, a world colourless and formless, but also timeless; a kind of eternity. It would be a good place to die in, he thought, for already the clinging ties of life were loosened and death would mean little since life had ceased.
To his surprise he saw a small schooner anchored at the edge of a sandbank, a startling thing in that empty place. Johnny had joined him, and they went down to inspect it. An Eskimo family was on board, merry, upstanding people from far-distant Gordans Land. The skipper was one Andersen, the son of a Danish whaling captain and an Eskimo mother, and he spoke good English. He had been to Herschell Island to lay in stores, and was now on his way home after a difficult passage through the ice of the Western Arctic. The schooner was as clean as a new pin, and the instruments as well kept as on a man-o’-war. It had come in for fresh water, and
Job was able to get from it a few tins of gasolene, for it was a long hop to the next fuelling stage. The visit to the Andersens altered Leithen’s mood. Here was a snug life being lived in what had seemed a place of death. It switched his interest back to his task.
Presently he found what he had come to seek. On the way to the tent they came on an Eskimo cemetery. Once there had been a settlement here which years ago had been abandoned. There were half a dozen Eskimo graves, with skulls and bones showing through chinks in the piles of stone, and in one there was a complete skeleton stretched as if on a pyre. There was something more. At a little distance in a sheltered hollow were two crosses of driftwood. One was bent and weathered, with the inscription, done with a hot iron, almost obliterated, but it was possible to read . . . . TID . GAIL . . . D. There was a date too blurred to decipher. The other cross was new and it had not suffered the storms of more than a couple of winters. On it one could read clearly PAUL LOUIS GAILLARD and a date eighteen months back.
To Leithen there was an intolerable pathos about the two crosses. They told so much, and yet they told nothing. How had Aristide died? Had Paul found him alive? How had Paul died? Who had put up the memorials? There was a grim drama here at which he could not even guess. But the one question that mattered to him was, had Francis seen these crosses?
Johnny, who had been peering at the later monument, answered that question.
“Brother Lew has been here,” he said.
He pointed to a little St. Andrew’s cross freshly carved with a knife just below Paul’s name. Its ends were funnily splayed out.
“That’s Lew’s mark,” he said. “You might say it’s a family mark. Long ago, when Dad was working for the Bay, there was a breed of Indians along the Liard, some sort of Slaveys, that had got into their heads that they were kind of Scots, and every St. Andrew’s Day they would bring Dad a present of a big St. Andrew’s Cross, very nicely carved, which he stuck above the door like a horse-shoe. So we all got into the way of using that cross as our trade mark, especially Lew, who’s mighty particular. I’ve seen him carve it on a slab to stick above a dog’s grave, and when he writes a letter he puts it in somewhere. So whenever you see it you can reckon Lew’s ahead of you.”
“They can’t be long gone,” said Leithen.
“I’ve been figuring that out, and I guess they might have gone a week ago — maybe ten days. Lew’s pretty handy with a canoe. What puzzles me is where they’ve gone and how. There’s no place hereaways to get supplies, and it’s a good month’s journey to the nearest post. Maybe they shot caribou and smoked ‘em. I tell you what, if your pal’s got money to burn, what about him hiring a plane to meet ‘em here and pick ‘em up? If that’s their game it won’t be easy to hit their trail. There’s only one thing I’m pretty sure of, and that is they didn’t go home. If we fossick about we’ll maybe find out more.”
Johnny’s forecast was right, for that afternoon they heard a shot a mile off, and, going out to inquire, found an Eskimo hunter. At the sight of them the man fled, and Johnny had some trouble rounding him up. When halted he stood like a sullen child, a true son of the Elder Ice, for he had a tattooed face and a bone stuck through his upper lip. Probably he had never seen a white man before. He had been hunting caribou before they migrated south from the shore, and had a pile of skins and high-smelling meat to show for his labours. He stubbornly refused to accompany them back to the tent, so Leithen left him with Johnny, who could make some shape at the speech of the central Arctic.
When Johnny came back Andersen and the schooner had sailed, and Ghost River had returned to its ancient solitude.
“Lew’s been here right enough,” he said. “He and his boss and a couple of Indians came in two canoes eleven days back — at least I reckoned eleven days as well as I could from yon Eskimo’s talk. Two days later a plane arrived for them. The Eskimo has never seen a horse or an automobile, but he knows all about aeroplanes. They handed over the canoes and what was left of the stores to the Indians and shaped a course pretty well due west. They’ve gotten the start of us by a week or maybe more.”
That night after supper Johnny spoke for the first time at some length.
“I’ve been trying to figure this out,” he said, “and here’s what I make of it. Mr. Galliard comes here and sees the graves of his brother and uncle. So far so good. From what you tell me that’s not going to content him. He wants to do something of his own on the same line by way of squarin’ his conscience. What’s he likely to do? Now, let’s see just where brother Lew comes in. I must put you wise about Lew.”
Johnny removed his pipe from his mouth.
“He’s a wee bit mad,” he said solemnly. “He’s a great man; the cutest hunter and trapper and guide between Alaska and Mexico, and the finest shot on this continent. But he’s also mad — batty — loony — anything you like that’s out of the usual. It’s a special kind of madness, for in most things you won’t find a sounder guy. Him and me was buck privates in the War until they made a sharpshooter of him, and you wouldn’t hit a better-behaved soldier than old Lew. I was a good deal in trouble, but Lew never. He has just the one crazy spot in him, and it reminds me of them Gaillards you talk about. It’s a kind of craziness you’re apt to find in us Northerners. There’s a bit of country he wants to explore, and the thought of it comes between him and his sleep and his grub. Say, did you ever hear of the Sick Heart River?”
Leithen shook his head.
“You would if you’d been raised in the North. It’s a fancy place that old-timers dream about. Where is it? Well, that’s not easy to say. You’ve heard maybe of the South Nahanni that comes in the north bank of the Liard about a hundred miles west of Fort Simpson? Dad had a post up the Liard and I was born there, and when I was a kid there was a great talk about the South Nahanni. There’s a mighty big waterfall on it, so you can’t make it a canoe trip. Some said the valley was full of gold, and some said that it was as hot as hell owing to warm springs, and everybody acknowledged that there was more game there to the square mile than in the whole of America. It had a bad name, too, for at least a dozen folk went in and never came out. Some said that was because of bad Indians, but that was punk, for there ain’t no Indians in the valley. Our Indians said it was the home of devils, which sounds more reasonable.”
Johnny stopped to relight his pipe, and for a few minutes smoked meditatively.
“Do you get to Sick Heart by the South Nahanni?” Leithen asked.
“No, you don’t. Lew’s been all over the South Nahanni, and barring the biggest grizzlies on earth and no end of sheep and goat and elk and caribou, he found nothing. Except the Sick Heart. He saw it from the top of a mountain, and it sort of laid a charm on him. He said that first of all you had snow mountains bigger than any he had ever seen, and then ice-fields like prairies, and then forests of tall trees, the same as you get on the coast. And then in the valley bottom, grass meadows and an elegant river. A Hare Indian that was with him gave him the name — the Sick Heart, called after an old-time chief that got homesick for the place and pined away. Lew had a try at getting into it and found it no good — there was precipices thousands of feet that end. But he come away with the Sick Heart firm in his mind, and he ain’t going to forget it.”
“Which watershed is it on?” Leithen asked.
“That’s what no man knows. Not on the South Nahanni’s. And you can’t get into it from the Yukon side, by the Pelly or the Peel or the Ross or Macmillan — Lew tried ‘em all. So it looks as if it didn’t flow that way. The last time I heard him talk about it he was kind of thinking that the best route was up from the Mackenzie, the way the Hare Indians go for their mountain hunting. There’s a river there called the Big Hare. He thought that might be the road.”
“Do you think he’s gone there now?”
“I don’t think, but I suspicion. See here, mister. Lew’s a strong character and mighty set on what he wants. He’s also a bit mad, and mad folks have persuasive ways with them. He finds t
his Galliard man keen to get into the wilds, and the natural thing is that he persuades him to go to his particular wilds, which he hasn’t had out of his mind for ten years.”
“I think you’re probably right,” said Leithen. “We will make a cast by way of the Sick Heart. What’s the jumping-off ground?”
“Fort Bannerman on the Mackenzie,” said Johnny. “Right, we’ll start tomorrow morning. We can send back the planes from there and collect an outfit. We’ll want canoes and a couple of Hares as guides.”
And then he fell silent and stared into the fire. Now and then he took a covert glance at Leithen. At last he spoke a little shyly.
“You’re a sick man, I reckon. I can’t help noticin’ it, though you don’t make much fuss about it. If Lew’s on the Sick Heart and we follow him there it’ll be a rough passage, and likely we’ll have to go into camp for the winter. I’m wondering can you stand it? There ain’t no medical comforts in the Mackenzie mountains.”
Leithen smiled. “It doesn’t matter whether I stand it or not. You’re right. I’m a sick man. Indeed, I’m a dying man. The doctors in England did not give me more than a year to live, and that was weeks ago. But I want to find Galliard and send him home, and after that it doesn’t matter what happens to me.”
“Is Galliard your best pal?”
“I scarcely know him. But I have taken on the job to please a friend, and I must make a success of it. I want to die on my feet, if you see what I mean.”
Johnny nodded.
“I get you. I’m mighty sorry, but I get you. . . . Once I had a retriever bitch, the best hunting dog I ever knew, and her and me had some great times on the hills. She could track a beast all day, and minded a blizzard no more than a spring shower. Well, she got something mortally wrong with her innards, and was dying all right. One morning I missed her from her bed beside the stove, and an Indian told me he’d seen her dragging herself up through the woods in the snow. I followed her trail and found her dead just above the tree line, the place she’d been happiest in when she was well. She wanted to die on her feet. I reckon that’s the best way for men and hounds.”