by John Buchan
The place was the south coast of Cornwall Island, well inside the Arctic Circle, the month was February, the hour was three in the afternoon, and the sun was just dropping below the horizon. Monpetit was on his way to the remote station of Fripp Inlet to visit and succour a brother missionary, for word had come down the coast by some mysterious moccasin telegraph that the priest at Fripp was gravely ill, and since Monpetit was the only man with any medical knowledge within a thousand miles it was his duty to go to his aid. Already he had been five days on the road, and if the fates were kind and the weather held he should reach his goal in another two.
The orange sky suddenly became a dull slaty-blue, and the light seemed to go out of the landscape. The team stopped automatically, the dogs were unharnessed and rolled in the snow, and the Eskimos took out their snow knives and began to cut blocks for an igloo.
“This is a good place,” said Ecka-look. “There will be no wind, I think. If it blows it will be from the north, and the cliff is therefore a shelter.”
Monpetit, who knew something of the awful power of an Arctic blizzard, nodded in assent.
Once the igloo in which he slept had been wrapped by a blizzard in a four-foot covering of snow, so that all air vents were blocked, and but for his lucky awakening with bursting lungs the party must have perished.... But as, in the failing light, he looked at the cliff behind him and saw far up the edge of an overhanging snowfield he did not feel so certain about the merits of the site. He was mountain bred, and in Dauphine in such a place there might be an avalanche or an ice-fall.
The last light had scarcely gone before the igloo was completed. There was no special shelter built for the dogs, as is the Greenland fashion, but they were left to camp in the snow after their meal of frozen fish. The runners of the sledge were seen to, and scraped into an even convex, which before starting next day would be further lubricated by being given a fresh skin of ice. Inside the igloo the two primus stoves were set going, whence came a faint light, and presently a real warmth. On racks placed above them each man hung his wet clothing. On one stove snow was melted in a kettle to make tea; and the other was filled with fragments of frozen beans and ship’s biscuit. Soon the place was as warm and steamy as a vapour bath, and the Eskimos, as sensitive to heat as any white man, stripped off their dickeys.
Supper did not take long, and presently the two Eskimos were asleep. But Monpetit was wakeful, for a long day’s journey tired him more than his companions, and he had to wait until his body could sink into apathy. The igloo was full of tiny noises, the sputterings of the stoves and the drip of moisture from roof and walls. But soon he grew used to them and they became the background against which other noises stood out. His hearing became unnaturally keen to detect any stirrings outside.
All day in that world of deathly silence he had been conscious of the monotonous sounds of travel. There was the steady thump of the dogs’ feet coming out of the orange cloud made by their breath. There was the sound of the runners on the snow — a sharp hissing when the snow was hard, and where it was soft a kind of cotton-wool slushing. Now these noises had gone out of his ears and he was hearing new ones.
There was a steady patter of the dogs’ feet as they prowled round the igloo. They always did that after being fed, in quest, perhaps, of a further meal before they settled down in their cold lairs.
Presently that stopped, and was succeeded by a multitude of queer little sounds. One was a gentle drip which came from the outside, like the noise of snow slipping from the eaves of a house. There was a clattering, too, as if little bits of ice were falling. This puzzled Monpetit, for there was no wind and the night was dead calm. It must be a fall of ice fragments from the cliff behind them. But what, in that stricture of frost, made the fragments fall? He did not like it; it reminded him of his own unpredictable ice-wreathed Dauphine peaks.
Then he heard something which puzzled him more. It was the sound of feet. Not dog’s paws, but feet, human or of some biggish animal. There were no human beings within a hundred miles, and at that season there could be no caribou or musk ox on the shore. A bear? But the sound had not the shuffle of a bear. Monpetit’s mind sprang into full wakefulness and sharp anxiety. Thank heaven the Eskimos were asleep! If they heard it they would panic about the Ghost Sledge, or some other of their many bogey tales....
Donald in his picture saw both the inside and the outside of the igloo, and what he saw outside startled him, though in the black night it was only a dance of shadows.
People were there — how many he could not tell, but not less than half a dozen. There was no sign of how they had come, no dogs, no sledge, they had simply welled out of the darkness. They were small people — of that he was certain — smaller than the Eskimos in the igloo, much smaller than Monpetit; and they did not move like ordinary mortals, but with a queer shuffling step like a bear.
What were they doing? They seemed able to see like cats in the dark, for they had spotted the igloo at once and were padding round it. They stopped to sniff, too, like dogs; they were conscious of the smell of humanity close at hand. They seemed to halt and take counsel. Then one of them plucked from somewhere on his person a crooked thing like a scimitar. He brandished it in the air and then plunged it in the igloo’s side at a joint between the blocks of snow.
Suddenly the whole party sprang backward and raised their heads. Something was happening on the cliff. Even in the darkness Donald was conscious of a huge moving curtain slipping down with the sound which water makes when it falls from a height so great that it is mostly spent in spray. It seemed to him that the igloo, whose outline he felt rather than saw, was suddenly raised to a conical tower. The little figures that surrounded it disappeared like rabbits at the report of a gun. Slowly the curtain drooped and then it seemed to stop and lie draped in thick folds along the flat....
Monpetit in the igloo listened anxiously to the padding of feet — mortal feet. He was muttering a prayer automatically, but every nerve in his brain was alive. His fear was human, not panic, which is animal. There was something outside which was man and with which man could deal.... And then he remembered the tale of the Eskimo on the Carlos river. The Toonits? The aboriginal folk of the North who had disappeared for a thousand years? Was he fated, here in the ends of the earth, to encounter the last earth-dwellers? For a second a strong intellectual curiosity steadied his nerves.
It enabled him to hear a new noise. The clatter of ice fragments suddenly stopped and was replaced by a steady drone, as if something soft and weighty were crushing down on something solid.... Now he knew where he was. He had heard that sound in a bivouac on the Meije. The ice cap on the cliff had slipped and the igloo was in the track of an avalanche.
Luckily he had not removed his dickey. With two violent kicks he awoke his companions into consciousness, then he dived at the wall nearest the sea and forced his hundred-and-eighty pounds through it. He had seen this done before in Baffin Land and a happy chance brought it to his memory.... Into the black night tumbled a dishevelled Oblate Father, closely followed by two half-clad Eskimos.
The change from the steamy igloo to the dry, bitter night was so harsh that for a moment Monpetit was half paralysed. He drew breath through clenched teeth, for the cold was enough to freeze his lungs. Thank God he had his dickey! But he had no protection for his head, and he had only one mitt. The Eskimos had nothing — parka, dickey, mitts, nor kamiks — only their shirts and pants and duffel stockings. All three were at the mercy of a winter night and would soon be dead.
Monpetit saw that the avalanche had stopped. It had submerged the igloo, but, so far as he could judge, had not crushed it. It had blocked up the hole in the wall through which he had escaped. Inside were clothes and warmth. Unless they could get inside they would assuredly perish.
But how? They had no snow knives, no implement but their naked hands. Monpetit made for the point where they had emerged and found a curtain of avalanche snow which must be at least four feet thick. It was still sof
tish, though soon it would harden into ice. He tore at it with his single mitt, and the Eskimos tore at it with their naked hands, but they could only clutch small handfuls. It was like a bird scrabbling with helpless claws against a stone wall....
He felt his strength ebbing under the impact of the cold. Worse, the exertion made him pant, and he was in terror of drawing ice into his lungs. He was a brave man, but he felt his manhood being squeezed out of him by the cruel grip of the North. He wanted to sink back into apathy or prayer, which would mean death....
And then suddenly he felt something hard below his knees, and out of the snow he drew a knife.
It was such a snow knife as he had never seen before, curved like a scimitar, made of bone or ivory, and curiously grooved and fluted. But it was what he needed. With it he hewed great chunks out of the drift that draped the igloo wall. Soon he had reached the wall itself and could scoop out easily the soft snow which now filled the hole he had made. A refreshing waft of heat came out to greet him. The two Eskimos were shoved through first, for their need was the greater, and lay panting on the floor like newly speared seals.
Monpetit, as soon as he got his breath, knelt beside the others and gave fervid thanks for the miracle which had been vouchsafed him. God had interfered directly with His grace to save His servant’s life by providing out of the void an instrument of salvation. He examined the heavenly gift. If it was of angel workmanship, then the celestial folk followed closely mortal patterns, for he recognised in the delicate incised work various Eskimo conventions. The blade was long, but the handle was very small, as if meant for tiny hands.... He remembered the sound of human feet which he had heard outside the igloo before the avalanche.
Donald blinked hard, for he was looking straight into the eye of the sun, which was now far down in the west. He wondered, not for the first time, why excessive light should be so near darkness, for it seemed to him that he had been for a moment or two in the dark.
As they jogged home in Celestin Martel’s buckboard Father Laflamme remembered something else about his friend in the North.
“Charles tells me,” he said, “that he is bringing back a wonderful curiosity. It is a snow knife he found in Cornwall Island. He thinks it may be Toonit workmanship.”
Father Monpetit duly came to Petit Fleurs a few weeks later, and Donald heard from his own lips the story of his miraculous escape from the avalanche. He saw, too, and handled, the snow knife which had been the instrument of Heaven. The Father was positive that its origin was Toonit.
“It lay there on the shore,” he said, “for a thousand years till the moment came for it.”
“Isn’t it a bit younger than a thousand years?” Donald asked. “It seems fairly new. Might not there still be some Toonits up there who only lost it the other day?”
The Father looked curiously at the boy. “Maybe,” he said. “God is great.”
In the following winter Donald’s form master at school gave his class a talk one afternoon about the story of exploration in the North. It was a rather good talk, beginning with old Henry Hudson and going down through Baffin and Hearne and the pirate D’Iberville to Franklin and Parry and Rae and Back, and the Hudson’s Bay Company who to-day are using the North-west Passage of which Amundsen was the pioneer, and which was sought for five hundred years. He spoke also of the Eskimos who, he said, had come from Asia over the Behring Strait. Upon this Donald had raised the question of the Toonit, about whom the master was more than sceptical. Donald, I fear, argued his case with such vigour that he was accused of disrespect, and was given a hundred lines of Paradise host as an imposition to improve his manners!
QU’APPELLE?
Qu’appelle?
A whisper steals through the sunburnt grasses;
Faint as a twilight wind it passes,
Broken and slow,
Soft and low,
And the heart responds like a beaten bell;
For the voice comes out of the ancient deeps
Where the blind, primordial Terror sleeps,
And hark! It is followed by soft footfalls!
Who calls?
Qu’appelle?
What is it stirs the cedars high,
When there is no wind in all the sky,
And plays queer tunes
On the saskatoons,
Subtler airs than the ear can tell?
The evening breeze? But wise men warn
That the tune and the wind are elfin-born,
And lure the soul to uncanny things.
Who sings?
Qu’appelle?
The world is empty of stir and sound,
Not a white fox barks in the void profound;
On the Elder Ice
Old Silence lies,
Older than Time and deep as Hell.
Yet a whisper creeps as a mist from a fen
Which is not the speech of articulate men,
And the hunter flees like a startled bird.
Whose word?
EPILOGUE
JOHN BUCHAN thought that history was too often taught to children in such a way that they found it a dull subject. He said that they must be told stories and legends about what had happened in their own country, in order to awaken an interest in their ancestors.
So he set to work to try and show Canadian children how romantic and exciting he felt the history of Canada to be. In this book he has mixed new times with olden times. Donald, who is not at all good at learning history at school, suddenly has it brought before his eyes in a series of magic pictures. John Buchan was aware that some Indians have the power of projecting happenings of long ago on to a piece of calm water; so he chose Negog, the Indian, Donald’s companion and guide, to wave a magic wand over the past, and we see a rich pageant moving before our eyes as we turn over the pages of this book.
Among the author’s papers I found a chapter called “Trusty and Well-beloved,” which he did not quite finish. On the wall of the sitting-room in Donald’s home hung his father’s commission in the Militia, which said that His Majesty called on the services of an officer whom he described as “trusty and well-beloved.” These words strongly impressed Donald’s fancy. They seemed to him to be the highest terms of compliment possible in the English language. He applied them at various times to his own belongings — a cocker spaniel and a catapult, among other things! It seemed to him that the words also applied to Tim Haskins, who had done everything which seemed to the boy worth doing. He had trapped, traded, and prospected down the Mackenzie river, and something about Tim’s steady grey eyes always recalled the phrase to him.
This story tells of how Tim Haskins and Father Laflamme were talking together. Donald listened for a time and then slipped off to the river to see how the fish were running. He found Negog beside the sea-pool mending a net that was used for sprats. The Indian looked up from his work, nodded, and bent to it again.
“Fish running?” Donald asked.
“One — two — three. Not many fish. I think the weather changes. To-morrow will be rain and wind.” He looked up to the cloudless evening sky, turned his head eastward, and sniffed the air.
“Storm comes,” he said. Then he grinned and added something which Donald did not understand. “After to-night there will not be the Long Traverse.”
* * * *
So this is how “The Long Traverse” ends. The manuscript breaks off a few pages later, but before it ends it tells how Donald sees a vision of Tim Haskins, twenty years younger, just before the outbreak of the first Great War in 1914. He sees Tim in the North with a half-breed called Andy Applin. They had made camp in a little bay where the sand was grey like granite. Supper was nearly over, mugs of coffee were being handed round, and pipes were alight. With them were three college boys from Michigan, metallurgical students who were doing a bit of practical prospecting. They were looking for gold, and going off to a place called Blue Heron Lake, Tim shows them a sample of varicoloured sand, amongst which is some yellow stuff rather like sulphur. He te
lls them that it is pitchblende, in which radium is found.
While Tim is explaining that he and Andy are going off to look for more pitchblende they hear the sound of a canoe’s paddle, and see a canoe with a solitary figure in it coming along.
Andy cries out that it is Bill Macrae, the Mounty. The boys greet him and give him flapjacks and coffee. While he is eating he breaks the news to them that Britain is fighting Germany.
Without a moment’s hesitation Tim and Andy announce that they intend to go and fight, and are soon headed south, for there is no time to spare if they want to beat the freeze-up.
The manuscript ends here, but John Buchan had already written the whole story of the discovery of pitchblende, and some day you may see it depicted in a film.
THE END
The Short Stories
Hutchesons’ Grammar School, Glasgow — where Buchan was educated, before attending university
Aged 17, Buchan was awarded a scholarship to the University of Glasgow, where he studied classics, wrote poetry and became a published author.
The Keeper of Cademuir, or On Cademuir Hill
Glasgow University Magazine, 1894
The gamekeeper of Cademuir strode in leisurely fashion over the green side of the hill. The bright chilly morning was past, and the heat had all but begun; but he had lain long a-bed, deeming that life was too short at the best, and there was little need to hurry it over. He was a man of a bold carriage, with the indescribable air of one whose life is connected with sport and rough moors. A steady grey eye and a clean chin were his best features; otherwise, he was of the ordinary make of a man, looking like one born for neither good nor evil in any high degree. The sunlight danced around him, and flickered among the brackens; and though it was an everyday sight with him, he was pleased, and felt cheerful, just like any wild animal on a bright day. If he had had his dog with him, he would have sworn at it to show his pleasure; as it was, he contented himself with whistling ‘The Linton Ploughman’, and setting his heels deep into the soft green moss.