THE WINTERING PLACE
On the second day they crossed the Skeena, a risky and tedious piece of
business, for the river ran deep and strong. And shortly after this
crossing they came to a line of wire strung on poles. Originally a
fair passageway had been cleared through low brush and dense timber
alike. A pathway of sorts still remained, though dim and little
trodden and littered with down trees of various sizes. Bill followed
this.
"What is the wire? A rural telephone? Oh, I remember you told me
once--that Yukon telegraph," Hazel remarked.
"Uh-huh. That's the famous Telegraph Trail," Bill answered. "Runs
from Ashcroft clear to Dawson City, on the Yukon; that is, the line
does. There's a lineman's house every twenty miles or so, and an
operator every forty miles. The best thing about it is that it
furnishes us with a sort of a road. And that's mighty lucky, for
there's some tough going ahead of us."
So long as they held to the Telegraph Trail the way led through fairly
decent country. In open patches there was ample grazing for their
horses. Hills there were, to be sure; all the land rolled away in
immense forested billows, but the mountains stood off on the right and
left, frowning in the distance. A plague of flies harassed them
continually, Hazel's hands suffering most, even though she kept
religiously to thick buckskin gloves. The poisonous bites led to
scratching, which bred soreness. And as they gained a greater
elevation and the timbered bottoms gave way to rocky hills over which
she must perforce walk and lead her horse, the sweat of the exertion
stung and burned intolerably, like salt water on an open wound.
Minor hardships, these; scarcely to be dignified by that name, more in
the nature of aggravated discomforts they were. But they irked, and,
like any accumulation of small things, piled up a disheartening total.
By imperceptible degrees the glamour of the trail, the lure of
gypsying, began to lessen. She found herself longing for the Pine
River cabin, for surcease from this never-ending journey. But she
would not have owned this to Roaring Bill; not for the world. It
savored of weakness, disloyalty. She felt ashamed. Still--it was no
longer a pleasure jaunt. The country they bore steadily up into grew
more and more forbidding. The rugged slopes bore no resemblance to the
kindly, peaceful land where the cabin stood. Swamps and reedy lakes
lurked in low places. The hills stood forth grim and craggy, gashed
with deep-cleft gorges, and rising to heights more grim and desolate at
the uttermost reach of her vision. And into the heart of this, toward
a far-distant area where she could faintly distinguish virgin snow on
peaks that pierced the sky, they traveled day after day.
Shortly before reaching Station Six they crossed the Naas, foaming down
to the blue Pacific. And at Station Seven, Bill turned squarely off
the Telegraph Trail and struck east by north. It had been a break in
the monotony of each day's travel to come upon the lonely men in their
little log houses. When they turned away from the single wire that
linked them up with the outer world, it seemed to Hazel as if the
profound, disquieting stillness of the North became intensified.
Presently the way grew rougher. If anything, Roaring Bill increased
his pace. He himself no longer rode. When the steepness of the hills
and cañons made the going hard the packs were redivided, and henceforth
Satin bore on his back a portion of the supplies. Bill led the way
tirelessly. Through flies, river crossings, camp labor, and all the
petty irritations of the trail he kept an unruffled spirit, a fine,
enduring patience that Hazel marveled at and admired. Many a time,
wakening at some slight stir, she would find him cooking breakfast. In
every way within his power he saved her.
"I got to take good care of you, little person," he would say. "I'm
used to this sort of thing, and I'm tough as buckskin. But it sure
isn't proving any picnic for you. It's a lot worse in this way than I
thought it would be. And we've got to get in there before the snow
begins to fly, or it will play the dickens with us."
Many a strange shift were they put to. Once Bill had to fell a great
spruce across a twenty-foot crevice. It took him two days to hew it
flat so that his horses could be led over. The depth was bottomless to
the eye, but from far below rose the cavernous growl of rushing water,
and Hazel held her breath as each animal stepped gingerly over the
narrow bridge. One misstep--
Once they climbed three weary days up a precipitous mountain range,
and, turned back in sight of the crest by an impassable cliff, were
forced to back track and swing in a fifty-mile detour.
In an air line Roaring Bill's destination lay approximately two hundred
miles north--almost due north--of Hazleton. By the devious route they
were compelled to take the distance was doubled, more than doubled.
And their rate of progress now fell short of a ten-mile average.
September was upon them. The days dwindled in length, and the nights
grew to have a frosty nip.
Early and late he pushed on. Two camp necessities were fortunately
abundant, grass and water. Even so, the stress of the trail told on
the horses. They lost flesh. The extreme steepness of succeeding
hills bred galls under the heavy packs. They grew leg weary, no longer
following each other with sprightly step and heads high. Hazel pitied
them, for she herself was trail weary beyond words. The vagabond
instinct had fallen asleep. The fine aura of romance no longer hovered
over the venture.
Sometimes when dusk ended the day's journey and she swung her stiffened
limbs out of the saddle, she would cheerfully have foregone all the
gold in the North to be at her ease before the fireplace in their
distant cabin, with her man's head nesting in her lap, and no toll of
weary miles looming sternly on the morrow's horizon. It was all work,
trying work, the more trying because she sensed a latent uneasiness on
her husband's part, an uneasiness she could never induce him to embody
in words. Nevertheless, it existed, and she resented its existence--a
trouble she could not share. But she could not put her finger on the
cause, for Bill merely smiled a denial when she mentioned it.
Nor did she fathom the cause until upon a certain day which fell upon
the end of a week's wearisome traverse of the hardest country yet
encountered. Up and up and still higher he bore into a range of
beetling crags, and always his gaze was fixed steadfastly and dubiously
on the serrated backbone toward which they ascended with infinite toil
and hourly risk, skirting sheer cliffs on narrow rock ledges, working
foot by foot over declivities where the horses dug their hoofs into a
precarious toe hold, and where a slip meant broken bones on the ragged
stones below. But win to the uppermost height they did, where an early
snowfall lay two inches deep in a thin forest of jack pine.
They broke out of a cañon up which they had struggled all day onto a
level plot where the pine stood in somber ranks. A spring creek split
the flat in two. Beside this tiny stream Bill unlashed his packs. It
still lacked two hours of dark. But he made no comment, and Hazel
forbore to trouble him with questions. Once the packs were off and the
horses at liberty. Bill caught up his rifle.
"Come on, Hazel," he said. "Let's take a little hike."
The flat was small, and once clear of it the pines thinned out on a
steep, rocky slope so that westward they could overlook a vast network
of cañons and mountain spurs. But ahead of them the mountain rose to
an upstanding backbone of jumbled granite, and on this backbone Bill
Wagstaff bent an anxious eye. Presently they sat down on a bowlder to
take a breathing spell after a stiff stretch of climbing. Hazel
slipped her hand in his and whispered:
"What is it, Billy-boy?"
"I'm afraid we can't get over here with the horses," he answered
slowly. "And if we can't find a pass of some kind--well, come on! It
isn't more than a quarter of a mile to the top."
He struck out again, clambering over great bowlders, clawing his way
along rocky shelves, with a hand outstretched to help her now and then.
Her perceptions quickened by the hint he had given, Hazel viewed the
long ridge for a possible crossing, and she was forced to the reluctant
conclusion that no hoofed beast save mountain sheep or goat could cross
that divide. Certainly not by the route they were taking. And north
and south as far as she could see the backbone ran like a solid wall.
It was a scant quarter mile to the top, beyond which no farther
mountain crests showed--only clear, blue sky. But it was a stretch
that taxed her endurance to the limit for the next hour. Just short of
the top Bill halted, and wiped the sweat out of his eyes. And as he
stood his gaze suddenly became fixed, a concentrated stare at a point
northward. He raised his glasses.
"By thunder!" he exclaimed. "I believe--it's me for the top."
He went up the few remaining yards with a haste that left Hazel panting
behind. Above her he stood balanced on a bowlder, cut sharp against
the sky, and she reached him just as he lowered the field glasses with
a long sigh of relief. His eyes shone with exultation.
"Come on up on the perch," he invited, and reached forth a long,
muscular arm, drawing her up close betide him on the rock.
"Behold the Promised Land," he breathed, "and the gateway thereof,
lying a couple of miles to the north."
They were, it seemed to Hazel, roosting precariously on the very summit
of the world. On both sides the mountain pitched away sharply in
rugged folds. Distance smoothed out the harsh declivities, blurred
over the tremendous cañons. Looking eastward, she saw an ample basin,
which gave promise of level ground on its floor. True, it was ringed
about with sky-scraping peaks, save where a small valley opened to the
south. Behind them, between them and the far Pacific rolled a sea of
mountains, snow-capped, glacier-torn, gigantic.
"Down there," Roaring Bill waved his hand, "there's a little meadow,
and turf to walk on. Lord, I'll be glad to get out of these rocks!
You'll never catch me coming in this way again. It's sure tough going.
And I've been scared to death for a week, thinking we couldn't get
through."
"But we can?"
"Yes, easy," he assured. "Take the glasses and look. That flat we
left our outfit in runs pretty well to the top, about two miles along.
Then there's a notch in the ridge that you can't get with the naked
eye, and a wider cañon running down into the basin. It's the only
decent break in the divide for fifty miles so far as I can see. This
backbone runs to high mountains both north and south of us--like the
great wall of China. We're lucky to hit this pass."
"Suppose we couldn't get over here?" Hazel asked. "What if there
hadn't been a pass?"
"That was beginning to keep me awake nights," he confessed. "I've been
studying this rock wall for a week. It doesn't look good from the east
side, but it's worse on the west, and I couldn't seem to locate the gap
I spotted from the basin one time. And if we couldn't get through, it
meant a hundred miles or more back south around that white peak you
see. Over a worse country than we've come through--and no cinch on
getting over at that. Do you realize that it's getting late in the
year? Winter may come--bing!--inside of ten days. And me caught in a
rock pile, with no cabin to shelter my best girl, and no hay up to feed
my horses! You bet it bothered me."
She hugged him sympathetically, and Bill smiled down at her.
"But it's plain sailing now," he continued. "I know that basin and all
the country beyond it. It's a pretty decent camping place, and there's
a fairly easy way out."
He bestowed a reassuring kiss upon her. They sat on the bowlder for a
few minutes, then scrambled downhill to the jack-pine flat, and built
their evening fire. And for the first time in many days Roaring Bill
whistled and lightly burst into snatches of song in the deep, bellowing
voice that had given him his name back in the Cariboo country. His
humor was infectious. Hazel felt the gods of high adventure smiling
broadly upon them once more.
Before daybreak they were up and packed. In the dim light of dawn Bill
picked his way up through the jack-pine flat. With easy traveling they
made such time as enabled them to cross through the narrow gash--cut in
the divide by some glacial offshoot when the Klappan Range was
young--before the sun, a ball of molten fire, heaved up from behind the
far mountain chain.
At noon, two days later, they stepped out of a heavy stand of spruce
into a sun-warmed meadow, where ripe, yellow grasses waved to their
horses' knees. Hazel came afoot, a fresh-killed deer lashed across
Silk's back.
Bill hesitated, as if taking his bearings, then led to where a rocky
spur of a hill jutted into the meadow's edge. A spring bubbled out of
a pebbly basin, and he poked about in the grass beside it with his
foot, presently stooping to pick up something which proved to be a
short bit of charred stick.
"The remains of my last camp fire," he smiled reminiscently. "Packs
off, old pal. We're through with the trail for a while."