by John Buchan
At the base of the promontory there was a stand of well-grown spruce. A dozen of the trees had been felled, stripped, cut into lengths, and notched at each end. An oblong had been traced on a flat piece of ground, and holes dug for end-posts. A hut had been prospected, begun – and relinquished.
‘Lew’s been on this job,’ said Johnny. ‘You can’t mistake his axe-work.’
He stood looking with unquiet eyes at the pile of cut logs.
‘Him and his pal put in a day’s work here. And then they quit. What puzzles me is why Lew quit. It ain’t like him.’
‘Why shouldn’t he change his mind?’ Leithen asked. ‘He must have decided that this was not the best place for a base camp.’
Johnny shook his head.
‘It ain’t like him. He never starts on a job until he has thought all round it and made sure that he’s doin’ right, and then hell fire wouldn’t choke him off it. No, mister. There’s something queer about this, and I don’t like it. Something’s happened to Lew.’
The mild blue eyes were cloudy with anxiety.
‘They’ve back-packed their stuff and gone on. They’ve cached their canoe,’ and he nodded to where a bulky object was lashed in the lower branches of a tall poplar. ‘We’ve got to do the same. We’ll cache most of our stuff, for when we catch up with Lew we can send back for it. We’ll take the Indians, for you ain’t fit to carry a load. Their trail won’t be hard to follow. I’ve been over the first bit of it. Lew pushed on ahead, and the other was about fifty yards back of him and limping. Looks like they’ve quarrelled.’
6
THE trail led away from the lake shore up a tributary stream towards what looked like the main wall of the divide. The berry-clad, ferny hillside made easy walking, and since the timber was small there were few troublesome windfalls. Johnny carried his .44 rifle, his axe, and a bag containing his own personal effects and most of Leithen’s; the Hares, Big Klaus and Little Klaus, had the heavy stuff, tent, cooking utensils, portable stove, stores; while Leithen had no more than a light haversack about the weight which he had often carried in the Alps. The pattern of his day was now so familiar that he found it hard to fit into it the astounding novelties in his life – his quest for a man whom he had never seen, in the least-known corner of North America – the fact that presently somewhere in this wilderness he must die.
New also in his experience were the weather and his own weakness. The sun was getting low and the days were shortening; each night frost crisped the edges of the streams, and the first hour of the morning march was through crackling pools and frozen herbage. But by noon the sun was warm and it set daily over their left shoulders in a haze of opal and pearl. The morning and evening chills were keenly felt, but the tonic air seemed to soothe his coughing. It was the very quintessence of air, quickening every sense so that he smelt more keenly, heard more clearly, saw things in sharper outline. He had never used spectacles, and he found that his eyes were fully the equal of Johnny’s when he knew what to look for.
He might have had an appetite, too, had it not been for his fatigue. He was so tired when they made camp for the night that he could scarcely eat, and Johnny had to turn his beans and bacon into a kind of soup before he could swallow them. He would lie in a half-stupor drawing his breath painfully for the better part of an hour, while Johnny and the Hares built the fire. Johnny was merciful, and accommodated his pace to his dragging feet, but the easiest gait was too much for him, and soon he had to have hourly rests. The trail went in and out of the glens, rising slowly to the higher benches, and, but for a few patches of swamp and one laborious passage over a rockfall, it was a road a child could have walked. But except for a very few minutes in the day it was for Leithen one long purgatory.
He started out in the morning with wobbling legs. After a mile or so, when his blood moved more briskly, he had a short spell of comfort. Then his breath began to trouble him, and long before midday he was plodding like a conscientious drunkard. He made it a point of honour to continue until Johnny called a halt, and, though Johnny did this often, he found himself always near the limits of his strength, and would drop like a log when the word was given. He returned unconsciously to an old habit of his mountaineering days, when he had had a long dull course to complete, counting his steps up to a thousand and walking to the rhythm of ‘Old Soldiers never Die.’ …
At the head of a little pass Johnny halted, though the march had only been going for twenty minutes. The Hares, when they came up, set down their packs and broke into a dismal howling, which seemed to be meant for a chant. There was a big jack-pine with the lower branches lopped off, and some fifty feet from the ground a long bundle was lashed to the trunk, something wrapped in caribou skin tanned white.
Johnny removed his disreputable hat. ‘That’s a chief up there. Good old scout he was – name of Billy Whitefish … Passed out last fall.’
7
ONE blue day succeeded another, and each was followed by a colder night. The earth was yawning before it turned to its winter sleep. Leithen, though the days tired him to desperation, yet found the nights tolerable, and could let his thoughts stray from his bodily discomfort. He listened to Johnny’s talk.
Johnny talked much, for he had lost his shyness of Leithen, and this kind of trip was child’s play to him.
‘This is a pretty good land,’ he said, ‘to them that knows their way about. I guess a man could starve in the barrens, but not in the woods. Why, there’s forty kinds of berries – and a whole lot of different sorts of mushrooms – and rock-tripe – and bark you can boil to make porridge. And there’s all the animals that Noah had in the Ark. And there’s nothing to hurt a body provided the body’s got sense, and don’t tackle a grizzly up-hill.’
He had strong views on food. ‘B’ar’s right enough in the fall when he’s fat. A young un’s as good as mutton, but an old un’s plain shoe leather.’ He did not care for moose meat, preferring caribou or deer, and he liked best partridge or ptarmigan in half-plumage.
‘What’s here? Grizzly, black b’ar, brown b’ar, moose, caribou, three kinds of sheep – everything except goats. The Almighty left goats out when He stocked them mountains.’
It was clearly his purpose to picture the land as an easy place even for a sick man to travel in. ‘Canadians,’ he said (he used the word as the equivalent of strangers, embracing everybody except the men of the North-west), ‘think we’ve got hell’s own climate up here. They’re wrong. We get milder winters than the Prairies. Besides, winter’s a fine time to travel if you know the ways of it. You’ll be snugger in a hole in the snow at forty below than in an apartment house in Winnipeg, and a darn lot healthier.
‘But you’ve got to watch your step in the Northland,’ he would add. He would tell experiences of his own to show the cruelty of the wilds, though he was always careful to explain that his misfortunes were due to his own folly. He was a white-water man, though not of Lew’s class, and above all things he hated towing a boat with a long trackline. ‘The thing’s just waitin’ to murder you,’ he said, ‘trip you over a cliff, or drown you, or get round your neck and saw your head off.’ …
He had been near starvation. ‘I can go three days without food and not feel it, and I’ve done it pretty often. I reckon Lew could go five. But there’s never been no reason for it except my own dam’ folly. Once I lost all my kit in a river, including my knife which I had in my teeth, and I had to make shift with flint-flakes to kill and skin. I once lived for a week on berries and one porcupine.’
He had had his accidents, too, as when a pine he was chopping down split with the cold and sent a sliver through his shoulder. He had once walked twenty miles to find a bottle of painkiller which he had cached, his throat choking with laryngitis. But his worst adventure – he seemed shy in telling it – was when he was caught without snow-shoes in an early fall blizzard, and crossed unknowingly a bottomless half-frozen sphagnum swamp which heaved under his tread and made him vomit up his soul.
He would talk, too, about the secret lore of the woods. He could make the crows speak to him, and the squirrels, but not the whisky-jacks, because they were fools with only a cry and no speech. Lew could make anything talk.
It was always Lew, the mentor, the magician. But he never spoke his brother’s name, or so it seemed to Leithen, without an accent of disquiet. He followed unerringly Lew’s blazing of the trail, and often the blazes were so small that only a skilled woodman could have noticed them. He studied carefully every bivouac. Sometimes in marshy places he found the moccasin tracks still fresh, and then his anxiety seemed to increase.
‘Lew’s settin’ a terrible pace,’ he said, ‘and the other’s laggin’. They’re still messin’ together at night, but the other must be getting in pretty late, and he can’t be having much sleep, for each morning they starts together … I don’t like it somehow. I wonder what brother Lew’s aiming at?’
8
THE trail wound intricately along the slopes of deep parallel glens, now and then crossing from one to another by a low pass. Johnny had been over it before, and was puzzled. ‘Them rivers run down to the Yukon,’ he told Leithen. ‘But Lew swears the Sick Heart don’t do that, and we’re over the divide from the Mackenzie. I reckon it can’t have nothin’ to do with the Peel, so it must disappear into the earth. That’s my guess. Anyhow, this trail ain’t going to get us nowhere except to the Yukon.’
The celestial weather continued, wintry in the small hours of the night, but in the sun as balmy as June. Leithen had fallen into a state which was neither ease nor mal-ease, but something neutral like his bodily condition at the end of a hard term at the Bar, when he was scarcely ill but assuredly not well. He could struggle through the day and have a slender margin for the interests of the road.
There was one new thing – the wild animals were beginning to show themselves, as if they were stretching their legs for the last time before the snows came. One morning he saw the first moose – well up the hillside in a patch of dwarf spruce, showing against the background like elephants.
‘Them beasts ain’t happy here,’ Johnny said. ‘They want the hardwood country, for they ain’t like caribou that feed on moss – they likes the juicy underbrush. I guess they’ll come down before the snow to the bottoms and stamp out a ravage so as to get to the shoots. I’ll tell you a queer thing. The moose is pushin’ further north. I mind the day when there wasn’t one north of the Great Slave Lake, and now Lew has seen them on the Arctic shore east of the Mackenzie. I wonder what’s bitin’ them?’
The caribou had not yet appeared, being still on the tundras, but there were birds – ptarmigan and willow grouse – and big Arctic hares just getting into their winter coats. Also there were wolves, both the little grey wolves and the great timber wolves. They did not howl, but Johnny – and Leithen also – could hear them padding at night in the forest. Sometimes dim shapes slipped across a glade among the trees. One night, too, when Leithen could not sleep, he got up and watched the northern heavens where the aurora flickered like a curtain of delicate lace wrought in every tint of the rainbow. It lit up the foreground across which stalked a procession of black forms like some frieze on a Greek urn.
He found Johnny at his side. ‘That’s the North,’ he said solemnly. ‘The wolves and the Aurory. God send us a kind winter.’
9
ONE day the trail took an odd turn, for it left the parallel ridges and bore away to the east to higher ground. Johnny shook his head. ‘This is new country for me,’ he said. ‘Here’s where Lew has taken the big chance.’
Mountains prematurely snow-covered had been visible from the Hares’ settlement, and Leithen at Lone Tree Camp had seen one sharp white peak in a gap very far off. Ever since then they had been moving among wooded ridges at the most two thousand feet high. But now they suddenly came out on a stony plateau, the trees fell away, and they looked on a new world.
The sedimentary rocks had given place to some kind of igneous formation. In front were cliffs and towers as fantastic as the Dolomites, black and sinister against a background of great snowfields, sweeping upward to ice arêtes and couloirs which reminded Leithen of Dauphiné. In the foreground the land dropped steeply into gorges which seemed to converge in a deep central trough, but they were very unlike the mild glens through which they had been ascending. These were rifts in the black rock, their edges feathered with dwarf pines, and from their inky darkness in the sunlight they must be deep. The rock towers were not white and shining like the gracious pinnacles above Cortina, but as black as if they had been hewn out of coal by a savage Creator.
But it was not the foreground that held the eye, but the immense airy sweep of the snowfields and ice pinnacles up to a central point, where a tall peak soared into the blue. Leithen had seen many snow mountains in his time, but this was something new to him – new to the world. The icefield was gigantic, the descending glaciers were on the grand scale, the central mountain must compete with the chief summits of the southern Rockies. Butunlike the Rockies the scene was composed as if by a great artist – nothing untidy and shapeless, but everything harmonised into an exquisite unity of line and colour.
His eyes dropped from the skyline to the foreground and the middle distance. He shivered. Somewhere down in that labyrinth was Galliard. Somewhere down there he would leave his own bones.
Johnny was staring at the scene without speaking a word, without even an exclamation. At last he drew a long breath.
‘God!’ he said. ‘Them’s the biggest mountains in the Northland and only you and me and Lew and his pal has seen ’em, and some Indians that don’t count. But it’s going to be a blasted country to travel. See that black gash? I reckon that’s where the Sick Heart River flows, and it’ll be hell’s own job to get down to it.’
‘D’you think Lew and Galliard are there?’ Leithen asked.
‘Sure. I got their trail a piece back on the sand of that little pond we passed. We’ll pick it up soon on them shale slides.’
‘Is the road possible?’
‘Lew thinks it is. I told you he’d seen the Sick Heart once but couldn’t get down the precipices. It couldn’t have been this place or he wouldn’t have gone on, for he don’t try impossibilities. He sure knows there’s a way down.’
Leithen, sitting on the mountain gravel, had a sudden sharp pang of hopelessness, almost of fear. He realised that this spectacle of a new mountain-land would once have sent him wild with excitement, the excitement both of the geographer and the mountaineer. But now he could only look at it with despair. It might have been a Pisgah-sight of a promised land; but now it was only a cruel reminder of his frailty. He had still to find Galliard, but Galliard had gone into this perilous labyrinth. Could he follow? Could he reach him? … But did it matter after all? The finding of Galliard was a task he had set himself, thinking less of success than of the task. It was to tide away the time manfully before his end so that he could die standing. A comforting phrase of Walt Whitman’s came back to him, ‘the delicious near-by assurance of death.’
Sometimes lately he had been surprised at himself. He had not thought that he possessed this one-idea’d stoicism which enabled him to climb the bleak staircase of his duty with scarcely a look behind … But perhaps this was the way in which most men faced death. Had his health lasted he would be doing the same thing a dozen or a score of years ahead. Soon his friends would be doing it – Hannay and Lamancha and Clanroyden – if they were fated to end in their beds. It was the lot of everyone sooner or later to reach the bleak bag’s-end of life into which they must creep to die.
10
THEY soon picked up the tracks of their forerunners in the long spouts of gravel, and as they slowly zigzagged downhill to the tree line the weather changed. The cold blue sky beyond the mountains dulled to a colder grey and all light went out of the landscape. It was like the coming of the Polar Night of which he had read, the inexorable drawing down of a curtain upon the glory of the world. The snow began to fall in big
flakes, not driven by any wind, but like the gentle emptying of a giant celestial bin. Soon there was nothing but white round them, except the tops of the little gnarled firs.
Luckily they had reached the tree line before the snow began, for otherwise they might have lost the trail. As it was, Johnny soon picked it up from the blazes on the diminutive trunks. It led them down a slope so steep that it was marvellous that any roots could cling to it. They had to ford many ice-cold streams, and before they reached flat ground in the evening Leithen was tottering on the very outside edge of his strength. He scarcely heard Johnny’s mutter, ‘Looks like Lew has lost his pal. Here’s where he camped and there’s just the one set of tracks.’ He was repeating to himself Whitman’s words like a prayer.
Johnny saw his weariness and mercifully said no more, contenting himself with making camp and cooking supper. Leithen fell asleep as soon as he had finished his meal, and did not wake until he heard the crackling of the breakfast fire. The air was mild and most of the snow had gone, for the wind had shifted to the south-west. Every limb ached after the long march of yesterday, but his chest was easier and there seemed more pith in his bones.
Johnny wore an anxious face. ‘We’ve made up on ’em,’ he said. ‘I reckon Lew’s not two days ahead.’
Leithen asked how he knew this, but Johnny said he knew but could not explain – it would take too long and a stranger to the wilds would not understand.
‘He’s gone on alone,’ he repeated. ‘This was his camping-ground three nights back, and the other wasn’t here. They parted company some time that day, for we had the trail of both of ’em on the shale slides. What in God’s name has happened? Lew has shook off his pal, and that pal is somewhere around here, and, being new to the job, he’ll die. Maybe he’s dead already.’