Into the mouth of the broad Stikine the two voyageurs guided their laden
bidarka; and it was like starting anew into the river of life. Fugitives
though they were, they meant to make the best of this canoe-adventure,
reconcile themselves to its hardships, and take all that uncertain
pleasure which is to be derived from close communion with raw, robust
nature. At least this free journeying through pleasant water vistas was
more pleasant than pacing a darkened cell.
Both knew something about handling a canoe, but since Molly seemed to be
the most skilled, she took the stern seat. When the river flowed
quietly, they made their way by paddling; but a large part of the way
the boat was “lined” up the bank—the two voyageurs walking along the
water’s edge and pulling the bidarka by means of a rope fastened at bow
and stern. When night lowered they pushed just far enough into the heavy
timber to hide their supper fire, beside which they made a primitive
camp.
Almost after the first hour they were in the deep wilderness. They saw
no other living things but the wild creatures in the water and on the
bank; hair seal and waterfowl, fur-bearer and big game. On the frowning
cliffs of nearby mountains the flocks of wild goats looked like minute
patches of last winter’s snow; and often a surly, peevish, sulky old
grizzly, fishing on the bank, looked at them with sullen eyes, no doubt
resenting their intrusion into his fastnesses. Once they glimpsed that
scientific curiosity, the glacier bear, and although they had scarcely
reached the edge of the moose country, they met on the fourth day out an
old cow moose that was also a voyageur—swimming staunchly on some
adventure across the wide river. This was the “backwoods” of which Jeff
had often spoken with contempt—but that was before he had met them face
to face. He would never scorn them hereafter. Before the end of the
first day he learned that, compared to them, his proud strength was less
than a leaf that the wind ravishes and hurls down.
This was the spruce forest, unbroken except for its waters and the
heights of snowy ranges. Here were wonders past any man’s imagining:
gentleness, and at the same time, savagery; deep peace, and in the same
breath, the realization of never-ending war; desolation and eternal
hospitality. He saw scenes of moving beauty: glaciers, cataracts,
sequestered lakes, snowy peaks dreaming in the sun, hidden sloughs
flashed over by wings of mallard and brant, rivulets creeping through
ferns, a wooded sky line between him and a rising moon.
He tasted of the hardships of the trail, the rough life that is the only
possible life in the wilderness. After paddling or pulling all day he
knew what it was to make camp in the gray, bleak twilight: building
fires, cutting fuel, spreading their canvas fly that was all they had in
the way of a tent. He ate the rough food, much of it poorly cooked over
the camp fire; laborer’s food, he thought it was, yet sustaining him in
his toil and satisfying his strengthening body. When they made their
permanent winter’s camp, almost a hundred miles up the river and a half
mile back from its shore on the bank of a small stream, he knew the
arduous labor of cabin-building.
Molly helped him a great deal, but the heavy work naturally fell to his
greater strength. He had to cut trees and float the logs down the creek
to the selected site, haul them out on the bank beyond high-water line,
then lift them into place. He made many mistakes, he was awkward from
sheer inexperience, and the work which an experienced woodsman could
have done in three days took him almost a fortnight. He had to hunt
meat—the caribou and moose that thronged these more open forests back
from the coast line—packing it on his back into camp; and to lay in
fuel for the Northern winter which was surely encroaching upon them.
There was nothing extraordinary about this toil. All frontiersmen were
obliged to perform the same arduous tasks, and in addition clear the
land for corn and run their trap lines into the forest. Yet it was all
wonderfully enlightening to Jeff Sharp. By just such labor and hardship
the steel of America had been forged.
He had always before taken America for granted. If he had thought about
it at all, he assumed it had “just happened”; and the fact that it had
been hewn out of the wilderness by his own forefathers had never
occurred to him. He had never regarded America as a priceless heritage,
won through just such mighty toil as he was doing now. Women and lords
could pamper a culture, but by God! it took men to make a nation.
Trying though they sometimes were, these days in the wildwood were good
for Jeff. From this far place he seemed to get a perspective on all of
life; and his standards underwent revolutionary change. Things mattered
deeply that before were as nothing; and many things he once set store by
were now as dust. He did not believe he would continue to deplore the
absence of a vested nobility in America. Nobility, meaning exalted
birth, would not count for much out here, when there were trees to fell
and logs to lift and cabins to build. It was even possible that the
nation governed by and for a hardy, industrious, adventurous rank and
file was in some ways to be preferred to that where a cultured
aristocracy sat comfortably on the necks of crushed and hopeless
peasantry. It was a revolutionary thought, yet it haunted his meditative
hours.
He had never been proud of America. It was a backwoods nation, and even
its oldest cities were but yesterday the haunts of wolf and deer. The
mighty, marching spirit that had made America was shut from his sight;
and thus he had not been inclined to appreciate the victories it had
won. Now that he had cut a few trees himself he experienced a healthy
wonder at the vast areas newly cleared and sown to grain. He made at
last a surprising discovery: that America was rich and great purely
because her eagle’s brood had made her so.
Perhaps such a land was worth a man’s loyalty, its ideals worth fighting
for. Perhaps the brave and warlike people whose fortitude and daring had
made it possible were worthy of his respect, even more than cultured
lords and ladies far away. Since it had been ordained that the Union
should stand and that the Southern people were not to establish a
government exactly to fill their needs, perhaps the country as a whole
could still be worth his allegiance. Perhaps one should feel pride in
the mere fact of being an American, a representative of America’s strong
and marching citizenry.
He found himself regarding Molly in a new light. He no longer patronized
her, nor did he measure her by any scale other than that of intrinsic
worth. She had served him a long time, but now the hour of reckoning was
at hand. Fully appreciative at last of all she had done for him, he
soberly concluded that it was now his time to serve, and this he did to
the limit of his power.
He was willing to work his fingers to the bone to add to Molly’s
comfort, meanwhile trying to save her all except the more pleasant
tasks. He spared no pains to make the cabin comfortable for her, and in
every way to prepare for the rigorous winter which was encroaching so
swiftly upon them. He maintained a constant attitude of cheer so that
she might be cheered, and his unvarying consideration and chivalry was
actually a wonder—worthy of the best traditions of the South. In these
passing weeks he did, indeed, pay some of the debt he owed her in the
past, although he was not blind to the fact that her very presence here,
beside him in his hour of trial, was an accumulative obligation that
never could be fully paid. On one occasion he risked his own life to
hold her when she slipped on a steep mountain side, and all of one
chill, rainy, dismal night he spent at her side purely to administer to
a vicious, raging toothache for which no soothing drugs could be found
short of Sitka. His tenderness that night was even more dear to her
because it had been called forth by a malady of no lasting seriousness
and which was not a traditional occasion for chivalric service.
With the deepening cold and lengthening nights they knew a growing need
of mutual service. The Northern wilderness is dreary and dark in the
late fall, stricken by the threat of coming winter, and only by a fine,
gay companionship could the two exiles escape its brooding mood.
They learned to find manna in the wilderness and to derive certain
happiness from their sylvan home. The fear of capture by the Russians
was largely past now. Since they had left the _Ethan Allen_ they had not
so much as glimpsed a human form; and naturally Jeff could hardly
believe his eyes when, one chill November morning, he saw unaccustomed
traffic on the broad Stikine.
From the bank where he stood gaffing salmon for winter use he
distinguished a black, moving speck far up the stream. At first he
thought it was a piece of driftwood—perhaps a tree top such as often
floated by like a green-sailed ship—but flotsam does not hasten toward
the sea with the aid of flashing paddles. Peering intently, Jeff saw it
was a canoe manned by a single voyageur; and without waiting for further
scrutiny, he scrambled up the bank behind screening thickets.
A wild animal could have scarcely found cover more quickly. Even in his
few weeks here he had picked up something of that strange furtiveness
that marks all denizens of the hushed woods, a power to drift away like
smoke into the maze of light and shadow of the underbrush. Now he
lingered out of sight, watching intently.
The voyageur was plainly an Indian. White men do not as a rule race the
salmon down the riffles with such slight effort; besides, his skin
showed bronze against the long blue sheen behind. Following the deepest
part of the channel the boat swung in and approached within fifty feet
of him. And now Jeff recognized the brown, aquiline face past any
possibility of doubt.
“Big Eagle!” he called suddenly. And he stepped out on to the bank so
that the man could see him plainly.
Big Eagle started and whirled, but he did not snatch up his musket. He
knew perfectly that the voice from the shore was not that of an enemy,
simply because it issued from human vocal chords instead of from the maw
of a gun. He had offered a good target, and it was the way of his foes
to shoot first and speak afterward. He saw Jeff, and turning his canoe
in a swift, graceful circle, he made a skillful landing just at the
white man’s feet.
“Heap fighter!” the Indian observed eloquently. “Lick’m Roosian soldiers
on Kolosh Ryeka trail.”
“That’s right, Big Eagle! What in the world you doing here?”
But the native was still absorbed in what seemed to him a miraculous
meeting. “Big Eagle’s friend,” said he. “Where big, strong, skookem
squaw?”
Jeff grinned. “Molly? She’s back at our cabin.”