THE HATE OF THE LONG SNOWS
In the unwritten law of the north no one in peril shall ask for succor
in vain. So universal is this creed, so general its acceptance and
observance throughout the vast land of silence, that when word is
brought in to settlement, fur-post, or lonely cabin, that help is
needed, it is a matter of course that a relief party takes the trail,
however long and hazardous. And so it was with John Hunter, clergyman,
physician, and man. New to the north, he had come from England at the
call for volunteers to shepherd the souls and bodies of the people of
the solitudes, and without hesitation, he agreed to undertake a journey
which the older heads at Fort George knew might well culminate in the
discovery later, by a searching party, of two stiffened bodies buried
beside a starved dog-team, somewhere in the drifts behind the Cape of
the Four Winds.
Marcel and the dogs were in sore need of a few hours' rest for the
grilling duel with snow and wind, before them, so, when he had eaten,
Jean turned into a bed in the Mission.
At midnight Jean hitched his dogs and waked Hunter. Leaving Fort George
asleep in the smother of snow, down to the river trail, into the white
drive of the norther plunged the dog-team.
Giving the trail-wise Fleur her head in the black night, Jean, with
Hunter, followed the sled carrying their food and robes. Turning from
the swept river ice into the Bay, dogs and men met the full beat of the
blasts with heads lowered to ease the hammering of the pin-pointed
scourge whipping their faces. With the neighboring shore smothered in
murk, Marcel, trusting to Fleur's instinct to keep the trail over the
blurred white floor which only increased the blackness above, followed
the sled he could barely see. Speed against the wind was impossible, and
at all hazards he must keep the trail, for if they swung to the west on
the sea-ice they were doomed to wander until they froze. He would push
on and camp, until daylight, in the lee of the Isle of Graves. With the
light they would begin to travel. Then on the open ice, where there was
little drift, he would give Fleur and her pups the chance to prove their
mettle, for there would be little rest. And beyond, at the rendezvous of
the winds, they would have ten miles inland through the drifts. The
unproven sons of Fleur would indeed need the stamina of wolves to take
them through the days to come.
At last the trail, which the lead-dog had held solely by keeping her
nose to the ice, ran in under the bold shore of Wastikun. There, after
feeding the dogs, they burrowed into the snow in the lee of the cliffs
wrapped in their fur robes. With the wind, the temperature had risen and
men and dogs slept hard until dawn. Then, hot tea, bread and pemmican
spurred the fighting heart of Marcel with hope. The wind had eased, but
powdery snow still drove down blanketing the near shore.
Daylight found them on their way. Due to the wind there was as yet
little drift on the trail over the Bay ice and the freshened dogs, with
lowered heads, swung up the coast at a trot. All day with but short
respite, men and dogs battled on against the norther. The mouth of the
Little Salmon was the goal Marcel had set for himself--the river valley
from which they would cut overland behind the gray cape, to the north
coast. Forty miles away it lay--forty cruel miles of the torturing beat
of shot-like snow on the faces of men and dogs; forty miles of endless
pull and drag for the iron thews of Fleur and the whelps of the wolf.
This was the mark which the now ruthless Frenchman, with but one
thought, one vision, set for the shaggy beasts he loved.
Hunter, game though he was, at last was forced to ride on the sled, so
fierce was their pace into the wind. Steadily the great beasts ate up
the miles. At noon, floundering through drifts like the billows of a
broken sea, with Marcel ahead breaking trail, they crossed Caribou
Point, Hunter, refusing to burden the dogs, wallowing behind the sled.
There they boiled tea, then pushed on to the mouth of the Roggan.
At Ominuk, night fell like a tent, and again a white wraith of a
lead-dog, blinded by the fury she faced, kept the trail by instinct,
backed loyally by her brood of ice-sheathed wolves, foot-sore,
trail-worn, following with low noises her tireless feet.
The coast swung sharply. They were in the lee of the Cape. But a few
miles farther and a long rest in the sheltered river valley awaited
them. Marcel stopped his dogs and went to Fleur, lying on the trail, her
hot breath freezing as it left her panting mouth. Kneeling on the snow
beside her with his back to the drive, he examined each hairy paw for
pad-cracks or balled snow between the toes, but the feet of the Ungava
were iron; then he took in his hands her great head with its battered
nose, blood-caked from the snow barrage she had faced all day. Rubbing
the ice from her masked eyes, Jean placed his hooded face against his
dog's; she turned her nose and her rough tongue touched his
frost-blackened cheek.
"Fleur," he said, "we are doing it for Julie--you and Jean Marcel. We
mus' mak' de Salmon to-night. Some day we weel hav' de beeg sleep--you
and Jean."
Again he stroked her massive head with his red, unmittened hand, then
for an instant resting his face against the scarred nose, sprang to his
feet. With a glance at the paws and a word for each of the whining
puppies whose white tails switched in answer, Jean cracked his whip and
shouted, "Marche!"
Late that night a huge fire burned in the timber of the sheltered mouth
of the Little Salmon. Two men and a dog-team ate ravenously, then slept
like the dead, while over them roared the norther, rocking the spruce
and jack-pine in the river bottom, heaping the drifts high on the Whale
River trail.
In three days of gruelling toil Marcel had got within ninety miles of
his goal--within a day and a half of Whale River had the trail been ice
hard. But now it would be days longer--how many he dared not guess.
Had the weather held for him, four days from the night of his starting
would have seen him home; for on an iced trail, at his call, his great
dogs would have run like wolves at the rallying cry of the pack. As he
drew his stiffened legs from the rabbit-skins to freshen the fire at
dawn, he bit his cracked lips until they bled, at the thought of what
the blizzard had meant to Julie Breton, waiting, waiting for the
dog-team creeping up the East Coast, hobbled and held back by head-wind
and drift.
The dogs had won a long rest and Marcel did not start breaking trail
inland until after daylight. With the sunrise the wind had increased and
the heart-sick Marcel groaned at the strength-sapping floundering in
breast-high drifts which faced his devoted dogs, when he needed them
fresh for the race up the sea-ice of the coast beyond. Before he slept,
he had weighed the toil of ten miles of drift-barred short-cut across
the Cape, against doubling the headland on the ice, but he had decided
that no men or dogs could face the maelstrom of wind and snow which
churned around its bald buttresses; no strength could force its way--no
endurance prevail, against it.
With Marcel in the lead as trail-breaker and the missionary, who took
the punishment without murmur, like the man he was, following the sled,
Fleur led her sons up to their Calvary in the hills.
As they left the valley and reached the open tundra above, they met the
full force of the wind. For an instant men and dogs stopped dead in
their tracks, then with heads down they hurled themselves into the white
fury which had buried the trail beyond all following.
On pushed the desperate Frenchman in the direction of the north coast,
followed by Fleur with her whitened nose at the tails of his snow-shoes.
At times, when the force of the snow-swirls sucked their very breath,
men and dogs threw themselves panting on the snow, until, with wind
regained, they stumbled on. Often plunging to their collars in the new
snow, the huskies travelled solely by leaps, until, stalled nose-deep,
tangled in traces and held by the drag of the overturned sled, Marcel
and the exhausted Hunter came to their rescue. Heart-breaking mile after
mile of the country over which Marcel had sped two days before, they
painfully put behind them.
At noon, the man who lived his creed crumpled in the snow. Wrapping him
in robes, Marcel lashed him on the sled and went on, the vision of a
dying girl on a white cot at Whale River ever in his eyes.
Through a break in the snow, before the light waned, Marcel made out,
dim in the north, the silhouette of Big Island. He was over the divide
and well on his way to the coast. With the night, the wind eased, though
the snow held, and although he was off the trail, the new snow on the
exposed north slope of the Cape was either wind-packed or swept from the
frozen tundra, and again the exhausted dogs found good footing.
For some time the team had been working easily down hill, Marcel often
forced to brake the toboggan with his feet. He knew he had worked to the
west of the trail, and was swinging in a circle to regain it. Worried by
the sting of the cold, which was growing increasingly bitter as the wind
fell off, he stopped to rub the muffled, frost-cracked face and hands of
his spent passenger, cheering him with the promise of a roaring fire.
When he started the team, Colin, stiffened by the rest, limped badly,
and Jules, who had bucked the deep snow all day like a veteran of the
mail-teams, gamely following his herculean mother, hobbled along, head
and tail down, with a wrenched shoulder. It was high time they found a
camping place. With the falling wind they would freeze in the open. So
he pushed on through the murk, seeking the beach where there was wood
and a lee.
They were swiftly dropping down to the sea-ice but snow and darkness
drew around them an impenetrable curtain. Seizing the gee-pole, Marcel
had thrown his weight back on the sled to keep it off the dogs on a
descent when suddenly Fleur, whose white back he could barely see moving
in front, with a whine stopped dead in her tracks and flattened on the
snow. Her tired sons at once lay down behind her. The sled slid into
Angus and stopped.
Mystified, Marcel called: "Marche, Fleur! Marche!" fearing to find,
when she rose, that his rock and anchor had suddenly broken on the
trail.
But the great dog, ignoring the command, raised her nose in a low growl
as Marcel reached her.
"What troubles you, Fleur?" he asked, on his knees beside her, brushing
the crusted snow from her ears and slant eyes. Again Fleur whined
mysteriously.
"Where ees de pain, Fleur? Get up!" he ordered sharply, thinking to
learn where her iron body had received its hurt. But the dog lay rigid,
her throat still rumbling.
"By Gar, dis ees queer t'ing!" muttered Marcel, his mittened hand on the
massive head.
Then some strange impulse led him to advance into the black wall, when,
with fierce protest, Fleur, jerking Jules to his feet, leaped forward,
straining to reach him.
The Frenchman, checked by the dog's action, stared into the darkness,
until, at length, he saw that the white tundra at his feet fell away
before his snow-shoes and he looked out into gray space.
As he crouched peering ahead, his senses slowly warned him that he stood
on a shoulder of cliff falling sheer to the invisible beach below.
He had driven his dogs to the lip of a ghastly death; and Julie----
Turning back, he flung himself beside the trembling Fleur and with his
arm circling the great neck, kissed the battered nose. Fleur, with the
uncanny instinct of the born lead-dog, had scented the open space,
divined the danger, had known--and lain down, saving them all.
Swinging his team off the brow of the cliff, he worked back and finally
down to the beach, and his muffled passenger, drowsy, with swiftly
numbing limbs, never knew that he had ridden calmly, that night, out to
the doors of doom.
In the lee of an island Marcel made camp and boiled life-giving
tea,--the panacea of the north--and pemmican, on a hot fire, which soon
revived the frozen Hunter.
To his joy, he realized that the back of the blizzard was broken, for as
the wind and snow eased, the temperature rapidly fell to an Arctic cold.
With Whale River eighty miles away; his dogs broken by lack of rest and
stiff from the wrenching and exhaustion of the battle with the deep
snow; his own legs twinging with "mal raquette"; Marcel thanked God, for
the dawn would see the wind dead and if his team did not fail him, in
two days he would reach the post.