The steamer backed away from a float of which Hollister was the sole
occupant. She swung in a wide semicircle, pointed her bluff bow down
the Inlet, and presently all that he could see of her was the tip of
her masts over a jutting point and the top of her red funnel trailing
a pennant of smoke, black against a gray sky.
Hollister stood looking about him. He was clad like a logger, in thick
mackinaws and heavy boots, and the texture of his garments was
appropriate to the temperature, the weather. He seemed to have stepped
into another latitude,--which in truth he had, for the head of Toba
Inlet lies a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Vancouver, and the
thrust of that narrow arm of the sea carries it thirty miles into the
glacial fastnesses of the Coast Range. The rain that drenched
Vancouver became snow here. The lower slopes were green with timber
which concealed the drifts that covered the rocky soil. A little
higher certain clear spaces bared the whiteness, and all the tree
tops, the drooping boughs, carried a burden of clinging snow. Higher
still lifted grim peaks capped with massive snow banks that even
midsummer heat could never quite dispel. But these upper heights were
now hidden in clouds and wraiths of frost fog, their faces shrouded in
this winter veil which--except for rare bursts of sunshine or sweeping
northwest wind--would not be lifted till the vernal equinox.
It was very cold and very still, as if winter had laid a compelling
silence on everything in the land. Except the faint slapping of little
waves against the ice-encrusted, rocky shore, and the distant, harsh
voices of some wheeling gulls, there was no sound or echo of a sound,
as he stood listening.
Yet Hollister was not oppressed by this chill solitude. In that
setting, silence was appropriate. It was merely unexpected. For so
long Hollister had lived amid blaring noises, the mechanical thunder
and lightning of the war, the rumble of industry, the shuffle and
clatter of crowds, he had forgotten what it was like to be alone,--and
in the most crowded places he had suffered the most grievous
loneliness. For the time being he was unconscious of his mutilation,
since there was no one by to remind him by look or act. He was only
aware of a curious interest in what he saw, a subdued wonder at the
majestic beauty and the profound hush, as if he had been suddenly
transferred from a place where life was maddeningly, distractingly
clamorous to a spot where life was mute.
The head of Toba is neither a harbor nor a bay. One turns out of the
island-studded Gulf of Georgia into an arm of the sea a mile in
breadth. The cliffs and mountains grow higher, more precipitous mile
by mile, until the Inlet becomes a chasm with the salt water for its
floor. On past frowning points, around slow curves, boring farther and
farther into the mainland through a passage like a huge tunnel, the
roof of which has been blown away. Then suddenly there is an end to
the sea. Abruptly, a bend is turned, and great mountains bar the way,
peaks that lift from tidewater to treeless heights, formidable ranges
bearing upon their rocky shoulders the lingering remains of a glacial
age. The Inlet ends there, the seaway barred by these frowning
declivities.
Hollister remembered the head of Toba after a fashion. He had the lay
of the land in his mind. He had never seen it in midwinter, but the
snow, the misty vapors drifting along the mountain sides, did not
confuse him.
From the float he now perceived two openings in the mountain chain.
The lesser, coming in from the northwest, was little more than a deep
and narrow gash in the white-clad hills. On his right opened the
broader valley of the Toba River, up which he must go.
For a space of perhaps five minutes Hollister stood gazing about him.
Then he was reminded of his immediate necessities by the chill that
crept over his feet,--for several inches of snow overlaid the planked
surface of the landing float.
Knowing what he was about when he left Vancouver, Hollister had
brought with him a twenty-foot Hudson's Bay freight canoe, a capacious
shoal-water craft with high topsides. He slid this off the float,
loaded into it sundry boxes and packages, and taking his seat astern,
paddled inshore to where the rising tide was ruffled by the outsetting
current of a river.
Here, under the steep shoulder of a mountain, rows of piles stood
gaunt above the tide flats. When Hollister had last seen the mouth of
the Toba, those same piles had been the support of long boom-sticks,
within which floated hundreds of logs. On the flat beside the river
there had stood the rough shacks of a logging camp. Donkey engines
were puffing and grunting in the woods. Now the booming ground was
empty, save for those decaying, teredo-eaten sticks, and the camp was
a tumbledown ruin when he passed. He wondered if the valley of the
Toba were wholly deserted, if the forests of virgin timber covering
the delta of that watercourse had been left to their ancient solitude.
But he did not stop to puzzle over this. In ten minutes he was over
the sandy bar at the river's mouth. The sea was hidden behind him. He
passed up a sluggish waterway lined by alder and maple, covered with
dense thickets, a jungle in which flourished the stalwart salmonberry
and the thorny sticks of the devil's club. Out of this maze of
undergrowth rose the tall brown columns of Douglas fir, of red cedar,
of spruce and hemlock with their drooping boughs.
Sloughs branched off in narrow laterals, sheeted with thin ice, except
where the current kept it open, and out of these open patches flocks
of wild duck scattered with a whir of wings. A mile up-stream he
turned a bend and passed a Siwash rancheria. The bright eyes of little
brown-faced children peered shyly out at him from behind stumps. He
could see rows of split salmon hung by the tail to the beams of an
open-fronted smokehouse. Around another bend he came on a buck deer
standing knee-deep in the water, and at the sight of him the animal
snorted, leaped up the bank and vanished as silently as a shadow.
Hollister marked all these things without ceasing to ply his paddle.
His objective lay some six miles up-stream. But when he came at last
to the upper limit of the tidal reach he found in this deep, slack
water new-driven piling and freshly strung boom-sticks and acres of
logs confined therein; also a squat motor tugboat and certain lesser
craft moored to these timbers. A little back from the bank he could
see the roofs of buildings.
He stayed his paddle a second to look with a mild curiosity. Then he
went on. That human craving for companionship which had gained no
response in the cities of two continents had left him for the time
being. For that hour he was himself, sufficient unto himself. Here
probably a score of men lived and worked. But they were not men he
knew. They were not men who would care to know him,--not after a
clear sight of his face.
Hollister did not say that to himself in so many words. He was only
subconsciously aware of this conclusion. Nevertheless it guided his
actions. Through long, bitter months he had rebelled against spiritual
isolation. The silent woods, the gray river, the cloud-wrapped hills
seemed friendly by comparison with mankind,--mankind which had marred
him and now shrank from its handiwork.
So he passed by this community in the wilderness, not because he
wished to but because he must.
Within half a mile he struck fast water, long straight reaches up
which he gained ground against the current by steady strokes of the
paddle, shallows where he must wade and lead his craft by hand. So he
came at last to the Big Bend of the Toba River, a great S curve where
the stream doubled upon itself in a mile-wide flat that had been
stripped of its timber and lay now an unlovely vista of stumps, each
with a white cap of snow.
On the edge of this, where the river swung to the southern limit of
the valley and ran under a cliff that lifted a thousand foot sheer, he
passed a small house. Smoke drifted blue from the stovepipe. A pile of
freshly chopped firewood lay by the door. The dressed carcass of a
deer hung under one projecting eave. Between two stumps a string of
laundered clothes waved in the down-river breeze. By the garments
Hollister knew a woman must be there. But none appeared to watch him
pass. He did not halt, although the short afternoon was merging into
dusk and he knew the hospitality of those who go into lonely places to
wrest a living from an untamed land. But he could not bear the thought
of being endured rather than welcomed. He had suffered enough of that.
He was in full retreat from just that attitude. He was growing afraid
of contact with people, and he knew why he was afraid.
When the long twilight was nearly spent, he gained the upper part of
the Big Bend and hauled his canoe out on the bank. A small flat ran
back to the mouth of a canyon, and through the flat trickled a stream
of clear water.
Hollister built a fire on a patch of dry ground at the base of a
six-foot fir. He set up his tent, made his bed, cooked his supper, sat
with his feet to the fire, smoking a pipe.
After four years of clamor and crowds, he marveled at the astonishing
contentment which could settle on him here in this hushed valley,
where silence rested like a fog. His fire was a red spot with a yellow
nimbus. Beyond that ruddy circle, valley and cliff and clouded sky
merged into an impenetrable blackness. Hollister had been cold and wet
and hungry. Now he was warm and dry and fed. He lay with his feet
stretched to the fire. For the time he almost ceased to think,
relaxed as he was into a pleasant, animal well-being. And so presently
he fell asleep.
In winter, north of the forty-ninth parallel, and especially in those
deep clefts like the Toba, dusk falls at four in the afternoon, and
day has not grown to its full strength at nine in the morning.
Hollister had finished his breakfast before the first gleam of light
touched the east. When day let him see the Alpine crevasses that
notched the northern wall of the valley, he buckled on a belt that
carried a sheath-ax, took up his rifle and began first of all a
cursory exploration of the flat on which he camped.
It seemed to him that in some mysterious way he was beginning his life
all over again,--that life which his reason, with cold, inexorable
logic, had classified as a hopeless ruin. He could not see wherein the
ruin was lessened by embarking upon this lone adventure into the
outlying places. Nevertheless, something about it had given a fillip
to his spirits. He felt that he would better not inquire too closely
into this; that too keen self-analysis was the evil from which he had
suffered and which he should avoid. But he said to himself that if he
could get pleasure out of so simple a thing as a canoe trip in a
lonely region, there was hope for him yet. And in the same breath he
wondered how long he could be sustained by that illusion.
He had a blue-print of the area covering the Big Bend. That timber
limit which he had lightly purchased long ago, and which
unaccountably went begging a purchaser, lay south and a bit west from
where he set up his camp. He satisfied himself of that by the
blue-print and the staking description. The northeast corner stake
should stand not a great way back from the river bank.
He had to find a certain particularly described cedar tree, thence
make his way south to a low cliff, at one extreme of which he should
find a rock cairn with a squared post in its center. From that he
could run his boundary lines with a pocket compass, until he located
the three remaining corners.
Hollister found cedars enough, but none that pointed the way to a low
cliff and a rock cairn. He ranged here and there, and at last went up
the hillside which rose here so steeply as to be stiff climbing. It
bore here and there a massive tree, rough-barked pillars rising to a
branchy head two hundred feet in the air. But for the most part the
slope was clothed with scrubby hemlock and thickets of young fir and
patches of hazel, out of which he stirred a great many grouse and once
a deer.
But if he found no stakes to show him the boundaries of his property,
he gained the upper rim of the high cliff which walled the southern
side of the Big Bend, and all the valley opened before him. Smoke
lifted in a pale spiral from the house below his camp. Abreast of the
log boom he had passed in the river, he marked the roofs of several
buildings, and back of the clearings in the logged-over land opened
white squares against the dusky green of the surrounding timber. He
perceived that a considerable settlement had arisen in the lower
valley, that the forest was being logged off, that land was being
cleared and cultivated. There was nothing strange in that. All over
the earth the growing pressure of population forced men continually to
invade the strongholds of the wilderness. Here lay fertile acres,
water, forests to supply timber, the highway of the sea to markets.
Only labor,--patient, unremitting labor--was needed to shape all that
great valley for cultivation. Cleared and put to the plow, it would
produce abundantly. A vast, fecund area out of which man, withdrawing
from the hectic pressure of industrial civilization, could derive
sustenance,--if he possessed sufficient hardihood to survive such
hardships and struggle as his forefathers had for their common lot.
Hollister ranged the lower part of the hillside until hunger drove him
back to camp. And, as it sometimes happens that what a man fails to
come upon when he seeks with method and intent he stumbles upon by
accident, so now Hollister, coming heedlessly downhill, found the
corner stake he was seeking. With his belt-axe he blazed a trail from
this point to the flat below, so that he could find it again.
He made no further explorations that afternoon. He spent a little time
in making his camp comfortable in ways known to any outdoor man. But
when day broke clear the following morning he was on the hill, compass
in hand, bearing due west from the original stake. He found the second
without much trouble. He ran a line south and east and north again and
so returned to his starting point by noon with two salient facts
outstanding in his mind.
The first was that he suspected himself of having bought a poke which
contained a pig of doubtful value. This, if true, made plain the
difficulty of re-sale, and made him think decidedly unpleasant things
of "Lewis and Company, Specialists in B.C. Timber." The second was
that someone, within recent years, had cut timber on his limit. And it
was his timber. The possessive sense was fairly strong in Hollister,
as it usually is in men who have ever possessed any considerable
property. He did not like the idea of being cheated or robbed. In this
case there was superficial evidence that both these things had
happened to him.
So when he had cooked himself a meal and smoked a pipe, he took to the
high ground again to verify or disprove these unwelcome conclusions.
In that huge and largely inaccessible region which is embraced within
the boundaries of British Columbia, in a land where the industrial
life-blood flows chiefly along two railways and three navigable
streams, there are many great areas where the facilities of
transportation are much as they were when British Columbia was a field
exploited only by trappers and traders. Settlement is still but a
fringe upon the borders of the wilderness. Individuals and
corporations own land and timber which they have never seen, sources
of material wealth acquired cheaply, with an eye to the future. Beyond
the railway belts, the navigable streams, the coastwise passages where
steamers come and go, there lies a vast hinterland where canoe and
pack-sack are still the mainstay of the traveler.
In this almost primeval region the large-handed fashion of primitive
transactions is still in vogue. Men traffic in timber and mineral
stakings on the word of other men. The coastal slopes and valleys are
dotted with timber claims which have been purchased by men and
corporations in Vancouver and New York and London and Paris and
Berlin, bought and traded "sight unseen" as small boys swap
jackknives. There flourishes in connection with this, on the Pacific
coast, the business of cruising timber, a vocation followed by hardy
men prepared to go anywhere, any time, in fair weather or foul.
Commission such a man to fare into such a place, cruise such and such
areas of timber land, described by metes and bounds. This resourceful
surveyor-explorer will disappear. In the fullness of weeks he will
return, bearded and travel-worn. He will place in your hands a report
containing an estimate of so many million feet of standing fir, cedar,
spruce, hemlock, with a description of the topography, an opinion on
the difficulty or ease of the logging chance.
On the British Columbia coast a timber cruiser's report comes in the
same category as a bank statement or a chartered accountant's audit of
books; that is to say, it is unquestionable, an authentic statement of
fact.
Within the boundaries defined by the four stakes of the limit
Hollister owned there stood, according to the original cruising
estimate, eight million feet of merchantable timber, half fir, half
red cedar. The Douglas fir covered the rocky slopes and the cedar
lined the gut of a deep hollow which split the limit midway. It was
classed as a fair logging chance, since from that corner which dipped
into the flats of the Toba a donkey engine with its mile-long arm of
steel cable could snatch the logs down to the river, whence they would
be floated to the sea and towed to the Vancouver sawmills.
Hollister had been guided by the custom of the country. He had put a
surplus fund of cash into this property in the persuasion that it
would resell at a profit, or that it could ultimately be logged at a
still greater profit. And this persuasion rested upon the cruising
estimate and the uprightness of "Lewis and Company, Specialists in
B.C. Timber, Investments, Etc."
But Hollister had a practical knowledge of timber himself, acquired at
first hand. He had skirted his boundaries and traversed the fringes
of his property, and he saw scrubby, undersized trees where the
four-foot trunks of Douglas fir should have lifted in brown ranks. He
had looked into the bisecting hollow from different angles and marked
magnificent cedars,--but too few of them. Taken with the fact that
Lewis had failed to resell even at a reduced price, when standing
timber had doubled in value since the beginning of the war, Hollister
had grave doubts, which, however, he could not establish until he went
over the ground and made a rough estimate for himself.
This other matter of timber cutting was one he could settle in short
order. It roused his curiosity. It gave him a touch of the resentment
which stirs a man when he suspects himself of being the victim of
pillaging vandals. No matter that despair had recently colored his
mental vision; the sense of property right still functioned
unimpaired. To be marred and impoverished and shunned as if he were a
monstrosity were accomplished facts which had weighed upon him, an
intolerable burden. He forgot that now. There was nothing much here to
remind him. He was free to react to this new sense of outrage, this
new evidence of mankind's essential unfairness.
In the toll taken of his timber by these unwarranted operations there
was little to grieve over, he discovered before long. He had that
morning found and crossed, after a long, curious inspection, a chute
which debouched from the middle of his limit and dipped towards the
river bottom apparently somewhere above his camp. He knew that this
shallow trough built of slender poles was a means of conveying
shingle-bolts from the site of cutting to the water that should float
them to market. Earlier he had seen signs of felling among the cedars,
but only from a distance. He was not sure he had seen right until he
discovered the chute.
So now he went back to the chute and followed its winding length until
it led into the very heart of the cedars in the hollow. Two or three
years had elapsed since the last tree was felled. Nor had there ever
been much inroad on the standing timber. Some one had begun operations
there and abandoned the work before enough timber had been cut to half
repay the labor of building that long chute.
Nor was that all. In the edge of the workings the branches and litter
of harvesting those hoary old cedars had been neatly cleared from a
small level space. And on this space, bold against the white carpet of
snow, stood a small log house.
Hollister pushed open the latched door and stepped into the musty
desolation of long abandoned rooms. It was neatly made, floored with
split cedar, covered by a tight roof of cedar shakes. Its tiny-paned
windows were still intact. Within, it was divided into two rooms.
There was no stove and there had never been a stove. A rough fireplace
of stone served for cooking. An iron bar crossed the fireplace and on
this bar still hung the fire-blackened pothooks. On nails and shelves
against the wall pans still hung and dishes stood thick with dust. On
a homemade bunk in one corner lay a mattress which the rats had
converted to their own uses, just as they had played havoc with papers
scattered about the floor and the oilcloth on the table.
Hollister passed into the other room. This had been a bedroom, a
woman's bedroom. He guessed that by the remnants of fabric hanging
over the windows, as well as by a skirt and sunbonnet which still hung
from a nail. Here, too, was a bedstead with a rat-ruined mattress. And
upon a shelf over the bed was ranged a row of books, perhaps two dozen
volumes, which the rats had somehow respected,--except for sundry
gnawing at the bindings.
Hollister took one down. He smiled; that is to say, his eyes smiled
and his features moved a little out of their rigid cast. Fancy finding
the _contes_ of August Strindberg, the dramatist, that genius of
subtle perception and abysmal gloom, here in this forsaken place.
Hollister fluttered the pages. Writing on the flyleaf caught his eye.
There was a date and below that:
DORIS CLEVELAND--HER BOOK
He took down the others, one by one,--an Iliad, a Hardy novel, "The
Way of All Flesh" between "Kim" and "The Pilgrim Fathers", a volume of
Swinburne rubbing shoulders with a California poet who sang of gibbous
moons, "The Ancient Lowly" cheek by jowl with "Two Years Before the
Mast." A catholic collection, with strong meat sandwiched between some
of the rat-gnawed covers. And each bore on the flyleaf the inscription
of the first, written in a clear firm hand: Doris Cleveland--Her Book.
Hollister put the last volume back in place and stood staring at the
row. Who was Doris Cleveland and why had she left her books to the
rats?
He gave over his wonder at the patently unanswerable, went out into
the living room, glanced casually over that once more, and so to the
outside where the snow crisped under his feet now that the sun had
withdrawn behind the hills. About the slashed area where the cedars
had fallen, over stumps and broken branches and the low roof of the
cabin, the virgin snow laid its softening whiteness, and the tall
trees enclosed the spot with living green. A hidden squirrel broke out
with brisk scolding, a small chirruping voice in a great silence. Here
men had lived and worked and gone their way again. The forest remained
as it was before. The thickets would soon arise to conceal man's
handiwork.
Hollister shook off this fleeting impression of man's impermanence,
and turned downhill lest dark catch him in the heavy timber and make
him lose his way.