FOUR WALLS AND A ROOF
To such as view with a kindly eye the hushed areas of virgin forest and
the bold cliffs and peaks of mountain ranges, it is a joy to tread
unknown trails, camping as the spirit moves, journeying leisurely and
in decent comfort from charming spot to spots more charming. With no
spur of need to drive, such inconsequential wandering gives to each day
and incident an added zest. Nature appears to have on her best bib and
tucker for the occasion. The alluring finger of the unknown beckons
alluringly onward, so that if one should betimes strain to physical
exhaustion in pursuit, that is a matter of no moment whatever.
But it is a different thing to face the wilderness for a purpose, to
journey in haste toward a set point, with a penalty swift and sure for
failure to reach that point in due season. Especially is this so in
the high latitudes. Natural barriers uprear before the traveler,
barriers which he must scale with sweat and straining muscles. He must
progress by devious ways, seeking always the line of least resistance.
The season of summer is brief, a riot of flowers and vegetation. A
certain number of weeks the land smiles and flaunts gay flowers in the
shadow of the ancient glaciers. Then the frost and snow come back to
their own, and the long nights shut down like a pall.
Brought to it by a kindlier road, Hazel would have found that nook in
the Klappan Range a pleasant enough place. She could not deny its
beauty. It snuggled in the heart of a wild tangle of hills all
turreted and battlemented with ledge and pinnacle of rock, from which
ran huge escarpments clothed with spruce and pine, scarred and gashed
on every hand with slides and deep-worn watercourses, down which
tumultuous streams rioted their foamy way. And nestled amid this, like
a precious stone in its massive setting, a few hundred acres of level,
grassy turf dotted with trees. Southward opened a narrow valley, as if
pointing the road to a less rigorous land. No, she could not deny its
beauty. But she was far too trail weary to appreciate the grandeur of
the Klappan Range. She desired nothing so much as rest and comfort,
and the solemn mountains were neither restful nor soothing. They stood
too grim and aloof in a lonely land.
There was so much to be done, work of the hands; a cabin to build, and
a stable; hay to be cut and stacked so that their horses might live
through the long winter--which already heralded his approach with
sharp, stinging frosts at night, and flurries of snow along the higher
ridges.
Bill staked the tent beside the spring, fashioned a rude fork out of a
pronged willow, and fitted a handle to the scythe he had brought for
the purpose. From dawn to dark he swung the keen blade in the heavy
grass which carpeted the bottom. Behind him Hazel piled it in little
mounds with the fork. She insisted on this, though it blistered her
hands and brought furious pains to her back. If her man must strain
every nerve she would lighten the burden with what strength she had.
And with two pair of hands to the task, the piles of hay gathered thick
on the meadow. When Bill judged that the supply reached twenty tons,
he built a rude sled with a rack on it, and hauled in the hay with a
saddle horse.
"Amen!" said Bill, when he had emptied the rack for the last time, and
the hay rose in a neat stack. "That's another load off my mind. I can
build a cabin and a stable in six feet of snow if I have to, but there
would have been a slim chance of haying once a storm hit us. And the
caballos need a grubstake for the winter worse than we do, because they
can't eat meat. _We_ wouldn't go hungry--there's moose enough to feed
an army ranging in that low ground to the south."
"There's everything that one needs, almost, in the wilderness, isn't
there?" Hazel observed reflectively. "But still the law of life is
awfully harsh, don't you think, Bill? Isolation is a terrible thing
when it is so absolutely complete. Suppose something went wrong?
There's no help, and no mercy--absolutely none. You could die here by
inches and the woods and mountains would look calmly on, just as they
have looked on everything for thousands of years. It's like prison
regulations. You _must_ do this, and you _must_ do that, and there's
no excuse for mistakes. Nature, when you get close to her, is so
inexorable."
Bill eyed her a second. Then he put his arms around her, and patted
her hair tenderly.
"Is it getting on your nerves already, little person?" he asked.
"Nothing's going to go wrong. I've been in wild country too often to
make mistakes or get careless. And those are the two crimes for which
the North--or any wilderness--inflicts rather serious penalties. Life
isn't a bit harsher here than in the human ant heaps. Only everything
is more direct; cause and effect are linked up close. There are no
complexities. It's all done in the open, and if you don't play the
game according to the few simple rules you go down and out. That's all
there is to it. There's no doctor in the next block, nor a grocer to
take your order over the phone, and you can't run out to a café and
take dinner with a friend. But neither is the air swarming with
disease germs, nor are there malicious gossips to blast you with their
tongues, nor rent and taxes to pay every time you turn around. Nor am
I at the mercy of a job. And what does the old, settled country do to
you when you have neither money nor job? It treats you worse than the
worst the North can do; for, lacking the price, it denies you access to
the abundance that mocks you in every shop window, and bars you out of
the houses that line the streets. Here, everything needful is yours
for the taking. If one is ignorant, or unable to convert wood and
water and game to his own uses, he must learn how, or pay the penalty
of incompetence. No, little person, I don't think the law of life is
nearly so harsh here as it is where the mob struggles for its daily
bread. It's more open and aboveboard here; more up to the individual.
But it's lonely sometimes. I guess that's what ails you."
"Oh, pouf!" she denied. "I'm not lonely, so long as I've got you. But
sometimes I think of something happening to you--sickness and
accidents, and all that. One can't help thinking what might happen."
"Forget it!" Bill exhorted. "That's the worst of living in this big,
still country--it makes one introspective, and so confoundedly
conscious of what puny atoms we human beings are, after all. But
there's less chance of sickness here than any place. Anyway, we've got
to take a chance on things now and then, in the course of living our
lives according to our lights. We're playing for a stake--and things
that are worth having are never handed to us on a silver salver.
Besides, I never had worse than a stomachache in my life and you're a
pretty healthy specimen yourself. Wait till I get that cabin built,
with a big fireplace at one end. We'll be more comfortable, and things
will look a little rosier. This thing of everlasting hurry and hard
work gets on anybody's nerves."
The best of the afternoon was still unspent when the haystacking
terminated, and Bill declared a holiday. He rigged a line on a limber
willow wand, and with a fragment of venison for bait sought the pools
of the stream which flowed out the south opening. He prophesied that
in certain black eddies plump trout would be lurking, and he made his
prophecy good at the first pool. Hazel elected herself gun-bearer to
the expedition, but before long Bill took up that office while she
snared trout after trout from the stream--having become something of an
angler herself under Bill's schooling. And when they were frying the
fish that evening he suddenly observed:
"Say, they were game little fellows, these, weren't they? Wasn't that
better sport than taking a street car out to the park and feeding the
swans?"
"What an idea!" she laughed. "Who wants to feed swans in a park?"
But when the fire had sunk to dull embers, and the stars were peeping
shyly in the open flap of their tent, she whispered in his ear:
"You mustn't think I'm complaining or lonesome or anything, Billy-boy,
when I make remarks like I did to-day. I love you a heap, and I'd be
happy anywhere with you. And I'm really and truly at home in the
wilderness. Only--only sometimes I have a funny feeling; as if I were
afraid. It seems silly, but this is all so different from our little
cabin. I look up at these big mountains, and they seem to be
scowling--as if we were trespassers or something."
"I know." Bill drew her close to him. "But that's just mood. I've
felt that same sensation up here--a foolish, indefinable foreboding.
All the out-of-the-way places of the earth produce that effect, if one
is at all imaginative. It's the bigness of everything, and the eternal
stillness. I've caught myself listening--when I knew there was nothing
to hear. Makes a fellow feel like a small boy left by himself in some
big, gloomy building--awesome. Sure, I know it. It would be hard on
the nerves to live here always. But we're only after a stake--then all
the pleasant places of the earth are open to us; with that little, old
log house up by Pine River for a refuge whenever we get tired of the
world at large. Cuddle up and go to sleep. You're a dead-game sport,
or you'd have hollered long ago."
And, next day, to Hazel, sitting by watching him swing the heavy,
double-bitted ax on the foundation logs of their winter home, it all
seemed foolish, that heaviness of heart which sometimes assailed her.
She was perfectly happy. In each of them the good, red blood of youth
ran full and strong, offering ample security against illness. They had
plenty of food. In a few brief months Bill would wrest a sack of gold
from the treasure house of the North, and they would journey home by
easy stages. Why should she brood? It was sheer folly--a mere ebb of
spirit.
Fortune favored them to the extent of letting the October storms remain
in abeyance until Bill finished his cabin, with a cavernous fireplace
of rough stone at one end. He split planks for a door out of raw
timber, and graced his house with two windows--one of four small panes
of glass carefully packed in their bedding all the way from Hazleton,
the other a two-foot square of deerskin scraped parchment thin; opaque
to the vision, it still permitted light to enter. The floor was plain
earth, a condition Bill promised to remedy with hides of moose, once
his buildings were completed. Rudely finished, and lacking much that
would have made for comfort, still it served its purpose, and Hazel
made shift contentedly.
Followed then the erection of a stable to shelter the horses. Midway
of its construction a cloud bank blew out of the northeast, and a foot
of snow fell. Then it cleared to brilliant days of frost. Bill
finished his stable. At night he tied the horses therein. By day they
were turned loose to rustle their fodder from under the crisp snow. It
was necessary to husband the stock of hay, for spring might be late.
After that they went hunting. The third day Bill shot two moose in an
open glade ten miles afield. It took them two more days to haul in the
frozen meat on a sled.
"Looks like one side of a butcher shop," Bill remarked, viewing the
dressed meat where it hung on a pole scaffolding beyond reach of the
wolves.
"It certainly does," Hazel replied. "We'll never eat all that."
"Probably not," he smiled. "But there's nothing like having plenty.
The moose might emigrate, you know. I think I'll add a deer to that
lot for variety--if I can find one."
He managed this in the next few days, and also laid in a stock of
frozen trout by the simple expedient of locating a large pool, and
netting the speckled denizens thereof through a hole in the ice.
So their larder was amply supplied. And, as the cold rigidly tightened
its grip, and succeeding snows deepened the white blanket till
snowshoes became imperative, Bill began to string out a line of traps.