Ten days after that night when he had gone into the mystery-room at the
Château, David and Father Roland clasped hands in a final farewell at
White Porcupine House, on the Cochrane River, 270 miles from God's Lake.
It was something more than a hand-shake. The Missioner made no effort to
speak in these last moments. His team was ready for the return drive and
he had drawn his travelling hood close about his face. In his own heart
he believed that David would never return. He would go back to
civilization, probably next autumn, and in time he would forget. As he
said, on their last day before reaching the Cochrane, David's going was
like taking a part of his heart away. He blinked now, as he dropped
David's hand--blinked and turned his eyes. And David's voice had an odd
break in it. He knew what the Missioner was thinking.
"I'll come back, _mon Père_," he called after him, as Father Roland
broke away and went toward Mukoki and the dogs. "I'll come back next
year!"
Father Roland did not look back until they were started. Then he turned
and waved a mittened hand. Mukoki heard the sob in his throat. David
tried to call a last word to him, but his voice choked. He, too, waved a
hand. He had not known that there were friendships like this between
men, and as the Missioner trailed steadily away from him, growing
smaller and smaller against the dark rim of the distant forest, he felt
a sudden fear and a great loneliness--a fear that, in spite of himself,
they would not meet again, and the loneliness that comes to a man when
he sees a world widening between himself and the one friend he has on
earth. His one friend. The man who had saved him from himself, who had
pointed out the way for him, who had made him fight. More than a friend;
a father. He did not stop the broken sound that came to his lips. A low
whine answered it, and he looked down at Baree, huddled in the snow
within a yard of his feet. "My god and master," Baree's eyes said, as
they looked up at him, "I am here." It was as if David had heard the
words. He held out a hand and Baree came to him, his great wolfish body
aquiver with joy. After all, he was not alone.
A short distance from him the Indian who was to take him over to Fond du
Lac, on Lake Athabasca, was waiting with his dogs and sledge. He was a
Sarcee, one of the last of an almost extinct tribe, so old that his hair
was of a shaggy white, and he was so thin that he looked like a
famine-stricken Hindu. "He has lived so long that no one knows his age,"
Father Roland had said, "and he is the best trailer between Hudson's Bay
and the Peace." His name was Upso-Gee (the Snow Fox), and the Missioner
had bargained with him for a hundred dollars to take David from White
Porcupine House to Fond du Lac, three hundred miles farther northwest.
He cracked his long caribou-gut whip to remind David that he was ready.
David had said good-bye to the factor and the clerk at the Company store
and there was no longer an excuse to detain him. They struck out across
a small lake. Five minutes later he looked back. Father Roland, not much
more than a speck on the white plain now, was about to disappear in the
forest. It seemed to David that he had stopped, and again he waved his
hand, though human eyes could not have seen the movement over that
distance.
Not until that night, when David sat alone beside his campfire, did he
begin to realize fully the vastness of this adventure into which he had
plunged. The Snow Fox was dead asleep and it was horribly lonely. It was
a dark night, too, with the shivering wailing of a restless wind in the
tree tops; the sort of night that makes loneliness grow until it is like
some kind of a monster inside, choking off one's breath. And on
Upso-Gee's tepee, with the firelight dancing on it, there was painted in
red a grotesque fiend with horns--a medicine man, or devil chaser; and
this devil chaser grinned in a bloodthirsty manner at David as he sat
near the fire, as if gloating over some dreadful fate that awaited him.
It _was_ lonely. Even Baree seemed to sense his master's oppression, for
he had laid his head between David's feet, and was as still as if
asleep. A long way off David could hear the howling of a wolf and it
reminded him shiveringly of the lead-dog's howl that night before
Tavish's cabin. It was like the death cry that comes from a dog's
throat; and where the forest gloom mingled with the firelight he saw a
phantom shadow--in the morning he found that it was a spruce bough,
broken and hanging down--that made him think again of Tavish swinging in
the moonlight. His thoughts bore upon him deeply and with foreboding.
And he asked himself questions--questions which were not new, but which
came to him to-night with a new and deeper significance. He believed
that Father Roland would have gasped in amazement and that he would have
held up his hands in incredulity had he known the truth of this
astonishing adventure of his. An astonishing adventure--nothing less. To
find a girl. A girl he had never seen, who might be in another part of
the world, when he had got to the end of his journey--or married. And if
he found her, what would he say? What would he do? Why did he want to
find her? "God alone knows," he said aloud, borne down under his gloom,
and went to bed.
Small things, as Father Roland had frequently said, decide great events.
The next morning came with a glorious sun; the world again was white and
wonderful, and David found swift answers to the questions he had asked
himself a few hours before. Each day thereafter the sun was warmer, and
with its increasing promise of the final "break-up" and slush snows,
Upso-Gee's taciturnity and anxiety grew apace. He was little more
talkative than the painted devil chaser on the blackened canvas of his
tepee, but he gave David to understand that he would have a hard time
getting back with his dogs and sledge from Fond du Lac if the thaw came
earlier than he had anticipated. David marvelled at the old warrior's
endurance, and especially when they crossed the forty miles of ice on
Wollaston Lake between dawn and darkness. At high noon the snow was
beginning to soften on the sunny slopes even then, and by the time they
reached the Porcupine, Snow Fox was chanting his despairing prayer
nightly before that grinning thing on his tepee. "Swas-tao (the thaw)
she kam dam' queek," he said to David, grimacing his old face to
express other things which he could not say in English. And it did. Four
days later, when they reached Fond du Lac, there was water underfoot in
places, and Upso-Gee turned back on the home trail within an hour.
This was in April, and the Post reminded David of a great hive to which
the forest people were swarming like treasure-laden bees. On the last
snow they were coming in with their furs from a hundred trap-lines. Luck
was with David. On the first day Baree fought with a huge malemute and
almost killed it, and David, in separating the dogs, was slightly bitten
by the malemute. A friendship sprang up instantly between the two
masters. Bouvais was a Frenchman from Horseshoe Bay, fifty miles from
Fort Chippewyan, and a hundred and fifty straight west of Fond du Lac.
He was a fox hunter. "I bring my furs over here, m'sieu," he explained,
"because I had a fight with the factor at Fort Chippewyan and broke out
two of his teeth," which was sufficient explanation. He was delighted
when he learned that David wanted to go west. They started two days
later with a sledge heavily laden with supplies. The runners sank deep
in the growing slush, but under them was always the thick ice of Lake
Athabasca, and going was not bad, except that David's feet were always
wet. He was surprised that he did not take a "cold." "A cold--what is
that?" asked Bouvais, who had lived along the Barrens all his life.
David described a typical case of sniffles, with running at eyes and
nose, and Bouvais laughed. "The only cold we have up here is when the
lungs get touched by frost," he said, "and then you die--the following
spring. Always then. The lungs slough away." And then he asked: "Why
are you going west?"
David found himself face to face with the question, and had to answer.
"Just to toughen up a bit," he replied. "Wandering. Nothing else to do."
And after all, he thought later, wasn't that pretty near the truth? He
tried to convince himself that it was. But his hand touched the picture
of the Girl, in his breast pocket. He seemed to feel her throbbing
against it. A preposterous imagination! But it was pleasing. It warmed
his blood.
For a week David and Baree remained at Horseshoe Bay with the Frenchman.
Then they went on around the end of the lake toward Fort Chippewyan.
Bouvais accompanied them, out of friendship purely, and they travelled
afoot with fifty-pound packs on their shoulders, for in the big, sunlit
reaches the ground was already growing bare of snow. Bouvais turned back
when they were ten miles from Fort Chippewyan, explaining that it was a
nasty matter to have knocked two teeth down a factor's throat, and
particularly down the throat of the head factor of the Chippewyan and
Athabasca district. "And they went down," assured Bouvais. "He tried to
spit them out, but couldn't." A few hours later David met the factor and
observed that Bouvais had spoken the truth; at least there were two
teeth missing, quite conspicuously. Hatchett was his name. He looked it;
tall, thin, sinewy, with bird-like eyes that were shifting this way and
that at all times, as though he were constantly on the alert for an
ambush, or feared thieves. He was suspicious of David, coming in alone
in this No Man's Land with a pack on his back; a white man, too, which
made him all the more suspicious. Perhaps a possible free trader looking
for a location. Or, worse still, a spy of the Company's hated
competitors, the Revilon Brothers. It took some time for Father Roland's
letter to convince him that David was harmless. And then, all at once,
he warmed up like a birch-bark taking fire, and shook David's hand three
times within five minutes, so hungry was he for a white man's
companionship--an _honest_ white man's, mind you, and not a scoundrelly
competitor's! He opened four cans of lobsters, left over from Christmas,
for their first meal, and that night beat David at seven games of
cribbage in a row. He wasn't married, he said; didn't even have an
Indian woman. Hated women. If it wasn't for breeding a future generation
of trappers he would not care if they all died. No good. Positively no
good. Always making trouble, more or less. That's why, a long time ago,
there was a fort at Chippewyan--sort of blockhouse that still stood
there. Two men, of two different tribes, wanted same woman; quarrelled;
fought; one got his blamed head busted; tribes took it up; raised hell
for a time--all over that rag of a woman! Terrible creatures, women
were. He emphasized his belief in short, biting snatches of words, as
though afraid of wearing out his breath or his vocabulary or both. Maybe
his teeth had something to do with it. Where the two were missing he
carried the stem of his pipe, and when he talked the stem clicked, like
a Castanet.
David had come at a propitious moment--a "most propichus moment,"
Hatchett told him. He had done splendidly that winter. His bargains with
the Indians had been sharp and exceedingly profitable for the Company
and as soon as he got his furs off to Fort McMurray on their way to
Edmonton he was going on a long journey of inspection, which was his
reward for duty well performed. His fur barges were ready. All they were
waiting for was the breaking up of the ice, when the barges would start
up the Athabasca, which meant _south_; while he, in his big war canoe,
would head up the Peace, which meant _west_. He was going as far as
Hudson's Hope, and this was within two hundred and fifty miles of where
David wanted to go. He proved that fact by digging up an old Company
map. David's heart beat an excited tattoo. This was more than he had
expected. Almost too good to be true. "You can _work_ your way up there
with me," declared Hatchett, clicking his pipe stem. "Won't cost you a
cent. Not a dam' cent. Work. Eat. Smoke. Fine trip. Just for company. A
man needs company once in a while--decent company. Ice will go by middle
of May. Two weeks. Meanwhile, have a devil of a time playing cribbage."
They did. Cribbage was Hatchett's one passion, unless another
was--beating the Indians. "Rascally devils," he would say, driving his
cribbage pegs home. "Always trying to put off poor fur on me for good.
Deserve to be beat. And I beat 'em. Dam-if-I-don't."
"How did you lose your teeth?" David asked him at last. They were
playing late one night.
Hatchett sat up in his chair as if stung. His eyes bulged as he looked
at David, and his pipe stem clicked fiercely.
"Frenchman," he said. "Dirty pig of a Frenchman. No use for 'em. None.
Told him women were no good--all women were bad. Said he had a woman.
Said I didn't care--all bad just the same. Said the woman he referred to
was his wife. Told him he was a fool to have a wife. No warning--the
pig! He biffed me. Knocked those two teeth out--_down_! I'll get him
some day. Flay him. Make dog whips of his dirty hide. All Frenchmen
ought to die. Hope to God they will. Starve. Freeze."
In spite of himself David laughed. Hatchett took no offense, but the
grimness of his long, sombre countenance remained unbroken. A day or two
later he discovered Hatchett in the act of giving an old, white-haired,
half-breed cripple a bag of supplies. Hatchett shook himself, as if
caught in an act of crime.
"I'm going to kill that old Dog Rib soon as the ground's soft enough to
dig a grave," he declared, shaking a fist fiercely after the old Indian.
"Beggar. A sneak. No good. Ought to die. Giving him just enough to keep
him alive until the ground is soft."
After all, Hatchett's face belied his heart. His tongue was like a
cleaver. It ripped things generally--was terrible in its threatening,
but harmless, and tremendously amusing to David. He liked Hatchett. His
cadaverous countenance, never breaking into a smile, was the oddest mask
he had ever seen a human being wear. He believed that if it once broke
into a laugh it would not straighten back again without leaving a
permanent crack. And yet he liked the man, and the days passed swiftly.
It was the middle of May before they started up the Peace, three days
after the fur barges had gone down the Athabasca. David had never seen
anything like Hatchett's big war canoe, roomy as a small ship, and light
as a feather on the water. Four powerful Dog Ribs went with them,
making six paddles in all. When it came to a question of Baree, Hatchett
put down his foot with emphasis. "What! Make a dam' passenger of a dog?
Never. Let him follow ashore--or die."
This would undoubtedly have been Baree's choice if he had had a voice in
the matter. Day after day he followed the canoe, swimming streams and
working his way through swamp and forest. It was no easy matter. In the
deep, slow waters of the Lower Peace the canoe made thirty-five miles a
day; twice it made forty. But Hatchett kept Baree well fed, and each
night the dog slept at David's feet in camp. On the sixth day they
reached Fort Vermilion, and Hatchett announced himself like a king. For
he was on inspection. Company inspection, mind you. Important! A week
later they arrived at Peace River landing, two hundred miles farther
west, and on the twentieth day came to Fort St. John, fifty miles from
Hudson's Hope. From here David saw his first of the mountains. He made
out their snowy peaks clearly, seventy miles away, and with his finger
on a certain spot on Hatchett's map his heart thrilled. He was almost
there! Each day the mountains grew nearer. From Hudson's Hope he fancied
that he could almost see the dark blankets of timber on their sides.
Hatchett grunted. They were still forty miles away. And Mac Veigh, the
factor at Hudson's Hope, looked at David in a curious sort of way when
David told him where he was going.
"You're the first white man to do it," he said--an inflection of doubt
in his voice. "It's not bad going up the Finly as far as the Kwadocha.
But from there...."
He shook his head. He was short and thick, and his jaw hung heavy with
disapproval.
"You're still seventy miles from the Stikine when you end up at the
Kwadocha," he went on, thumbing the map. "Who the devil will you get to
take you on from there? Straight over the backbone of the Rockies. No
trails. Not even a Post there. Too rough a country. Even the Indians
won't live in it." He was silent for a moment, as if reflecting deeply.
"Old Towaskook and his tribe are on the Kwadocha," he added, as if
seeing a glimmer of hope. "_He might._ But I doubt it. They're a lazy
lot of mongrels, Towaskook's people, who carve things out of wood, to
worship. Still, he _might_. I'll send up a good man with you to
influence him, and you'd better take along a couple hundred dollars in
supplies as a further inducement."
The man was a half-breed. Three days later they left Hudson's Hope, with
Baree riding amidships. The mountains loomed up swiftly after this, and
the second day they were among them. After that it was slow work
fighting their way up against the current of the Finly. It was
tremendous work. It seemed to David that half their time was spent amid
the roar of rapids. Twenty-seven times within five days they made
portages. Later on it took them two days to carry their canoe and
supplies around a mountain. Fifteen days were spent in making eighty
miles. Easier travel followed then. It was the twentieth of June when
they made their last camp before reaching the Kwadocha. The sun was
still up; but they were tired, utterly exhausted. David looked at his
map and at the figures in the notebook he carried. He had come close to
fifteen hundred miles since that day when he and Father Roland and
Mukoki had set out for the Cochrane. Fifteen hundred miles! And he had
less than a hundred more to go! Just over those mountains--somewhere
beyond them. It looked easy. He would not be afraid to go alone, if old
Towaskook refused to help him. Yes, alone. He would find his way,
somehow, he and Baree. He had unbounded confidence in Baree. Together
they could fight it out. Within a week or two they would find the Girl.
And then...?
He looked at the picture a long time in the glow of the setting sun.