THE DREAM HILL
THE DREAM HILL
THE DREAM HILL
It was less than ten weeks to the time when the first fierce rush of winter might be expected. Already the days were shortening down with their customary rush, and in a brief time only the Caribou Valley, the river, the whole world of the far North would be lost to sight under the white shroud of battling elements, whose merciless warfare would be waged, with only brief intervals of armistice, until such time as the summer daylight dawned again.
Hesther McLeod was sitting in her doorway. It was the favoured sitting place she usually selected when the flies and summer heat made her rough kitchen something approaching the intolerable. The intense heat of summer was lessening, but the ominous chill of winter had not yet made itself felt. The sky had lost something of its summer brilliance, and clouds were wont to bank heavily with the threat of the coming season. But the flies remained. They would undoubtedly remain until swept from the face of the earth by the first heavy frost.
Hesther was assiduously battling with one of her many tasks while she talked in her simple, homely fashion to the Kid, who was standing beside her. The foster-mother was frail but wiry, and, with her greying brown hair and thin face, looked the work-worn, happy philosopher she actually was. The Kid was a picture of charming femininity for all the mannish mode of her working clothes. Her pretty, rounded figure would not be denied under the beaded caribou-skin parka that reached almost to her knees. It was belted in about the waist, and a fierce-looking hunting knife protruded from its slung sheath. Her wealth of fair hair was supposed to be tightly coiled under the enveloping cap drawn down over it. But it had fallen, as it usually fell, upon her shoulders as though refusing to endure imprisonment when the sun it loved to reflect was shining. Her blue eyes were deeply thoughtful just now as they regarded the bowed head of the beloved mother woman. She watched the nimble fingers spread the buckskin patch out over the jagged rent in the seat of Perse’s diminutive breeches.
“You know,” Hesther said, without looking up, “that little feller Perse’ll make good someways. I can’t guess how. But his queer little head’s plumb full of things that stick worse than flies. An’ even though the seat of his pants drops right out, which it’s mostly doing all the time, he’ll foller his notion clear through to the end. He’s got the gold bug now, an’ spends most all his time skiddin’ himself over rocks an’ things chasin’ what he wouldn’t rec’nise if he beat his pore little head right up against it. I want to laff most all the time at his yarns. But I just don’t. I’ve a hunch to see him do things.”
The Kid nodded.
“Yes,” she agreed simply. Then her gaze was turned to the distant river where its shining waters could just be seen beyond the lank jack pines which surrounded the rambling house. “Perse is the brightest of the bunch. You know, Mum, it’s kind of queer us talking of the kids making good. We don’t ever stop to guess how they’re going to do it—away up here, thousands of miles from, from anywhere.”
Hesther flung a quick upward glance at the sweet weather-tanned face that was no longer smiling. She was wondering, for the girl’s tone had a note in it to which she was quite unaccustomed. In a moment, however, her eyes had dropped again to the thick patch cut from a caribou moccasin she was endeavouring to make fast to the child’s tattered pants.
“Trouble, Kid?” she asked, without looking up again.
These two understood each other. A deep bond of sympathy and love held them. The girl looked to this brave little widow of Jim McLeod for sympathy and comfort in her distress as a child looks to its mother. In affairs which needed capacity and strong execution the position was reversed. This girl of twenty, supported by the staunch Usak, strong in spirit and youthful optimism, wide in her grasp of the affairs of the farm, was responsible leader in all pertaining to their livelihood. Just now the girl was troubled and Hesther realised that the Kid had not abandoned her afternoon’s work at the corrals simply for idle talk at her doorway. Her interrogation was calculated. She wanted the girl to talk.
“Nothing worse than usual, Mum,” she said with a sigh. “It’ll be two years since Ben Needham went, come next opening. We’ve enough supplies to see us through six months. That’s the limit. Usak’ll be along back before the freeze-up. Well, things depend on the trade he brings back, and a winter trail to Placer. Do you get it? By next spring our stores’ll be run out. If he brings back good trade, and no accident happens along on our winter trail, we’ll be in fairly good shape for awhile. But it just means we can’t put in another season right through. I don’t see how we can, unless we have mighty good luck. The thing’s as dead as caribou meat without a market right alongside, like it was when Ben Needham was around. We’re right here beyond the edge of the world, and—and it can’t be done.”
“You mean—quit? An’ with the boys coming along? The twins are nearly sixteen.”
The mother laboured on assiduously. The busy needle punched its way through the tough buckskin with a sharp click as the strong fingers plied it.
The Kid glanced down at the bowed figure.
“The boys are good. Alg is a real man around the deer,” she said, with a shadow of a smile in her pretty eyes. “Clarence is hardening into a tough trail man. Usak reckons he’s a great feller to have with him. But it’s not that, Mum. It’s the trade these wretched Euralians beat us out of, and the distance to our market.”
“Is that all it is, Kid?”
Hesther’s needle was still. She was looking up with a pair of soft, brown, questioning eyes, and the gentle mentality behind them was reading the girl through and through with a certainty that her transparent simplicity and innocence made possible.
“How can it be anything else, Mum? I guess ther’s nothing around this farm to worry with but the feeding of hungry mouths.”
The Kid had turned away. Again her eyes had sought the gleam of waters sedately flowing on to their junction with the greater river beyond.
The mother shook her head. She leant forward on her door-sill with her lean, bare arms folded over her offspring’s clothing.
“I don’t just see how it can be a thing else,” she admitted promptly. “But I was thinkin’. You see, Kid, you’re over twenty. Let’s see. Why, I guess you’re over twenty-one. Yes. Sure you must be.”
And she deliberately began to count up the years that had passed since the terrible time of the descent of the Euralians on Fox Bluff. The girl watched the counting fingers, and the abstracted gaze of the other as she reckoned up her sum.
“But what’s that to do with it, Mum?” she cried.
“Sure I’m over twenty-one, but—”
Hesther laughed gently. She shook her head.
“There was no talk of quitting, whatever our trade, before you made Placer last year with Usak. Say, Kid,” she went on, with infinite sympathy and gentleness, “you’re a woman now. You aren’t a—Kid—any longer. Does it tell you anything?” She raised a pointing finger that was painfully work-worn, and admonished her. “My dear, things are a heap different through a woman’s eyes. When you’re a kid you’re mostly crazy with every new thing just living can show you. When you’re a woman it isn’t life just to live. Ther’s a whole book full o’ feelings, and wants, an’ notions start in to worry around, and the answer to ’em isn’t found in the work of running a caribou farm, and beating a bunch of scallawags who’re grabbing your trade. It isn’t found in yearning to hand a stomach full o’ food to a crowd of kids you love like brothers an’ sisters, either.”
The girl’s eyes were searching for all their responsive smile, and she made no attempt at denial.
“Wher’ d’you find the answer, Mum?” she asked.
The older woman’s eye fell serious. A wistful yearning crept into them.
“I found it in two things when I was your age,” she said. “First it was in the excitement of fancy clothes, and parties, where folks of my own age got around, boys and gals. Then I guessed the answer to every yearning I had was in my Jim, and in the bunch o’ scallawags he set crawling around my knees. Why, Kid, this queer old world’s just got only one place where it can make me feel good. It’s where my Jim’s babies are. You been down to Placer. You and Usak. You’ve seen a big city where ther’s white-folk like yourself, where ther’s lights burning on the streets, and folks dancing, and parties racketing, and the boys and gals are having quite a time. Then you get along back to the farm here, and the kids, and, maybe, me. And I guess you’re glad—for awhile.”
The girl moved from the door-casing where she had been leaning. She abruptly dropped to a seat on the door-sill beside Hesther, and took possession of the thin, strong hand nearest to her. There was a change in her as sudden as had been her movements. Her eyes were shining and full of something Hesther had never seen in them before. And somehow the magnetism of it, her sudden, almost passionate earnestness claimed the older woman and left her with a feeling that was something scared.
“Tell me, Mum,” she cried, in a thrilling voice. “You haven’t told me enough. You loved your Jim. Tell me just how you loved him.”
“It ’ud be easier to tell you how the thunder banks up in summer and bursts over us,” Hesther replied with a headshake, while her hand responded with sympathetic pressure to the clasp of the girl’s.
She gazed into the earnest face that so reminded her of the father who had been slain so many years before, and the pretty, fair-haired woman who had borne this foster child of hers. She was wondering at the girl’s sudden passion of interest in her love for the dead man who had given her such a wealth of simple happiness. It was a new phase, and it meant something. And she wondered what the meaning was.
“No, Kid,” she went on. “I don’t reckon if I talked from now to Kingdom Come I could ever tell you the thing you’re asking. He was my man, just all of him. Could you feel so that any feller could tell you to do the craziest thing and you’d want to get busy right away doing it? Could you feel so that a feller’s frown was better than the whole world’s smile? Could you feel you’d rather have one man call you a crazy fool, and beat you over the head with a club, than a hundred swell fellers bowing an’ scraping to hand you a good time? If you could feel all that foolish stuff you’d know something how I loved my Jim. He was mine, Kid,” she went on squeezing the girl’s plump hand in her thin, strong fingers. “He was mine from the roof of his head to the soles of his caribou moccasins, and life with him was full of sunshine, even when the night of winter shut down. And he handed me all these ‘God’s blessings’ that aren’t never content but that I’m doing an’ making for them all the time. My, but I’d be glad to have you feel all those things.”
The girl nodded. Her eyes were deeply contemplative. She was not looking at the woman beside her but gazing abstractedly into space.
“I—I think I could feel all that,” she said after awhile. “I—I think I could feel so a man could beat me to death if he wanted to. But—”
She broke off. Then her gaze came back to the brown eyes beside her, and a sort of ecstatic smile lit her eyes and transformed her with its radiance.
“But he’d have to be a great feller, with the courage of a fighter. He’d have to be a man who ordered other folks around, a man who knew no fear. A man who’d help a friend with his last dollar or kill the enemy who hurt him. Yes,” she went on dreamily, “and he’d have grey eyes, and a strong face that wasn’t maybe too good-looking, and dark hair, and shoulders like a bull caribou, and—”
“Be like to some feller you got a look at down in Placer?”
Hesther had returned to her work, and drew a deep breath of expectancy. But the girl ignored the challenge. She turned suddenly and spoke with feverish eagerness.
“You felt that way, Mum, for your Jim?” she demanded. “That’s the way all gals feel when they want—want to marry someone? Maybe the Eskimo squaws feel that way, too? Just every woman? Is that so?”
Hesther smiled and nodded.
“Sure. Tell me about him.”
The older woman’s philosophy had been swallowed up by the irresistible emotions of her sex. She wanted to hear the story of this child’s tender romance. She had made up her mind there was a romance deeply hidden within her innocent heart, and that it had taken place in that great gold city the girl had visited with Usak. She was hungering for the story of it as every real woman hungers for the love story of another, after having passed a similar milestone in her own life. She was thrilled, and her calm veins were afire with the recrudescence of her youth.
But the Kid suddenly came out of her dreaming, and smilingly shook her head in a fashion that flooded the other with disappointment.
“No, Mum,” she said. “There wasn’t a feller in Placer made me feel that way. Not one. I—I was just thinking. That’s all.”
“And it makes you want to quit and get around where life’s real life?” Hesther cried incredulously. “An’ where there’s folks and parties, and marrying, and you can have a place in it all?”
Again the girl shook her head. This time all smiling had passed. Her lips were no longer happily parted. And the corners of her mouth were slightly depressed.
“No, dear,” she said, with a decision which the other felt had cost her an effort. “I don’t feel like quitting. I don’t want to quit. Ever! I want to stay right here, till—till—I want to stay here always with you, and the kids, and Usak. But sense says I can’t. None of us can. We’ve played our game to the limit, an’ I guess the cards are dead against us. We must go next year for—the sake of those babies your Jim handed to you. I don’t just know all it means. I don’t just see what we’re to do to earn our food. But we’ll have to make the break, and take what the good God hands—Hello!”
The girl broke off. Her final exclamation came at the sight of a little procession which hurried round the angle of the building. It was headed by Mary Justicia and the adventurous Perse. Alg was behind carrying Jane Constance in his sturdy arms, while Gladys Anne clung to him yielding him her moral support.
It was a subdued procession, and the Kid and the mother looked for the thing which had affected them so seriously. Their attention became promptly fixed on the dripping bundle of humanity in the elder boy’s arms. An explanation was instantly forthcoming in the coolest phraseology.
“Darn crazy little buzzock reckoned to drown herself,” the boy said with a grin. “Hadn’t no more sense than to fall off’n the driftwood pile into six foot of water. We shaken most of it out of her.”
The mother was on her feet in a moment, and the child, despite her liquid condition, was snatched to her eager bosom. And in her anxiety everything else was completely forgotten.
“You pore little bit,” she cried solicitously as she hugged the moist bundle in her arms. Then she turned on the gawking youth with which she was surrounded. She glanced swiftly over the faces grinning up at her, and punctuated her survey with a sweeping condemnation.
“You bunch o’ hoodlams,” she cried. “The good God gave you the image of Hisself, did He? Well, I guess He must ha’ forgot the mush you need to think with. Be off with you. The whole bunch. You, Mary Justicia, stay around an’ help me scrape the pore mite clean. The rest of you get out o’ my sight. I don’t feel like looking at any of you again—ever.”
She vanished into the house, a diminutive figure of righteous indignation, and the Kid was left to the eager, laughing explanations of the unimpressed culprits.
The kyak darted down the river on a stream that made its progress something like the flight of an arrow. Its great length and narrow width left it a crazy enough vessel to handle, but the Kid had been born and bred to its manipulation, and she played with it as she chose without concern for its crankiness. Her gun lay in the bottom of the hide-built craft, for she was speeding down towards the marshes in quest of water-fowl.
With the rapid passing of the shortening northern day she knew she would find the marsh alive with duck. Game was plentiful just now. In another few weeks the approach of winter would drive the migratory fowl south, where the waters remained open and winter feed was to be had in abundance. The girl was pot-hunting, and the full stocking of the farm larder was an important duty in her routine of life.
Silently, almost ghostlike, the dip of her paddle giving out no sound, she sped on over the shining waters between high, lichen-grown banks, that were mostly rock-bound and almost completely sterile. It was a wild, broken stretch of country, without any of the vegetation which was the inspiration of the setting of the farm. It was without any graciousness, from the southern hills to the northern limits containing the shallow valley. But even so, to this girl, who had known the Caribou Valley all her young life, there was intense attraction in every detail of its familiar uncouthness.
Quite abruptly she passed beyond the undulating, rock-bound stretch, and shot into the jaws of a short but narrow canyon. For no apparent reason the country about her suddenly reared itself into a tumbled sea of low, broken hills that darkly overshadowed the passage which the river had eaten through them. The gleaming waters had lost their vivid, dancing light and assumed an almost inky blackness. Their speed had increased, and they frothed and churned as they beat against the facets of the encompassing walls, as though in anger at a resistance they had never been able to overcome.
The girl was gazing ahead at the far opening, where the hills gave way to the wide muskeg which was her goal. It was at the sort of giant gateway which was formed by two sheer sentry rocks standing guard on either side of the river, overshadowing, frowning, lofty, windswept and bare.
A girlish impulse urged her. These two barren crests were old-time friends of her childhood. The leaning summit of the hill on the left bank was the dream place of childish fancy. It was always windswept, even on the calmest day. It was beyond the reach of the mosquitoes and flies abounding on the river. It was free and open to the sunlight, which was getting shorter now with every passing day. And, somehow, an hour passed on its chilly summit never failed to inspire her heart with feelings freed from the oppressive weight of the cares of her life below.
Yes. She would leave the feeding fowl to their evening meal. For the present there was no shortage in the farm larder. The marshes could wait till to-morrow. For the moment she felt deeply in need of that consolation she never failed to find in this old friend of her earlier years. She would pass an hour with it. She would confide to it the story of those feelings and desires, which, with every passing month, were absorbing her more and more deeply. For she was restless, disturbed. As Hesther had suggested, the dawning womanhood in her was crying out.
Oh, yes. She understood now. The life of the farm was no longer the satisfying thing it had always been. Something was amiss with her. A great, unrecognised longing had been urgent in her for months past. And a glimmer of its meaning had come to her while listening to Hesther’s endeavour to show her the thing which her own love for her dead husband had been.
Suddenly she dipped her paddle and held it. Instantly her light vessel swung about and headed up stream. Slowly, laboriously it nosed in against the stream and glided gently up to the familiar landing place.
Leaping ashore, the Kid stooped and grasped the central struts of her craft. Then she lifted it bodily out of the water, and set it in safety on the broad strand.
The Kid was squatting trail fashion with her back thrust against the smooth-worn, almost polished sides of a great boulder. The chill wind was beating against her rounded cheeks. There were moments when its nipping blast brought tears to her eyes. And her soft, fair hair streamed from under her cap in response to its rough caresses.
Her eyrie was set more than a hundred feet above the rest of the world about her. Her gaze was free to roam the length and breadth of the valley below her. There was nothing whatsoever but the limit of vision to deny her. Here she could feast herself upon the world she had learned to love, with fancy free to riot as it listed.
It was a wonderful panorama for all its harshness. Away to the north lay endless miles of barren, low hills and shallow valleys which lost themselves in the far-off purple of falling daylight. To the south of her it was the same, except that the dying sun of summer lolled heavily on the horizon, gleaming, blinding in its last passion. To the east lay the farm and the corrals that claimed all her working hours, and beyond that was the purple of distance enshrouding lank, sparse, woodland bluffs whose stunted, windswept tops cut sharp drawn lines against the far-off shadows. It was all wide flung, and harsh, and infinitely small viewed from her lofty crow’s-nest. And even the river, immediately below, was no better than a silver ribbon dropped by some careless hand on a carpet that was drab, and worn, and utterly without beauty.
But none of these claimed her now. The girl’s gaze was to the westward. Even the hour was forgotten, and the spread of cold grey cloud which the biting wind was driving down upon the world out of the fierce north-east. Her gaze was on the dark line beyond which flowed the mighty Hekor, where it beat the meeting waters of the two rivers into a cauldron of boiling rapids. It was on the great bluff of woodland which had sheltered her original home, and beyond which lay the deserted Fort, which had been the pulsing heart making life possible for them all. And she was thinking, thinking of a man with “grey eyes, and a strong face that wasn’t too good-looking, and dark hair, and shoulders like a bull caribou.”
He had said he would return, this man who called himself Bill Wilder. He and his red-headed companion and the grey hard-bitten creature he called Chilcoot. They had gone out into the far North. The great, wide-open North with its treacherous smiling summer masking a merciless wintry heart. Would he return? Would he come again down the river? Would he forget, and pass right on down to the city which contained his home? She wondered. And, with each possibility that presented itself, a cold constriction seemed to grip her strong young heart.
How long had he said? She remembered. She had never forgotten. She could never forget. The man’s smiling eyes had haunted her ever since the first moment they had gazed so earnestly, so kindly into hers. Oh, she knew nothing of whence he came or whither he was bound. She knew nothing of the man he might be. These things concerned her not at all. She had judged him in the first moments of her meeting with him nearly two years ago, and from the first words he had spoken in his easy way, and her judgment had been of a splendid manhood that harmonised with the deep woman instinct, which, for good or ill, is the final tribunal of a woman’s life.
He had been the ideal of everything that appealed to her in manhood. She had learned her simple understanding of life amongst the rough men of the northern trail. Here was a man recklessly plunging into the far-off world, ready to face and battle with every chance with which that world was crowded. He was fearless. Yes. He was all she looked for in courage. He was a leader, a strong, determined leader of men no less brave and adventurous than himself. And as for the rest it was all there. She had seen for herself. A great stature, a strong man’s face. And eyes that calmly shone with honesty and kindliness.
She sighed. Would he return? The hands about her knees broke apart. They fell from about her knees, and she stirred, and twisted her body round so that she sat with one hand on the bare rock supporting it. She was facing round to the west.
Why, why did she so long for his return? He had said he would return in two years. Two years? That would not be up till next opening. The winter ahead suddenly looked to be an interminable period of waiting. Winter. And anything might happen to him in—winter. Suddenly she became weakly anxious for his safety. She knew the dangers. She knew the conditions of the country into which he had gone. The Euralians. The desperate storms. The— But she dismissed her fears. She remembered the man’s equipment. But more than all she remembered his confident, commanding eyes. No. Nothing could harm him. Nothing. Nothing. But would he remember. Would he—?
She started. Suddenly she sprang to her feet with the easy agility of one of the young deer it was her work to handle. And she stood against the sweeping breeze, at the very edge of the ledge, silhouetted against the background of a dying sun.
The biting wind swept her hair across her eyes. She raised a brown hand and thrust it aside and held its mass firmly, while she stared out wide-eyed in amazement. Then she raised the other hand, pointing, a thrill of excitement, and gladness, and hope, surging through her heart. And as she stood, utterly unconscious of the thing she did, words sprang to her lips and she counted aloud.
“One! Two! Three! Yes. Five large and two small!”
And with each numeral she uttered, her pointing hand moved from one tiny distant object on the river to another.
For awhile she remained spellbound by the vision. She remembered. Oh, yes. There could be no mistake. Five large canoes and two smaller. That had been the extent of Bill Wilder’s outfit as she had first discovered it. It was he. He was coming up the river. He had returned. And—he had returned sooner than he promised.
A wild tumult of feeling consumed her as she stared at the distant procession of boats. Then, in a moment, a surge of colour swept up into her cheeks, and a fierce panic of shame robbed her of all her delight. She turned; tearing herself from the glad sight, and fled headlong to her kyak below.