Philip Weyman's buoyancy of heart was in face of the fact that he
had but recently looked upon Radisson's unpleasant death, and that
he was still in a country where the water flowed north. He laughed
and he sang. His heart bubbled over with cheer. He talked to
himself frankly and without embarrassment, asked himself
questions, answered them, discussed the beauties of nature and the
possibilities of storm as if there were three or four of him
instead of one.
At the top end of the world a man becomes a multiple being--if he
is white. Two years along the rim of the Arctic had taught Philip
the science by which a man may become acquainted with himself, and
in moments like the present, when both his mental and physical
spirits overflowed, he even went so far as to attempt poor
Radisson's "La Belle Marie" in the Frenchman's heavy basso,
something between a dog's sullen growl and the low rumble of
distant thunder. It made him cough. And then he laughed again,
scanning the narrowing sweep of the lake ahead of him.
He felt like a boy, and he chuckled as he thought of the definite
reason for it. For twenty-three months he had been like a piece of
rubber stretched to a tension--sometimes almost to the snapping
point. Now had come the reaction, and he was going HOME. Home! It
was that one word that caused a shadow to flit over his face, and
only once or twice had he forgotten and let it slip between his
lips. At least he was returning to civilization--getting AWAY from
the everlasting drone of breaking ice and the clack-clack tongue
of the Eskimo.
With the stub of a pencil Philip had figured out on a bit of paper
about where he was that morning. The whalebone hut of his last
Arctic camp was eight hundred miles due north. Fort Churchill,
over on Hudson's Bay, was four hundred miles to the east, and Fort
Resolution, on the Great Slave, was four hundred miles to the
west. On his map he had drawn a heavy circle about Prince Albert,
six hundred miles to the south. That was the nearest line of rail.
Six days back Radisson had died after a mouth's struggle with that
terrible thing they called "le mort rouge," or the Red Death.
Since then Philip had pointed his canoe straight UP the Dubawnt
waterways, and was a hundred and twenty miles nearer to
civilization. He had been through these waterways twice before,
and he knew that there was not a white man within a hundred and
fifty miles of him. And as for a white woman--
Weyman stopped his paddling where there was no current, and leaned
back in his canoe for a breathing space, and to fill his pipe. A
WHITE WOMAN! Would he stare at her like a fool when he saw her
again for the first time? Eighteen months ago he had seen a white
woman over at Fort Churchill--the English clerk's wife, thirty,
with a sprinkle of gray in her blond hair, and pale blue eyes.
Fresh from the Garden of Eden, he had wondered why the half-dozen
white men over there regarded her as they did. Long ago, in the
maddening gloom of the Arctic night, he had learned to understand.
At Fond du Lac, when Weyman had first come up into the forest
country, he had said to the factor: "It's glorious! It's God's
Country!" And the factor had turned his tired, empty eyes upon him
with the words: "It was--before SHE went. But no country is God's
Country without a woman," and then he took Philip to the lonely
grave under a huge lob-stick spruce, and told him in a few words
how one woman had made life for him. Even then Philip could not
fully understand. But he did now.
He resumed his paddling, his gray eyes alert. His aloneness and
the bigness of the world in which, so far as he knew, he was the
only human atom, did not weigh heavily upon him. He loved this
bigness and emptiness and the glory of solitude. It was middle
autumn, and close to noon of a day unmarred by cloud above, and
warm with sunlight. He was following close to the west shore of
the lake. The opposite shore was a mile away. He was so near to
the rock-lined beach that he could hear the soft throat-cries of
the moose-birds. And what he saw, so far as his eyes could see in
all directions, was "God's Country"--a glory of colour that was
like a great master painting. The birch had turned to red and
gold. From out of the rocks rose trees that were great crimson
splashes of mountain-ash berries framed against the dark lustre of
balsam and cedar and spruce.
Without reason, Philip was listening again to the quiet lifeless
words of Jasper, the factor over at Fond du Lac, as he described
the day when he and his young wife first came up through the
wonderland of the North. "No country is God's Country without a
woman!" He found the words running in an unpleasant monotone
through his brain. He had made up his mind that he would strike
Fond du Lac on his way down, for Jasper's words and the hopeless
picture he had made that day beside the little cross under the
spruce had made them brothers in a strange sort of way. Besides,
Jasper would furnish him with a couple of Indians, and a sledge
and dogs if the snows came early.
In a break between the rocks Philip saw a white strip of sand, and
turned his canoe in to shore. He had been paddling since five
o'clock, and in the six hours had made eighteen miles. Yet he felt
no fatigue as he stood up and stretched himself. He remembered how
different it had been four years ago when Hill, the Hudson's Bay
Company's man down at Prince Albert, had looked him over with
skeptical and uneasy eyes, encouraging him with the words: "You're
going to a funeral, young man, and it's your own. You won't make
God's House, much less Hudson's Bay!"
Weyman laughed joyously.
"Fooled 'em--fooled 'em all!" he told himself. "We'll wager a
dollar to a doughnut that we're the toughest looking specimen that
ever drifted down from Coronation Gulf, or any other gulf. A
DOUGHNUT! I'd trade a gold nugget as big as my fist for a doughnut
or a piece of pie right this minute. Doughnuts an' pie--real old
pumpkin pie--an' cranberry sauce, 'n' POTATOES! Good Lord, and
they're only six hundred miles away, carloads of 'em!"
He began to whistle as he pulled his rubber dunnage sack out of
the canoe. Suddenly he stopped, his eyes staring at the smooth
white floor of sand. A bear had been there before him, and quite
recently. Weyman had killed fresh meat the day before, but the
instinct of the naturalist and the woodsman kept him from singing
or whistling, two things which he was very much inclined to do on
this particular day. He had no suspicion that a bear which he was
destined never to see had become the greatest factor in his life.
He was philosopher enough to appreciate the value and importance
of little things, but the bear track did not keep him silent
because he regarded it as significant, because he wanted to kill.
He would have welcomed it to dinner, and would have talked to it
were it as affable and good-mannered as the big pop-eyed moose-
birds that were already flirting about near him.
He emptied a half of the contents of the rubber sack out on the
sand and made a selection for dinner, and he chuckled in his big
happiness as he saw how attenuated his list of supplies was
becoming. There was still a quarter of a pound of tea, no sugar,
no coffee, half a dozen pounds of flour, twenty-seven prunes
jealously guarded in a piece of narwhal skin, a little salt and
pepper mixed, and fresh caribou meat.
"It's a lovely day, and we'll have a treat for dinner," he
informed himself. "No need of starving. We'll have a real feast.
I'll cook SEVEN prunes instead of five!"
He built a small fire, hung two small pots over it, selected his
prunes, and measured out a tablespoonful of black tea. In the
respite he had while the water heated he dug a small mirror out of
the sack and looked at himself. His long, untrimmed hair was
blond, and the inch of stubble on his face was brick red. There
were tiny creases at the corners of his eyes, caused by the
blistering sleet and cold wind of the Arctic coast. He grimaced as
he studied himself. Then his face lighted up with sudden
inspiration.
"I've got it!" he exclaimed. "I need a shave! We'll use the prune
water."
From the rubber bag he fished out his razor, a nubbin of soap, and
a towel. For fifteen minutes after that he sat cross-legged on the
sand, with the mirror on a rock, and worked. When he had finished
he inspected himself closely.
"You're not half bad," he concluded, and he spoke seriously now.
"Four years ago when you started up here you were thirty--and you
looked forty. Now you're thirty-four, and if it wasn't for the
snow lines in your eyes I'd say you were a day or two younger.
That's pretty good."
He had washed his face and was drying it with the towel when a
sound made him look over beyond the rocks. It was the crackling
sound made by a dead stick stepped upon, or a sapling broken down.
Either meant the bear.
Dropping the towel, he unbuttoned the flap to the holster of his
revolver, took a peep to see how long he could leave the water
before it would boil, and stepped cautiously in the direction of
the sound. A dozen paces beyond the bulwark of rocks he came upon
a fairly well-worn moose trail; surveying its direction from the
top of a boulder, he made up his mind that the bear was dining on
mountain-ash berries where he saw one of the huge crimson splashes
of the fruit a hundred yards away.
He went on quietly. Under the big ash tree there was no sign of a
feast, recent or old. He proceeded, the trail turning almost at
right angles from the ash tree, as if about to bury itself in the
deeper forest. His exploratory instinct led him on for another
hundred yards, when the trail swung once more to the left. He
heard the swift trickling run of water among rocks, and again a
sound. But his mind did not associate the sound which he heard
this time with the one made by the bear. It was not the breaking
of a stick or the snapping of brush. It was more a part of the
musical water-sound itself, a strange key struck once to interrupt
the monotone of a rushing stream.
Over a gray hog-back of limestone Philip climbed to look down into
a little valley of smooth-washed boulders and age-crumbled rock
through which the stream picked its way. He descended to the white
margin of sand and turned sharply to the right, where a little
pool had formed at the base of a huge rock. And there he stopped,
his heart in his throat, every fibre in his body charged with a
sudden electrical thrill at what he beheld. For a moment he was
powerless to move. He stood--and stared.
At the edge of the pool twenty steps from him was kneeling a
woman. Her back was toward him, and in that moment she was as
motionless as the rock that towered over her. Along with the
rippling drone of the stream, without reason on his part--without
time for thought-there leaped through his amazed brain the words
of Jasper, the factor, and he knew that he was looking upon the
miracle that makes "God's Country"--a white woman!
The sun shone down upon her bare head. Over her slightly bent
shoulders swept a glory of unbound hair that rippled to the sand.
Black tresses, even velvety as the crow's wing, might have meant
Cree or half-breed. But this at which he stared--all that he saw
of her--was the brown and gold of the autumnal tintings that had
painted pictures for him that day.
Slowly she raised her head, as if something had given her warning
of a presence behind, and as she hesitated in that birdlike,
listening poise a breath of wind from the little valley stirred
her hair in a shimmering veil that caught a hundred fires of the
sun. And then, as he crushed back his first impulse to cry out, to
speak to her, she rose erect beside the pool, her back still to
him, and hidden to the hips in her glorious hair.
Her movement revealed a towel partly spread out on the sand, and a
comb, a brush, and a small toilet bag. Philip did not see these.
She was turning, slowly, scanning the rocks beyond the valley.
Like a thing carven out of stone he stood, still speechless, still
staring, when she faced him.