A wind began to sigh among the trees as Hollister made his way
downhill. Over his evening fire he heard it grow to a lusty gale that
filled the valley all night with moaning noises. Fierce gusts
scattered the ashes of his fire and fluttered the walls of his tent as
though some strong-lunged giant were huffing and puffing to blow his
house down. At daylight the wind died. A sky banked solid with clouds
began to empty upon the land a steady downpour of rain. All through
the woods the sodden foliage dripped heavily. The snow melted, pouring
muddy cataracts out of each gully, making tiny cascades over the edge
of every cliff. Snowbanks slipped their hold on steep hillsides high
on the north valley wall. They gathered way and came roaring down out
of places hidden in the mist. Hollister could hear these slides
thundering like distant artillery. Watching that grim façade across
the river he saw, once or twice during the day, those masses plunge
and leap, ten thousand tons of ice and snow and rock and crushed
timber shooting over ledge and precipice to end with fearful crashing
and rumbling in the depth of a steep-walled gorge.
He was tied to his camp. He could not stir abroad without more
discomfort than he cared to undergo. Every bush, every bough, would
precipitate upon him showers of drops at the slightest touch. He sat
by his fire in the mouth of the tent and smoked and thought of the
comfortable cabin up in the cedar hollow, and of Doris Cleveland's
books. He began by reflecting that he might have brought one down to
read. He ended before nightfall of a dull, rain-sodden day with a
resolution to move up there when the weather cleared. A tent was well
enough, but a house with a fireplace was better.
The rain held forty-eight hours without intermission. Then, as if the
clouds had discharged their aqueous cargo and rode light as
unballasted ships, they lifted in aerial fleets and sailed away, white
in a blue sky. The sun, swinging in a low arc, cocked a lazy eye over
the southern peaks, and Hollister carried his first pack-load up to
the log cabin while the moss underfoot, the tree trunks, the green
blades of the salal, and the myriad stalks of the low thickets were
still gleaming with the white frost that came with a clearing sky.
He began with the idea of carrying up his blankets and three or four
days' food. He ended by transporting up that steep slope everything
but his canoe and the small tent. It might be, he said to himself as
he lugged load after load, just a whim, a fancy, but he was free to
act on a whim or a fancy, as free as if he were in the first blush of
careless, adventurous youth,--freer, because he had none of the
impatient hopes and urges and dreams of youth. He was finished, he
told himself in a transient mood of bitterness. Why should he be
governed by practical considerations? He was here, alone in the
unsentient, uncritical forest. It did not matter to any one whether he
came or stayed. To himself it mattered least of all, he thought. There
was neither plan nor purpose nor joy in his existence, save as he
conceived the first casually, or snatched momentarily at the other in
such simple ways as were available to him here,--here where at least
there was no one and nothing to harass him, where he was surrounded by
a wild beauty that comforted him in some fashion beyond his
understanding.
When he had brought the last of his food supply up to the cabin, he
hauled the canoe back into a thicket and covered it with the glossy
green leaves of the salal. He folded his tent in a tight bundle and
strung it to a bough with a wire, out of reach of the wood rats.
These tasks completed, he began his survey of the standing timber on
his limit.
At best he could make only a rough estimate, less accurate than a
professional cruiser's would be, but sufficient to satisfy him. In a
week he was reasonably certain that the most liberal estimate left
less than half the quantity of merchantable timber for which he had
paid good money. The fir, as a British Columbia logging chance, was
all but negligible. What value resided there lay in the cedar alone.
By the time he had established this, the clear, cold, sunny days came
to an end. Rain began to drizzle half-heartedly out of a murky sky.
Overnight the rain changed to snow, great flat flakes eddying
soundlessly earthward in an atmosphere uncannily still. For two days
and a night this ballet of the snowflakes continued, until valley and
slope and the high ridges were two feet deep in the downy white.
Then the storm which had been holding its breath broke with singular
fury. The frost bared its teeth. The clouds still volleyed, but their
discharge now filled the air with harsh, minute particles that stung
bare skin like hot sand blown from a funnel. The wind shrieked its
whole tonal gamut among the trees. It ripped the clinging masses of
snow from drooping bough and exposed cliff and flung it here and there
in swirling clouds. And above the treble voices of the storm
Hollister, from the warm security of the cabin, could hear the
intermittent rumbling of terrific slides. He could feel faint tremors
in the earth from the shock of the arrested avalanche.
This elemental fury wore itself out at last. The wind shrank to chill
whisperings. But the sky remained gray and lowering, and the great
mountain ranges--white again from foot to crest, save where the slides
had left gashes of brown earth and bare granite--were wrapped in
winter mists, obscuring vapors that drifted and opened and closed
again. Hollister could stir abroad once more. His business there was
at an end. But he considered with reluctance a return to Vancouver.
He was not happy. He was merely passive. It did not matter to anyone
where he went. It did not matter much to himself. He was as well here
as elsewhere until some substantial reason or some inner spur rowelled
him into action.
Here there was no one to look askance at his disfigurement. He was
less alone than he would be in town, for he found a subtle sense of
companionship in this solitude, as if the dusky woods and those grim,
aloof peaks accepted him for what he was, discounting all that
misfortune which had visited him in the train of war. He knew that was
sheer fantasy, but a fantasy that lent him comfort.
So he stayed. He had plenty of material resources, a tight warm house,
food. He had reckoned on staying perhaps a month. He found now that
his estimate of a month's staples was away over the mark. He could
subsist two months. With care he could stretch it to three, for there
was game on that southern slope,--deer and the white mountain goat and
birds. He hunted the grouse at first, but that gave small return for
ammunition expended, although the flesh of the blue and willow grouse
is pleasant fare. When the big storm abated he looked out one clear
dawn and saw a buck deer standing in the open. At a distance of sixty
yards he shot the animal, not because he hankered to kill, but because
he needed meat. So under the cabin eaves he had quarters of venison,
and he knew that he could go abroad on that snowy slope and stalk a
deer with ease. There was a soothing pleasantness about a great blaze
crackling in the stone fireplace. And he had Doris Cleveland's books.
Yes, Hollister reiterated to himself, it was better than a bedroom off
the blank corridor of a second-rate hotel and the crowded streets that
were more merciless to a stricken man than these silent places.
Eventually he would have to go back. But for the present,--well, he
occupied himself wholly with the present, and he did not permit
himself to look far beyond.
From the deerskin he cut a quantity of fine strips and bent into oval
shape two tough sticks of vine maple. Across these he strung a web of
rawhide, thus furnishing himself with a pair of snowshoes which were a
necessity now that the snow lay everywhere knee-deep and in many
places engulfed him to the waist when he went into the woods.
It pleased him to go on long snowshoe hikes. He reached far up the
ridges that lifted one after another behind his timber. Once he gained
a pinnacle, a solitary outstanding hummock of snow-bound granite
rising above all the rest, rising above all the surrounding forest.
From this summit he gained an eagle's view. The long curve of Toba
Inlet wound like a strip of jade away down to where the islands of the
lower gulf spread with channels of the sea between. He could see the
twin Redondas, Cortez, Raza, the round blob that was Hernando,--a
picturesque nomenclature that was the inheritance of Spanish
exploration before the time of Drake. Beyond the flat reaches of
Valdez, Vancouver Island, an empire in itself, lifted its rocky
backbone, a misty purple against the western sky. He watched a
steamer, trailing a black banner of smoke, slide through Baker Pass.
Out there men toiled at fishing; the woods echoed with the ring of
their axes and the thin twanging of their saws; there would be the
clank of machinery and the hiss of steam. But it was all hidden and
muffled in those vast distances. He swung on his heel. Far below, the
houses of the settlement in the lower Toba sent up blue wisps of
smoke. To his right ran with many a twist and turn the valley itself,
winding away into remote fastnesses of the Coast Range, a strip of
level, fertile, timbered land, abutted upon by mountains that shamed
the Alps for ruggedness,--mountains gashed by slides, split by gloomy
crevasses, burdened with glaciers which in the heat of summer spewed
foaming cataracts over cliffs a thousand foot sheer.
"Where the hill-heads split the tide
Of green and living air,
I would press Adventure hard
To her deepest lair.
I would let the world's rebuke
Like a wind go by,
With my naked soul laid bare
To the naked sky."
Out of some recess in his memory, where they had fixed themselves long
before, those lines rose to Hollister's lips. And he looked a long
time before he turned downhill.
A week passed. Once more the blustery god of storms asserted his
dominion, leaving the land, when he passed, a foot deeper in snow. If
he had elected to stay there from choice, Hollister now kept close to
his cabin from necessity, for passage with his goods to the steamer
landing would have been a journey of more hardships than he cared to
undertake. The river was a sheet of ice except over the shallow
rapids. Cold winds whistled up and down the Toba. Once or twice on
clear days he climbed laboriously to a great height and felt the cold
pressure of the northwest wind as he stood in the open; and through
his field glasses he could see the Inlet and the highroads of the sea
past the Inlet's mouth all torn by surging waves that reared and broke
in flashing crests of foam. So he sat in the cabin and read Doris
Cleveland's books one after another--verse, philosophy, fiction--and
when physical inaction troubled him he cut and split and piled
firewood far beyond his immediate need. He could not sit passive too
long. Enforced leisure made too wide a breach in his defenses, and
through that breach the demons of brooding and despondency were quick
to enter. When neither books nor self-imposed tasks about the cabin
served, he would take his rifle in hand, hook on the snowshoes, and
trudge far afield in the surrounding forest.
On one of these journeys he came out upon the rim of the great cliff
which rose like a wall of masonry along the southern edge of the flats
in the Big Bend. It was a clear day. Hollister had a pair of very
powerful binoculars. He gazed from this height down on the settlement,
on the reeking chimneys of those distant houses, on the tiny black
objects that were men moving against a field of white. He could hear a
faint whirring which he took to be the machinery of a sawmill. He
could see on the river bank and at another point in the nearby woods
the feathery puff of steam. He often wondered about these people,
buried, like himself, in this snow-blanketed and mountain-ringed
remoteness. Who were they? What manner of folk were they? He trifled
with this curiosity. But it did not seriously occur to him that by two
or three hours' tramping he could answer these idle speculations at
first hand. Or if it did occur to him he shrank from the undertaking
as one shrinks from a dubious experiment which has proved a failure in
former trials.
But this day, under a frosty sky in which a February sun hung
listless, Hollister turned his glasses on the cabin of the settler
near his camp. He was on the edge of the cliff, so close that when he
dislodged a fragment of rock it rolled over the brink, bounded once
from the cliff's face, and after a lapse that grew to seconds struck
with a distant thud among the timber at the foot of the precipice.
Looking down through the binoculars it was as if he sat on the topmost
bough of a tall tree in the immediate neighborhood of the cabin,
although he was fully half a mile distant. He could see each garment
of a row on a line. He could distinguish colors--a blue skirt, the
deep green of salal and second-growth cedar, the weathered hue of the
walls.
And while he stared a woman stepped out of the doorway and stood
looking, turning her head slowly until at last she gazed steadily up
over the cliff-brow as if she might be looking at Hollister himself.
He sat on his haunches in the snow, his elbows braced on his knees,
and trained the powerful lenses upon her. In a matter of half a minute
her gaze shifted, turned back to the river. She shrugged her
shoulders, or perhaps it was a shiver born of the cold, and then went
back inside.
Hollister rested the binoculars upon his knee. His face did not alter.
Facile expression was impossible to that marred visage. Pain or anger
or sorrow could no longer write its message there for the casual
beholder to read. The thin, twisted remnants of his lips could tighten
a little, and that was all.
But his eyes, which had miraculously escaped injury, could still glow
with the old fire, or grow dull and lifeless, giving some index to the
mutations of his mind. And those darkly blue eyes, undimmed beacons
amid the wreckage of his features, burned and gleamed now with a
strange fire.
The woman who had been standing there staring up the hillside, with
the sun playing hide and seek in her yellow hair, was Myra Hollister,
his wife.