XXI
Thusbegan a week of trial for Ned. For the first time in his life he was thrown wholly upon his own resources, standing or falling by his own worth. Should he fall insensible in the snow there were none to seek him and bring him into shelter. If he should go astray and miss the cabins there was no one to set him on the right path again. He was meeting the wilderness alone, and face to face.
Cooking his meals, cutting the fuel and building the fires that kept him warm, meeting the storm in its fury and fighting a lone fight from the gray of dawn to the day’s gray close, Ned made the long circuit of his trap line. The qualities that carried him far in his home city—such things as wealth and position and culture—were as dust here. His reliance now was the axe on his shoulder and the hunting knife at his hip; but most of all his own stamina, his own steadfastness, the cunning of his brain and the strength of his sinews. And every day found him stronger and better able to meet the next.
Certain muscles most used in tugging through the snow, seemingly worn to shreds the first day’s march, strengthened under the stress, and he found he did his daily stint with ever greater ease. Ever he handled the little, daily crises with greater skill, and this with less loss of vital energy: the crossing of a swollen stream or a perilous morass; or the climbing of a slippery glacier. Every day the wilderness unrolled its pages to his eyes.
The little daily encounters with the wild life were ever a greater delight. He found pleasure in trying to guess the identity of the lesser, scurrying people he met on the trail: he found a moving beauty in the far-off glimpse of the running pack, in a vivid silhouette on the ridge at twilight; the sight of a bull caribou tossing his far-spreading antlers sent his blood moving fast in his veins. By the grace of the Red Gods he was afforded the excitement of being obliged to backtrack two hundred yards in order gracefully to yield the trail to a great, surly Alaskan bear already seeking a lair for his winter sleep.
He crossed the divide to Forks cabin, followed the springs to Thirty-Mile cabin, descended to the sea, and along the shore to the home cabin, just as he had been told to do. He put out his traps as he went in what seemed to him the most likely places, using every wile Doomsdorf had taught him to increase his chances for a catch. In spite of the fact that he went alone, the second day was ever so much easier than the first; and he came into the home cabin only painfully tired, but not absolutely exhausted, on the fifth. Of course he didn’t forget that, other things being equal, these first five days were his easiest days. Actual trapping had not yet started: he had not been obliged to stop, thaw out and skin such larger animals as would be found dead in his traps; nor yet work late into the night fleshing and stretching the pelts. A greater factor was the moderate weather: light snowfall and temperature above freezing, a considerable variance from the deadly blizzards that would ensue.
All through the five days he had strengthened himself with the thought that Lenore awaited him at the journey’s end; and she had never seemed so lovely to him as when, returning in the gray twilight, he saw her standing framed in the lighted doorway of the home cabin. She had suffered no ill-treatment in his absence. The great fear that had been upon his heart was groundless, after all: her face was fresh, her eyes bright, she was not lost in despair. In spite of his aching muscles, his face lighted with hopefulness and relief that was almost happiness.
Doubtless it was his own eagerness that made her seem so slow in coming into his arms; and his own great fire that caused her to seem to lack warmth. He had been boyishly anticipatory, foolishly exultant. Yet it was all sweet enough. The girl fluttered a single instant in his arms, and he felt repaid for everything.
“Let me go,” she whispered tensely, when his arms tried to hold her. “Don’t let Doomsdorf see. He might kill you——”
But it came about that she didn’t finish the warning. Presently she felt his arms turn to steel. She felt herself thrust back until her eyes looked straight into his.
She had never seen Ned in this mood before. Indeed she couldn’t ever remember experiencing the sensation that swept her now: secretly appalled at him, burnt with his fire, wavering beneath his will. She didn’t know he had arms like that. His face, when she tried to meet it, hardly seemed his own. The flesh was like gray iron, the eyes cold as stones.
“What has Doomsdorf to do with it?” he demanded. “Has he any claim on you?”
“Of course not,” she hastened to reply. “He’s treated me as well as could be expected. But you know—he makes claims on us all.”
The fact could not be denied. Ned turned from her, nestling to the fire for warmth.
The happiness he had expected in this long-awaited night had failed to materialize. He ate his great meal, sat awhile in sporadic conversation with the girl in the snug cabin; then went wearily to his blankets. He hardly knew what was missing. Her beauty was no less; it was enhanced, if anything, by the flush of the wind on her cheeks. Yet she didn’t understand what he had been doing, what he had been through. He held her interest but slightly as he told of his adventures on the trail. When in turn she talked to him, it was of her own wrongs; and the old quick, eager sympathy somehow failed to reach his heart. But it was all he could expect on this terrible island. He must thank what gods there were for the one kiss she had given him—and be content. All happiness was clouded here.
Often, in the little hour after supper about the stove, he wakened from his revery to find that he had been thinking about Bess. She had come in from her line the previous day and had gone out again; and he had not dreamed that her absence could leave such a gap in their little circle. He had hardly regarded her at all, yet he found himself missing her. She was always so high-spirited, encouraging him with her own high heart. Of course the very fact that they were just three, exiled among foes, would make her absence keenly felt. The mere bond of common humanity would do that. Yet he found himself wishing that he had shown greater appreciation of her kindness, her courage, her sweet solicitude for him. On her lonely trap line out in the wastes it was as if she had gone forever. He found himself resenting the fact that Lenore had but cold assent to his praise of her, wholly unappreciative of the fact that her own ease was due largely to Bess’s offer to do additional work.
But his blankets gave him slumber, and he rose in the early hours, breakfasted, and started out on his lonely trap line. He was not a little excited as to the results of this morning’s tramp. Every skin he took was his, to protect his own body from the bitter, impending cold.
The first few traps had not been sprung. Out-witting the wild creatures was seemingly not the easy thing he had anticipated. The bait had been stolen from a marten trap at the edge of the barrens, but the jaws had failed to go home, and a subsequent light snowfall had concealed the tracks by which he might have identified the thief. Was this the answer to his high hopes? But he had cause to halt when he neared the trap on the beaver dam.
For a moment he couldn’t locate the trap. Then he saw that the wire, fastened securely to the bank, had become mysteriously taut. Not daring to hope he began to tug it in.
At the end of the wire he found his trap, and in the trap was a large beaver, drowned and in prime condition.
The moment was really a significant one for Ned. The little traps of steel, placed here and there through the wilderness, had seemed a doubtful project at best; but now they had shown results. The incident gave him added confidence in himself and his ability to battle successfully these perilous wilds. The rich, warm skin would help to clothe him, and he would easily catch others to complete his wardrobe.
The beaver was of course not frozen; and the skin stripped off easily under the little, sawing strokes of his skinning knife. He was rather surprised at its size. It came off nearly round, and it would stretch fully thirty-two inches in diameter. Washing it carefully, he put it over his back and started on.
Other traps yielded pelts in his long day’s march. The trap on the beaver landing contained a muskrat; he found several more of the same furred rodents in his traps along the creek; and small skins though they were, he had a place for every one. Once an otter, caught securely by the hind leg, showed fight and had to be dispatched by a blow on the head with a club; and once he was startled when a mink, scarcely larger than his hand, leaped from the snowy weeds, trap and all, straight for his ankle.
There was no more ferocious creature in all the mammalian world than this. “Little Death,” was a name for him in an aboriginal tongue; and it was perfectly in accord with his disposition. His eyes were scarlet; he opened his rapacious jaws so wide that they resembled those of a deadly serpent; he screamed again and again in the most appalling fury. This was the demon of the Little People: the snaky Stealth that murdered the nestlings in the dead of night; the cruel and remorseless hunter whose red eyes froze the snowshoe hare with terror.
Tired out, barely able to stand erect, yet wholly content with his day’s catch, Ned made the cabin in the twilight, built his fire, and cooked his meager supper. After supper he skinned out such little animals as he had not taken time to skin on the trail, fleshed and stretched his pelts, then hung them up to dry. He was almost too tired to remove his wet garments when the work was done. He hardly remembered drawing the blankets over him.
Thus ended the first of a long series of arduous days. The hardship was incomparably greater than that endured by the great run of those hardy men, the northern trappers, not only because of his inadequate clothes, but because the line had been laid out by a giant’s rule. Doomsdorf had spaced his cabins according to his own idea of a full day’s work, and that meant they were nearly twice as far apart as those of the average trap line. Bess had been given the line he had laid out for his squaw, hardly half so rigorous, yet all the average man would care to attempt.
But in spite of the hardship, the wrack of cold, the fatigue that crept upon him like a dreadful sickness, Ned had many moments of comparative pleasure. One of these moments, seemingly yielding him much more delight than the occasion warranted, occurred at the end of the second day of actual trapping.
This day’s march had taken him to the Forks cabin; and there, as twilight drew about him, he was amazed to hear the nearing sound of footsteps in the snow. Some one was coming laboriously toward him, with the slow, dragging tread of deep fatigue.
The thing made no sense at all. Human companionship, in these gray and melancholy wastes, was beyond the scope of the imagination. For a moment he stared in dumb bewilderment like a man at the first seizure of madness. Then he sprang through the door and out on the snowy slope.
It was not just a whim of the fancy. A dim form moved toward him out of the grayness, hastening, now that his lantern light gleamed on the snow. Presently Ned saw the truth.
It was Bess, of course. At this point their lines coincided. It was her third stop, and since she had left the home cabin a day ahead of him, she was perfectly on schedule. He could hardly explain the delight that flashed through him at the sight of her. In this loneliness and silence mere human companionship was blessing enough.
His appearance in the doorway was not a surprise to Bess. She had counted the days carefully, and she knew his schedule would bring him here. But now she was too near dead with fatigue to give him more than a smile.
The night that ensued was one of revelation to Ned. His first cause of wonder was the well of reserve strength that suddenly manifested itself in the hour of need. He had not dreamed but that he was at the edge of collapse from the long day’s toil; his brain had been dull with fatigue, and he was almost too tired to build his fire, yet he found himself a tower of strength in caring for the exhausted girl. It was as if his own fatigue had mysteriously vanished when he became aware of hers.
With scarcely a word he lifted her to the cot, covered her with a blanket, and in spite of her protests, went speedily about the work of cooking her supper. It was a strange thing what pleasure it gave him to see the warm glow of the life stream flow back into her blanched cheeks, and her deep, blue eyes fill again with light. Heretofore this twilight hour, at the end of a bitter day, had been the worst hour of all; but to-night it was the best. He hadn’t dreamed that so much pleasure could be gained simply by serving others. In addition to some of the simple staples that he found among the cabin’s supplies, he served her, as a great surprise, the plump, white breast of a ptarmigan that he had found in one of his ermine traps; and it was somehow a deep delight to see her little, white teeth stripping the flesh from the bone. He warmed her up with hot coffee; then sat beside her while the night deepened at the window.
They had a quiet hour of talk before he drew the blankets about her shoulders and left her to drift away in sleep. He was unexplainably exultant; light-hearted for all this drear waste that surrounded him. This little hut of logs was home, to-night. The cold could not come in; the wind would clamor at the roof in vain.
He did her work for her to-night. He skinned the smaller animals she had brought in, then fleshed and stretched all the pelts she had taken. After preparing his own skins, he made a hard bed for himself on the floor of the hut.
It was with real regret that they took different ways in the dawn. Ned’s last office was to prepare kindling for her use on her next visit to the cabin four days hence—hardly realizing that he was learning a little trick of the woodsman’s trade that would stand him in good stead in many a dreadful twilight to come. Only the veriest tenderfoot plans on cutting his kindling when he finishes his day’s toil. The tried woodsman, traveling wilderness trails, does such work in the morning, before fatigue lays hold of him. The thing goes farther: even when he does not expect to pass that way again he is careful to leave the kindling pile for the next comer. Like all the traditions of the North, it is founded on necessity: the few seconds thus saved in striking the flame have more than once, at the end of a bitter day, saved the flame of a sturdy life. This is the hour when seconds count. The hands are sometimes too cold to hold the knife: the tired spirit despairs at this labor of cutting fuel. It is very easy, then, to lie still and rest and let the cold take its toll.
The trails of these two trappers often crossed, in the weeks to come. They kept close track of each other’s schedules, and they soon worked out a system whereby they could meet at the Forks cabin at almost every circuit. They arranged it wholly without embarrassment, each of them appreciating the other’s need for companionship. By running a few traps toward the interior from the forks, Bess made an excuse to take five days to her route; and for once Doomsdorf seemed to fail to see her real motive. Perhaps he thought she was merely trying to increase her catch, thus hoping to avoid the penalties he had threatened.
Ned found to his amazement that they had many common interests. They were drawn together not only by their toil, and by their mutual fear of Doomsdorf’s lash; but they also shared a deep and growing interest in the wilderness about them. The wild life was an absorbing study in itself. They taught each other little tricks of the trapper’s trade, narrated the minor adventures of their daily toil; they were of mutual service in a hundred different ways. No longer did Ned go about his work in the flimsy clothes of the city. Out of the pelts he had dried she helped to make him garments and moccasins as warm and serviceable as her own, supplied through an unexpected burst of generosity on Doomsdorf’s part soon after their arrival on the island. They brought their hardest problems to the Forks cabin and solved them together.
As the winter advanced upon them, they found an increasing need of mutual help. The very problem of living began to demand their best coöperation. The winter was more rigorous than they had ever dreamed in their most despairing moments, so that coöperation was no longer a matter of pleasure, but the stark issue of life itself. The spirit, alone and friendless, yielded quickly in such times as these.
It got to be a mystery with them after while, why they hadn’t given up long since, instead of playing this dreadful, nightmare game to its ultimate end of horror and death. Why were they such fools as to keep up the hopeless fight, day after day through the intense cold, bending their backs to the killing labor, when at any moment they might find rest and peace? They did not have to look far. Freedom was just at their feet. Just to fall, to lie still; and the frost would creep swiftly enough into their veins. Sleep would come soon, the delusion of warmth, and then Doomsdorf’s lash could never threaten them again. But they found no answer to the question. It was as if a power beyond themselves was holding them up. It was as if there was a debt to pay before they could find rest.
Day after day the snow sifted down, ever laying a deeper covering over the island, bending down the limbs of the strong trees, obscuring all things under this cold infinity of white. The traps had to be laboriously dug out and reset, again and again. These were the days when the old “sourdough” on the mainland remained within his cabin, merely venturing to the door after fuel; but Ned and Bess knew no such mercy. Their fate was to struggle on through those ever-deepening drifts until they died. Driven by a cruel master they dared not rest even a day. Walking was no longer possible without snowshoes; and even these sank deep in the soft drifts, the webs filling with snow, so that to walk a mile was the most bitter, heart-breaking labor. Yet their fate was to plow on, one day upon another,—strange, dim figures in the gray, whirling flakes—the full, bitter distances between their cabins. To try to lay out meant death, certain and very soon. Moreover they could not even move with their old leisure. The days were constantly shorter, just a ray of light between great curtains of darkness; and only by mushing at the fastest possible walking pace were they able to make it through.
When the skies cleared, an undreamed degree of cold took possession of the land. Seemingly every trickle of moving water was already frozen hard, the sea sheltered by the island chain was an infinity of ice, snow-swept as was the rest of the weary landscape, but now the breath froze on the beard, and the eyelids one upon another. The fingers froze in the instant that the fur gloves were removed, and the hottest fires could hardly warm the cabins. And on these clear, bitter nights the Northern Lights were an ineffable glory in the sky.
A strange atmosphere of unreality began to cloud their familiar world. They found it increasingly hard to believe in their own consciousnesses; to convince themselves they were still struggling onward instead of lying lifeless in the snow. It was all dim like a dream,—snow and silence and emptiness, and the Northern Lights lambent in the sky. And for a time this was the only mercy that remained. Their perceptions were blunted: they were hardly aware of the messages of pain and torture that the nerves brought to the brain. And then, as ever, there came a certain measure of readjustment.
Their bodies built up to endure even such hardship as this. The fact that the snow at last packed was a factor too: they were able to skim over the white crust at a pace even faster than the best time they had made in early fall. They mastered the trapper’s craft, learning how to skin a beaver with the fewest number of strokes, and in such a manner that the minimum amount of painstaking fleshing was required; and how to bait and set the traps in the fastest possible time. They learned their own country, and thus the best, easiest, and quickest routes from cabin to cabin.
The result was that at last the companionship between Bess and Ned, forgotten in the drear horror of the early winter months, was revived. Again they had pleasant hours about the stove at the Forks cabin, sometimes working at pelts, sometimes even enjoying the unheard-of luxury of a few minutes of idleness. While before they had come in almost too tired to be aware of each other’s existence, now they were fresh enough to exchange a few, simple friendly words—even, on rare occasions, to enjoy a laugh together over some little disaster of the trail. The time came when they knew each other extremely well. In their hours of talk they plumbed each other’s most secret views and philosophies, and helped to solve each other’s spiritual problems.
Very naturally, and scarcely aware of the fact themselves, they had come to be the best of companions. As Ned once said, when a night of particular beauty stirred his imagination and loosened his stern lips, they had been “through hell” together; and the finest, most enduring companionship was only to have been expected. But it went farther than a quiet sort of satisfaction in each other’s presence. Each had got to know approximately what the other would do in any given case; and that meant that they afforded mutual security. They had mutual trust and confidence, which was no little satisfaction on this island of peril. Blunted and dulled before, their whole consciousness now seemed to sharpen and waken; they not only regarded each other with greater confidence: their whole outlook had undergone significant change. During the first few months of early winter they had moved over their terrible trails like mechanical machines, doing all they had to do by instinct, whether eating, sleeping, or working; self-consciousness had been almost forgotten, self-identity nearly lost. But now they were themselves again, looking forward keenly to their little meetings, their interests ever reaching farther, the first beginnings of a new poise and self-confidence upon them. They had stood the gaff! They had come through.
Ned’s hours with Lenore, however, gave him less satisfaction than they had at first. She somehow failed to understand what he had been through. He had found out what real hardship meant, and he couldn’t help but resent, considering her own comparative comfort, her attitude of self-pity. Always she wept for deliverance from the island, never letting Ned forget that his own folly had brought her hither; always expecting solicitude instead of giving it; always willing to receive all the help that Ned could give her, but never willing to sacrifice one whit of her own comfort to ease his lot. Because he had done man’s work, and stood up under it, he found himself expecting more and more from her,—and failing to receive it. Her lack of sportsmanship was particularly distressing to him at a time when sobbing and complaints could only tear down his own hard-fought-for spirit to endure. Most of all he resented her attitude toward Bess. She had no sympathy for what the girl had been through, even refusing to listen to Ned’s tales of her. And she seemed to resent all of Ned’s kindnesses to her.
Slowly, by the school of hardship and conquest over hardship, Ned Cornet was winning a new self-mastery, a new self-confidence to take the place of the self-conceit that had brought him to disaster. But the first real moment of wakening was also one of peril,—on the trapping trail one clear afternoon toward the bitter close of January.
He had been quietly following that portion of his trap line that followed the timber belt between the Twelve-Mile cabin and Forks cabin, and the blazed trail had led him into the depths of a heavy thicket of young spruce. He had never felt more secure. The midwinter silence lay over the land; the cold and fearful beauty of a snow-swept wilderness had hold of his spirit; the specter of terror and death that haunted these wintry wastes was nowhere manifest to his sight. The only hint of danger that the Red Gods afforded him did not half penetrate his consciousness and did not in the least call him from his pleasant fancies. It was only a glimpse of green where the snow had been shaken from a compact little group of sapling spruce just beside one of his sets. Likely the wind had caught the little trees just right; perhaps some unfortunate little fur-bearer, a marten perhaps, or a fisher, had sprung back and forth among the little trees in an effort to free himself from the trap. He walked up quietly, located the tree to which the trap chain was attached, bent and started to draw the trap from the small, dense thicket whence some creature had dragged it. He was only casually interested in what manner of poor, frozen creature would be revealed between the steel jaws. The beauty of the day had wholly taken his mind from his work.
One moment, and the forest was asleep about him; the little trees looked sadly burdened with their loads of snow. The next, and the man was hurled to the ground by a savage, snarling thing that leaped from the covert like the snow demon it was; and white, gleaming fangs were flashing toward his throat.
XXII
Exceptfor the impediment of the trap on the creature’s foot, there would have been but one blow to that battle in the snow. White fangs would have gone home where they were aimed, and all of Ned Cornet’s problems would have been simply and promptly solved. There would have been a few grotesque sounds, carrying out among the impassive trees,—such sounds as a savage hound utters over his bone, and perhaps, a strange motif carrying through, a few weird whisperings, ever growing fainter, from a torn throat that could no longer convey the full tones of speech; and perhaps certain further motion, perhaps a wild moment of odd, frenzied leaping back and forth, fangs flashing here and there over a form that still shivered as if with bitter cold. But these things would not have endured long: the sounds, like wakeful children, speedily hiding and losing themselves in the great curtains of silence and the wilderness itself swiftly returning to its slumber. Drifting snow dust, under the wind, would have soon paled and finally obliterated the crimson stain among the little trees.
Ned would have been removed from Doomsdorf’s power in one swiftly passing instant, the wilderness forgetting the sound of his snowshoes in its silent places. All things would be, so far as mortal eyes can discern, as if his soul had never found lodging in his body.
This was not some little fur-bearer, helpless in the trap. It was no less a creature than that great terror of the snow, a full-grown Arctic wolf, almost as white as the drifts he hunted through. Only the spruce trees knew how this fierce and cunning hunter came to snare his foot in the jaws of a marten trap. Nor could any sensible explanation be made why the great wolf did not break the chain with one lunge of his powerful body, instead of slinking into the coverts and waiting developments. The ways of the wild creatures quite often fail of any kind of an explanation; and it is a bold woodsman who will say what any particular creature will do under any particular condition. When he saw Ned’s body within leaping range, he knew the desperate impulse to fight.
None of the lower creatures are introspective in regard to their impulses. They follow them without regard to consequences. The wolf leaped with incredible speed and ferocity. The human body is not built to stand erect under such a blow: the mighty, full-antlered caribou would have gone down the same way.
The chain of the trap broke like a spring as he leaped. The steel leash that is often used to restrain a savage dog would have broken no less quickly. There was no visible recoil: what little resistance there was seemingly did not in the least retard the blow. It did, however, affect its accuracy. That fact alone saved Ned from instant death.
But as the wolf lunged toward him to complete his work—after the manner of some of the beasts of prey when they fail to kill at the first leap—an inner man of might seemed to waken in Ned’s prone body. A great force came to life within him. He lunged upward and met the wolf in the teeth.
Months before, when a falling tree had lashed down at him, he had seen a hint of this same, innate power. It was nothing peculiar to him: most men, sooner or later, see it manifested in some hour of crisis. But since that long-ago day it had been immeasurably enhanced and increased. While his outer, physical body had been developing, it had been strengthening too. Otherwise it would have been of little avail against that slashing, leaping, frenzied demon of the snow.
This inner power hurled him into a position of defense; but it would have saved him only an instant if it had not been for its staunch allies of muscles of tempered steel. For months they had been in training for just such a test as this; but Ned himself had never realized anything of their true power. He hadn’t known that his nerves were as finely keyed as a delicate electrical instrument, so that they might convey the commands of his brain with precision and dispatch. He suddenly wakened to find himself a marvelous fighting machine, with certain powers of resistance against even such a foe as this.
A great surge of strength, seemingly without physical limitation, poured through him. In one great bound he overcame the deadly handicap of his own prone position, springing up with terrible, reaching, snatching hands and clasping arms. Some way, he did not know how, he hurled that hundred pounds of living steel from his body before the white fangs could go home.
But there was not an instant’s pause. Desperate with fury, the wolf sprang in again,—a long, white streak almost too fast for the eye to follow. But he did not find Ned at a disadvantage now. The man had wrenched to one side to hurl the creature away, but he had already caught his balance and had braced to meet the second onslaught. A white-hot fury had descended upon him, too—obliterating all sense of terror, yielding him wholly to such fighting instincts as might be innate within him. Nor did they betray him, these inner voices. They directed the frightful power of his muscles in the one way that served him best.
Ned did not wait to catch the full force of that blow. His powerful thighs, made iron hard in these last bitter weeks, drove him out and up in an offensive assault. His long body seemed to meet that of the wolf full in the air. Then they rolled together into the drifts.
Ned landed full on top of the body of the wolf; and with a mighty surge of his whole frame he tried to strengthen his own advantageous position. His mighty knee clasped at the animal’s breast, pressing with all his strength with the deadly intention of crushing the ribs upon the wild heart. And he gave no heed to the clawing feet. His instincts told him surely that in the white fangs alone lay his danger. With one arm he encircled the shaggy neck; with the other he tried to turn the great muzzle from his flesh.
The wolf wriggled free, sending home one vicious bite into the flesh just under the arm; and for a breath both contestants seemed to be playing some weird, pinwheel game in the snow. The silence of the everlasting wild was torn to shreds by the noise of battle,—the frantic snarling of the wolf, the wild shouts of this madman who had just found his strength. No moment of Ned’s life had ever been fraught with such passion; none had ever been of such lightning vividness. He fought as he had never dreamed he could fight; and the glory of battle was upon him.
It might be that Doomsdorf could have picked up the great white creature by the scruff of the neck and beat his brains out against a tree. Yet Ned knew, in some cool, back part of his mind, that this was a foe worthy of the best steel of any man, however powerful. Even men of unusually great strength would have been helpless in an instant before those slashing fangs. Yet never for an instant did he lose hope. Bracing himself, he clamped down again with mighty knees on the wolf’s breast.
Again the slashing fangs caught him, but he was wholly unaware of the pain. The muscles of his arms snapped tight against the skin, the great tendons drew, and he jerked the mighty head around and back.
Then for a moment both contestants seemed to lie motionless in the snow. The wolf lay like a great hound before the fireside,—fore legs stretched in front, body at full length. Ned lay at one side, the animal’s body between his knees, one arm around his neck, the other thrusting back the great head. The whole issue of life or death, victory or defeat, was suddenly immensely simplified. It depended solely on whether or not Ned had the physical might to push back the shaggy head and shatter the vertebræ.
There was no sense of motion. Rather they were like figures in metal, a great artist’s theme of incredible stress. Ned’s face was drawn and black from congested blood. His lips were drawn back, the tendons of his hand, free of the glove, seemed about to break through the skin. For that long moment Ned called on every ounce of strength of his body and soul. Only his body’s purely physical might could force back the fierce head the ghastly inch that was needed; only the high-born spirit of strength, the mighty urge by which man holds dominion over earth and sea, could give him resolution to stand the incredible strain.
Time stood still. A thousand half-crazed fancies flew through his mind. His life blood seemed to be starting from his pores, and his heart was tearing itself to shreds in his breast. But the wolf was quivering now. Its eyes were full of strange, unworldly fire. And then Ned gave a last, terrific wrench.
A bone broke with a distinct crack in the utter silence. And as he fell forward, spent, the great white form slacked down and went limp in his arms.
Like a man who had been asleep Ned regained his feet. The familiar world of snow and forest rushed back to him, deep in the enchantment of the winter silence; and it was as if the battle had never occurred. Such warlike sounds as had been uttered were smothered in the stillness.
Yet the sleeve of his fur coat was torn, and dark red drops were dripping from his fingers. They made crimson spots in the immaculate snow. And just at his feet a white wolf lay impotent, never again to strike terror into his heart by its wild, unearthly chant on the ridge. The two had met, here in the wolf’s own snows; and now one lay dead at his conqueror’s feet.
Whose was the strength that had laid him low! Whose mighty muscles had broken that powerful neck! Vivid consciousness swept back to Ned; and with it a deep and growing exultation that thrilled the inmost chords of his being. It was an ancient madness, the heritage of savage days when man and beast fought for dominance in the open places; but it had not weakened and dimmed in the centuries. His eye kindled, and he stood shivering with excitement over his dead.
He had conquered. He had fought his way to victory. And was there any reason in heaven or earth why he should not fight on to freedom—out of Doomsdorf’s power? The moving spirit of inspiration seemed to bear him aloft.
Drunk with his own triumph, Ned could not immediately focus his attention on any definite train of thought. At first he merely gave himself up to dreams, a luxury that since the first day on the island he had never permitted himself. For many moments after the exultation of his victory had begun to pass away, he was still so entranced by dreams of freedom that he could not consider ways and means.
The word freedom had come to have a tangible meaning for him in these last dreadful months; its very idea was dear beyond any power of his to tell. It was so beloved a thing that at first his cold logic could not take hold of it: its very thought brought a luster as of tears to his eyes and a warm glow, as in the first drifting of sleep, to his brain. He had found out what freedom meant and how unspeakably beautiful it was. In his native city, however, he had taken it as a matter of course. Because it was everywhere around him he was no more conscious of it than the air he breathed; and he felt secret scorn of much of the sentimental eloquence concerning it. It had failed to get home to him, and many of his generation had forgotten it, just as they had forgotten the Author of their lives. It was merely something that feeble old men, amusing in their earnestness and their badges of the Grand Army so proudly worn on their tattered clothes, spoke of with a curious, deep solemnity, which a scattered few of his friends, from certain hard-fighting divisions, had learned on battlefields in France; but which was of little importance in his own life. When he did think of it at all he was very likely to confuse it with license. Now and then, when heady liquor had hold of him, he had amused his friends with quite a lecture concerning freedom,—particularly in its relation to the Volstead act. But the old urge and devotion that was the life theme of hundreds of generations that had preceded him had seemed cold in his spirit.
He had learned the truth up here. He had found out it was the outer gate to all happiness; and everything else worth while was wholly dependent upon it. As he stood in this little snowy copse beside the dead wolf, even clearer vision came to him concerning it. Was it not the dream of the ages? Was not all struggle upward toward this one star,—not only economic and religious freedom, but freedom from the tyranny of the elements, from the scourge of disease, from the soiling hand of ignorance and want? And what quality made for dominance as much as love of freedom?
It was a familiar truth that no race was great without this love. Suddenly he saw that this was the first quality of greatness, whether in nations or individuals. The degree of this love was the degree of worth itself; and only the fawning weakling, the soul lost to honor and self-respect, was content to live beneath a master’s lash when there was a fighting chance for liberty!
A fighting chance! The phrase meant nothing less than the chance of death. But all through the loner roll of the centuries the bravest men had defied this chance; and they would not lift their helmets to those that eschewed it. But now he knew the truth of that stern old law of tribes and nations,—a law sometimes forgotten yet graven on the everlasting stone—that he who will not risk his life for liberty does not deserve to live it. The thing held good with him now.It held good with Bess and Lenore as well.
That was the test!It was the last, cruel trial in the Training Camp of Life.
Deeply moved and exalted, he lifted his face to the cold, blue skies as if for strength. For the instant he stood almost motionless, oblivious to his wounds and his torn clothes, a figure of unmistakable dignity in those desolate drifts. He knew what he must do. He too must stand trial, bravely and without flinching. For Ned Cornet had come into his manhood.
XXIII
Ina little while Ned stripped the pelt from the warm body of the wolf and continued down his line of traps. He was able to think more coherently now and consider methods and details. And by the same token of clear thought, he was brought face to face with the fact of the almost insuperable obstacles in his path.
For all he could see now, Doomsdorf had surrounded them with a stone wall. He had seemingly thought of everything, prepared for every contingency, and left them not the slightest gateway to hope.
Plans for freedom first of all seemingly had to include Doomsdorf’s death. That was the first essential, and the last. Could they succeed in striking the life from their master, they could wait in the cabin until the traderIntrepidshould touch their island in the spring. It can be said for Ned that he conjectured upon the plan without the slightest whisper of remorse, the least degree of false sentiment. The fact that their master was, more or less, a human being did not change the course of his thought whatever. He would hurl that wicked soul out of the world with never an instant’s pity, and his only prayer would be that it might fall into the real hell that he had tried to imitate on earth. There could be no question about that. If, through some mercy, the brute lay helpless for a single second at his feet, it would be time enough for the deed Ned had in mind. His arm would never falter, his cruel axe would shatter down as pitilessly as upon some savage beast of the forest. He had not forgotten what the three of them had endured.
The difficulty lay in finding an opening of attack. Doomsdorf’s rifle was never loaded except when it was in his arms, and he wore his pistol in his belt, day and night. For all his hopelessness, Ned had noticed, half inadvertently, that he always took precautions against a night attack. The squaw slept on the outside of their cot and would be as difficult to pass without arousing as a sleeping dog. The cabin itself was bolted, not to be entered without waking both occupants; and the three prisoners of course slept in the newer cabin.
Bess had told him of Doomsdorf’s encounter with Knutsen, describing with particular emphasis the speed with which the murderer had whipped out his pistol. He could get it into action long before Ned could lay bare his clasp knife. Indeed, mighty man that he was, he could crush Ned to earth with one bound at the latter’s first offensive movement. And Doomsdorf was always particularly watchful when Ned carried his axe.
Yet the fact remained that in his axe alone lay the only possible hope of success. Some time Ned might see an opportunity to swing it down: perhaps he could think of some wile to put Doomsdorf at a disadvantage. It was inconceivable that they should try to escape without first rendering Doomsdorf helpless to follow them. They could attempt neither to conceal themselves on the island, or cross the ice straight to Tzar Island without the absolute certainty of being hunted down and punished. What form that punishment would take Ned dared not guess.
It was true that Doomsdorf kept but a perfunctory watch over Ned and Bess while they plied their trap lines. But long ago he had explained to them the hopelessness of attempting to load their backs with food and strike off across the ice on the slim chance of encountering some inhabited island. The plan, he had said, had not been worth a thought, and even now, in spite of his new courage, Ned found that it promised little. In the first place, to venture out into that infinity of ice, where there was not a stick of fuel and the polar wind was an icy demon day and night, meant simply to die without great question or any considerable delay. The islands were many, but the gray ice between them insuperably broad and rough. As Doomsdorf had said, they could not get much of a start; scarcely a day went by but that Doomsdorf, from some point of vantage where his daily hunting excursions carried him, discerned the distant forms of one or both of his two trappers across the snowy barrens; and he would be quick to investigate if they were missing. His powerful legs and mighty strength would enable him to overtake the runaways in the course of a few hours. But lastly, settling the matter once and for all, there was the subject of Lenore. He could neither smuggle her out nor leave her to Doomsdorf’s vengeance.
The plan might be worth considering, except for her. Of course, the odds would be tragically long on the side of failure; but all he dared pray for was a fighting chance. As matters lay, it was wholly out of the question.
Seemingly the only course was to lie low, always to be on the watch for the moment of opportunity. Some time, perhaps, their master’s vigilance would relax. Just one little instant of carelessness on his part might show the way. Perhaps the chance would come when theIntrepidput into the island to buy the season’s furs, if indeed life dwelt in his own body until that time. Ned didn’t forget that long, weary months of winter still lay between.
He concluded that he would not take Lenore into his confidence at once. That would come later,—when he had something definite to propose. Lately she had not shown great confidence in him, scorning his ability to shelter her and serve her; and of course she would have only contempt for any such vague hope as this. He had nothing to offer now but the assurance of his own growing sense of power. As yet his hope lay wholly in the realization of the late growth and development of his own character. So far as material facts went, the barriers between her and her liberty were as insuperable as ever. He would not be able to encourage her: more likely, by her contempt, she would jeopardize his own belief in himself. Besides, for all his great love for her, he could not make himself believe that she was of fighting metal. He found, in this moment of analysis of her soul, that he could not look to her for aid. She was his morning star, all that he could ask in woman, and he had chosen her for her worth and beauty, rather than for a helpmate, a fortress at his side. Yes, coöperation with her might injure, rather than increase, his chances for success.
He dismissed in an instant the idea of telling Bess. His loyalty to Lenore demanded that, at least. She must not go where his own betrothed was excluded. If the thought came that Bess, by light of courage and fortitude, had already gone where in weakness and self-pity Lenore could not possibly follow—the windy snow fields and the bitter crests of the rugged hills—he pushed it sternly from him. The whole thing was a matter of instinct with him, perhaps a wish to shield himself from invidious comparisons of the two girls. He would have liked to convince himself that Lenore could be his ally, but he was wholly unable to do so. Realizing that, he preferred to believe that Bess was likewise incompetent. But he knew he must not let his mind dwell to any great length upon the subject. He might be forced to change his mind.
He must make a lone fight. He must follow a lone trail—like the old gray pack leader whose sluts cannot keep pace.
Thereafter, day and night, Ned watched his chances. Never he climbed to the top of the ridge but that he searched, with straining eyes, for the glimpse of a dog-sledge on the horizon, or perhaps the faint line of a distant island. On the nights that he spent at the home cabin, he made an intense study of Doomsdorf’s most minor habits, trying to uncover some little failing, some trifling carelessness that might give him his opportunity. He made it a point to leave his axe in easy reaching distance; his clasp knife, in a holster of fur, was always open in his pocket, always ready to his hand. All day, down the weary length of his trap line, he considered ways and means.
Simply because the wild continued to train him, he was ever stronger for this great, ultimate trial. Not only his intent was stronger, his courage greater, but his body also continued its marvelous development. His muscles were like those of a grizzly: great bunches of tendons, hard as stone, moving under his white skin. Every motion was lithe and strong; his energy was a never-failing fountain; his eyes were vivid and clear against the old-leather hue of his face.
There was no longer an unpleasant discoloration in the whites of his eyes. They were a cold, hard, pale blue; and the little network of lines that had once shown faintly at his cheek bones had completely faded. His hands had killing strength; his neck was a brown pillar of muscle. Health was upon him, in its full glory, to the full meaning of the word.
He found, to his great amazement, that his mental powers had similarly developed. His thought was more clear, and it flowed in deeper channels. It was no effort for him now to follow one line of thought to its conclusion. The tendency to veer off in the direction of least resistance had been entirely overcome. He could be of some aid, now, in the fur house of Godfrey Cornet. He felt he would like to match wits with his father’s competitors.
He would need not only this great physical strength, but also his enhanced mental powers in the trial and stress that were to come. Doomsdorf’s tyranny could not be endured forever; they were being borne along toward a crisis as if on an ocean current. And for all his growth, Ned never made the fatal mistake of considering himself a physical match for Doomsdorf. Over and above the fact that the latter was armed with rifle and pistol, Ned was still a child in his hands. It was simply a case of intrinsic limitations. It was as if the wolf, chain-lightning savagery that he is, should try to lay low the venerable grizzly bear.
Sooner or later the crisis would fall upon them,—a fit of savage anger on Doomsdorf’s part, or a wrong that could not be endured, even if death were the penalty for rebellion. Moreover, Ned could not escape the haunting fear that such a crisis was actually imminent. Doomsdorf’s mood was an uncertain thing at best; and lately it had taken a turn for the worse. He was not getting the satisfaction that he had anticipated out of Ned’s slavery; the situation had lost its novelty, and he was open to any Satanic form of diversion that might occur to him. Ned had mastered his trap lines, had stood the gaff and was a better man on account of it; and it was time his master provided additional entertainment for him. In these dark, winter days he remembered the Siberian prison with particular vividness, and at such times the steely glitter was more pronounced in his eyes, and certain things that he had seen lingered ever in his mind. He kept remembering strange ghosts of men, toiling in the snow till they died, and souls that went out screaming under the lash; and such remembrances moved him with a dark, unspeakable lust. He thought he would like to bring these memory-pictures to life. Besides, his attitude toward Bess was ever more sinister. He followed her motions with a queer, searching, speculative gaze; and now and then he offered her little favors.
If he could only be held in restraint a few months more. Ned knew perfectly that the longer the crisis could be averted, the better his chance for life and liberty. He would have more opportunity to make preparations, to lay plans. Besides, every day that he followed his trap line he was better trained—in character and mind and body—for the test to come. The work of bringing out Ned Cornet’s manhood had never ceased.
Every day he had learned more of those savage natural forces that find clearest expression in the North. He knew the wind and the cold, snow-slide and blizzard, but also he knew hunger and fear and travail and pain. All these things taught him what they had to teach, and all of them served to shape him into the man he had grown to be. And one still, clear afternoon the North sent home a new realization of its power.
He was working that part of the line from his Twelve-Mile cabin over the ridge toward the Forks cabin,—his old rendezvous with Bess. He was somewhat late in crossing the range to-day. He had taken several of the larger fur-bearers and had been obliged to skin them laboriously, first thawing them out over a fire in the snow, so that midafternoon found him just emerging from the thick copse where he had killed the white wolf. The blazed trail took him around the shoulder of the ridge, clear to the edge of a little, deeply seamed glacier such as crowns so many of the larger hills in the far North.
Few were the wild creatures that traversed this icy desolation, so his trap line had been laid out around the glacier, following the blazed trail in the scrub timber. But to-day the long way round was particularly grievous to his spirit. More than a mile could be saved by leaving the timber and climbing across the ice, and only a few sets, none of which had ever proved especially productive, would be missed. In his first few weeks the danger of going astray had kept him close to his line, but he was not obliged to take it into consideration now. He knew his country end to end.
Without an instant’s hesitation he turned from the trail straight over the snowy summit toward the cabin. The cut-off would save him the annoyance of making camp after dark. And since he had climbed it once before, he scarcely felt the need of extra caution.
The crossing, however, was not quite the same as on the previous occasion. Before the ice had been covered, completely across, with a heavy snowfall, no harder to walk on than the open barrens. He soon found now that the snow prevailed only to the summit of the glacier, and the descent beyond the summit had been swept clean by the winds.
Below him stretched a half-mile of glare ice, ivory white like the fangs of some fabulous beast-of-prey. Here and there it was gashed with crevices,—those deep glacier chasms into which a stone falls in silence. For a moment Ned regarded it with considerable displeasure:
He was not equipped for ice scaling. Perhaps it was best not to try to go on. But as he waited, the long way down and around seemed to grow in his imagination. It was that deadly hour of late afternoon when the founts of energy run low and the thought-mechanism is dulled by fatigue;—and some way, he felt his powers of resistance slipping away from him. He forget, for the moment, theFearthat is the very soul of wisdom.
He decided to take a chance. He removed his snowshoes and ventured carefully out upon the ice.
It was easier than it looked. His moccasins clung very well. Steadily gaining confidence, he walked at a faster pace. The slope was not much on this side, the glacier ending in an abrupt cliff many hundred feet in height, so he felt little need of especial precaution. It was, in fact, the easiest walking that he had had since his arrival upon the island, so he decided not to turn off clear until he reached the high ground just to one side of the ice cliff. He crawled down a series of shelves, picked his way about a jagged promontory, and fetched up at last at the edge of a dark crevice scarcely fifty feet from the edge of the snow.
The crevice was not much over five feet wide at this point, and looking along, he saw that a hundred yards to his right it ended in a snowbank. But there was no need of following it down. He could leap it at a standing jump: with a running start he could bound ten feet beyond.
He was tired, eager to get to camp,—and this was the zero hour. He drew back three paces, preparatory to making the leap.
As he halted he was somewhat amazed at the incredible depth of silence that enthralled this icy realm. It seemed to him, except for the beat of his own heart, the absolute zero of silence,—not a whimper of wind or the faintest rustle of whisking snow dust. All the wilderness world seemed to be straining—listening. The man leaped forward.
At that instant the North gave him some sign of its power. His first running step was firm, but at the second his moccasin failed to hold, slipping straight back. He pitched forward on his hands and knees, grasping at the hard, slippery ice.
But he had not realized his momentum. He experienced a strange instant of hovering, of infinite suspense; and then the realization, like a flash of lightning, of complete and immutable disaster. There was no sense of fast motion. He slid rather slowly, with that sickening helplessness that so often characterizes the events of a tragic dream; and the wilderness seemed still to be waiting, watching, in unutterable indifference. Then he pitched forward into the crevice.
To Ned it seemed beyond the least, last possibility of hope that he should ever know another conscious second. The glacier crevices were all incredibly deep, and he would fall as a stone falls, crushed at last on the lightless floor of the glacier so far below that no sound might rise to disturb this strange immensity of silence. It was always thus with wilderness deaths. There is no sign that the Red Gods ever see. All things remain as they were,—the eternal silence, the wild creatures absorbed in their occupations; the trees never lifting their bowed heads from their burdens of snow. Ned did not dream that mortal eyes would ever rest upon his form again, vanishing without trace except for the axe that had fallen at the edge of the crevice and the imprint of his snowshoes on the trail behind. There was no reason in heaven or earth for doubting but that this ivory glacier would be his sepulcher forever.
In that little instant the scope of his mind was incredibly vast. His thought was more clear and true than ever before in his life, and it was faster than the lightning in the sky. It reached back throughout his years; it encompassed in full his most subtle and intricate relations with life. There was no sense of one thought coming after another. The focus of his attention had been immeasurably extended; and all that he knew, and all that he was and had been, was before his eyes in one great, infinite vista.
He still had time in plenty to observe the immensity of the silence; the fact that his falling had not disturbed, to the least fraction of a degree, the vast imperturbability of the stretching snow fields about him. In that same instant, because of the seeming certainty of his end, he really escaped from fear. Fear in its true sense is a relation that living things have with the uncertainties of the future: a device of nature by which the species are warned of danger, but it can serve no purpose when judgment is signed and sealed. This was not danger but seeming certainty; and the mind was too busy with other subjects to give place to such a useless thing as fear.
By the same token he could not truly be said to hope. Hope also is the handmaiden of uncertainty. Glancing back, there was no great sense of regret. Seemingly dispatched irrevocably out of the world, in that flash of an instant he was suddenly almost indifferent toward it. He remembered Lenore clearly, seeing her more vividly than he had ever seen her before, but she was like an old photograph found buried in a forgotten drawer,—recalling something that was of greatest moment once, but which no longer mattered. Perhaps, seemingly facing certain death, he was as one of the dead, seeing everything in the world from an indifferent and detached viewpoint.
All these thoughts swept him in a single fraction of an instant as he plunged into darkness. And all of them were unavailing. The uncertainty that shadows the lives of men held sway once more; and with it a ghastly and boundless terror.
He was not to die at once. There was still hope of life. He fetched up, as if by a miracle, on an icy shelf ten feet below the mouth of the crevice,—with sheer walls rising on each side.