GRANDFATHER’S RED BLANKETS
What change of plan or error of reckoning had brought Jerry into the
Vermilion River country, when he should have been miles from here,
heading due north, Kit at this moment was unable to imagine. He wasted
no time in futile speculation. It sufficed him to know that Hell Bent
and his brother were cruising on the river route, almost within rifle
shot of one another, while he and Diane Durand were trailing close
behind. He did not need the gift of prophecy to realize that events were
rapidly shaping themselves towards some sudden crisis.
The girl had come down the river slope to look curiously at the juncture
of the trails. For a moment Kitchener lifted his icy eyelashes, trying
to discover from her face whether she recognized the pattern of Jerry’s
raquettes. She did not enlighten him.
“Funny there’d be somebody else along here on a day like this,” was her
only comment.
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Kit carelessly. “Maybe some trapper finishing
his rounds. You find fur-hunters’ shacks scattered here and there all
through the wilderness. Come on. Let’s go.”
They took advantage of the last of twilight and hurried on after the two
who had gone before. Kit had no expectancy of closing up the distance
to-night, and the best he could hope was that conditions to-morrow might
remain favorable for tracking. At this moment, however, the prospects
were disquieting. The sleet was changing to snow--stinging, dry flakes
that had begun to eddy into drifts along the exposed banks of the river.
As he pushed onward he cast many dubious glances towards the northern
sky, worried by the auguries that spelled heavy weather and smothered
trails.
When darkness finally hid the ground underfoot he had no choice but to
go into camp. This night they were lucky enough to find an overhanging
bluff by the river which served both as a windbreak and a sheltering
roof. By the time the tent was up and supper had been cooked, their fire
was almost blotted out by flying clouds of snow. Kit shoved the
smoldering fagots closer to the cliffside, and then groped his way along
the cracking edges of river ice and dragged in enough down-timber and
driftwood to last through the night.
Diane Durand left her tent flap open to catch the rays of heat, and Kit
snuggled down by the snoring dogs, where the reflected warmth reached
the wall of rock. A dozen times during the night he awakened to
replenish the fire and to listen with gloomy forebodings to the wind and
the rush of snow down the river levels.
At daybreak he and the girl aroused themselves in a world of swirling
whiteness. The moment he had cast off his robes he wallowed through the
drifts to the river bank. It was as he had feared. The landscape
stretched away into ghostly backgrounds, an unbroken monotony of snow.
This was to-day, and all of yesterday’s records were buried under the
great downfall of the storm.
Kitchener felt reasonably certain the ex-convict and Jerry both were
heading for Great Owl Run. The trails had disappeared, and there was
little prospect of picking them up again. But as long as he held the
guidance of the river and kept count of the branching streams there was
slight danger of his going astray. Diane Durand did not seem to be much
alarmed by the burying of yesterday’s tangible paths.
“Uncle Jim’ll be up there somewhere,” she said serenely, “and if we keep
on the way we’re going we’ll surely find him.”
“Shouldn’t doubt it,” said Kit.
Through that brief, blustering day they struggled forward in the welter
of snow, like specters in a world of death, seeing no living creature,
walking in a vast blankness. They crossed the mouths of a third and a
fourth creek that ended their ice-choked careers in the Vermilion River.
As night closed in at the end of the ghastly daylight they struck the
fifth branching stream.
On a high promontory, barely discernible in the hurly-burly of the
storm, Kitchener made out a tall, gaunt fir tree that had been stripped
of its middle branches and left standing above the river, a beacon for
all passers-by. This was a “lobstick” which the Indians had trimmed
fantastically to commemorate some noteworthy tribal event. The ancient
marker, Jerry had said, would indicate Kit’s turning point. This creek
must be Great Owl Run.
Whether Diane Durand knew anything of local geography Kitchener did not
know. But she offered no protests when he quitted the river here and
turned up the side stream.
In almost any other land Great Owl Run would have been called a river.
It was thirty or forty feet wide between its sheer banks, a deep,
swift-running stream coming out of the high hills in the northeast. For
stretches the course was closed solidly from bank to bank, but along the
narrow races the water poured out thunderously from under the ice
tunnels, and would not freeze even in below-zero weather.
There was no sign of human footprints along the sheltered shores. If
anybody had come this direction during the last twenty-four hours the
trail was blotted out under the heavy snowfall. Kit moved furtively and
as long as he could see he kept a restless lookout among the gloomy
coverts. Bill Tearl and the two outlanders had met with a strange and
terrible fate not many miles farther up this stream, and Kit was
conscious of a haunting oppression of mind and spirit as he neared the
scene of the old tragedy.
Darkness came, and he continued to grope his way up the winding
watercourse. The dogs were sagging in the traces, staggering belly-deep
in the snow. Behind the sledge Diane Durand stumbled and floundered in
the drifts, almost at the end of her endurance. But still Kit would not
halt.
As they advanced the forest grew blacker and denser. The gale still
raged overhead, but in the timber-smothered depths of the creek bottoms
scarcely a breath of wind reached them. Evergreens do not rustle like
deciduous trees, but moan and sigh in living anguish. There are few
sounds more dolorous than the wailing of a spruce forest at night.
Kitchener was groping his way through a tangle of snowy underwood, when
he was conscious of a shadowy movement at his elbow. Startled, he turned
his head to see a slight, wraith-like shape hurrying at his heels. It
was Diane Durand. In the darkness he could just see the blur of her
lifted face.
“What’s the matter?” he asked as he resumed his weary stride. There was
no reason why he might not have spoken in a natural tone, but through
the warning of some vague instinct he pitched his voice to a whisper.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I-- How much farther must we go?”
“Not far now,” he said.
He expected her to drop back to her place with the sledge; instead she
kept at his side, pressing even closer, as though something had
frightened her and she was seeking the reassurance of human fellowship.
It was curious. Until this moment she had never betrayed any symptom of
timidity.
“I’ve never seen it so dark anywhere,” she complained. “It isn’t like
being out-of-doors, but feeling your way in a strange--” and hesitated
for the word--“cavern. Everything is so--shut-in.”
Kitchener had nothing to say. He was forcing his way doggedly through
the low, jungle-like thickets, when suddenly, unreasoningly, his breath
was quenched in his lungs and his heart stood still.
Something soft and silent and somehow horrible, seemed to move through
the air just by his head.
He was not aware of any sound, nor of actual motion. Yet without seeing
or hearing he knew that something alive had passed through the darkness
and stared at him.
And Diane knew, and the dogs knew. The girl’s hand was clutching the
muscles of his forearm, trembling. The dog team scrambled forward to
slink at Kitchener’s heels. Like the girl, the beasts also had
discovered a sudden need for human companionship.
Kit had pulled up short, listening, his eyes striving vainly to
penetrate the stifling gloom.
There was nothing, only the sighing of the spruces and the cracking of
frost-brittle branches along the hidden creek. His common sense tried to
tell him that he was deluding himself with overwrought imaginings, but
his high-keyed instincts knew better.
As he waited, tense and breathless, with the girl clinging to him and
the dogs cowering at his feet, it came again. For an instant he fancied,
or rather, felt, that a ghostly shape, blacker than the blackness of the
night, had soundlessly crossed his line of vision. Similarly, he was
conscious of a wavering in the darkness behind him.
Kit felt a cold tingling creep up his backbone to the base of the neck,
that queer, atavistic sensation that modern men probably have inherited
from furry forebears, who bristled in moments of danger and dread. The
girl was standing close, her slim young body as taut as though she had
suddenly passed under a mesmeric spell. Without thinking what he did,
Kit’s arm slid around her waist, and she did not try to move.
Again he was aware of a shady stirring, as though a grotesque and
impalpable substance had stooped his direction and brushed him by. For
just that moment the dead air was disturbed and he had the impression
that a soft, monstrous form had swept past his face. And all at once the
awful silence was disrupted by a harsh, snicking sound--like a pair of
steel scissors’ blades that had sharply clashed.
Kit caught his breath, and then his drawn muscles relaxed and he laughed
feebly with the letting down of over-strained senses. “Oh, gosh!” he
moaned. “What a pair of idiots we are! Scared--”
“Of what?” the girl gasped. “Oh, what?”
“Do you know the name of this place?” Kit’s voice sounded more as though
it belonged to him. “Of course! I never thought!”
“This place--?” she echoed.
“Great Owl Run. There must have been a reason for the name.” He released
the girl and looked shamefacedly into the darkness. “Owls!”
Something glided past them so close that they felt the fanned wake in
the atmosphere.
“It’s an owl pit in here,” explained Kit, who had become his own man
again. “There must be dozens of ’em. They’re just swooping to look at
us--”
The girl shuddered and threw up one arm to defend her face. “How
terrible!” she faltered.
“A puppy or a wolf cub would never get out of here alive,” he told her.
“But a man and woman and grown dogs are perfectly safe.”
The girl strained forward as his eyes tried desperately to fathom the
obscurity. “I can feel them about us,” she whispered. “They must be
enormous.”
“Great Northern Owls!” he said. “I saw one once that had wandered south.
He was six feet across the wings. Bloody night pirates! Fiends! This
must be a fearful pocket of the woods. Where the owls live nothing else
ever lives.” He touched her hand. “Let’s get on.”
Miss Durand was somewhat reassured, but the dogs did not like this place
at all. Thenceforward Kit had no worries about the jaded animals keeping
up with him. They were nosing his heels at every step.
As he crunched over a carpet of spruce needles, which in places was bare
of snow, vague, feathery flutterings wove invisible orbits about his
head. Once something croaked above him, and later one of the fearsome
nightbirds sent out his hunting call, a voiceless, disembodied sound,
like a despairing groan floating out of an insatiable emptiness. He knew
it was only an owl, and yet his blood was chilled by the unearthliness
of the cry.
He had no idea how far he followed the windings of that ill-omened
creek. For hours, it seemed to him, he groped his way among shaggy tree
trunks, around rotted windfalls, through tangling, flesh-tearing
thickets. And then, without warning, he found nothing in front of his
outreaching hand. He stopped and peered blindly, and knew only that the
dense forest had abruptly come to an end and that there was open space
before him.
Gingerly he moved forward again, and barked his knee on the sharp edge
of a stump. There were other snags and stumps sticking up from the
ground. He brushed the snow from one of the old stubs, and found the
scars of ancient ax-work. Here, apparently, was a man-made clearing.
Diane Durand had pressed up behind him with one unquiet hand touching
him as she tried to see past his shoulder. The dogs squatted on their
haunches and sat in an uneasy line, their noses and sharp ears cocked to
the fore. And then, before anybody could stop him, one of the beasts
flung up his head and let forth a long, lugubrious howl.
The sudden eruption of sound in that hushed closure of the wilderness
was indecent, uncanny, frightening. Kitchener caught the animal’s throat
and choked off the last echoing quaver. “Shut up!” he commanded under
his breath.
The girl had ventured a few paces forward, and he straightened and stole
up beside her.
“I think there’s something there,” she said close to his ear. “I can
just make it out--square and black.”
Kit lifted one eyebrow and stood at straining attention. Gradually a
dim, dark outline took shape in the gloom. “It looks like a house,” he
mused.
A mutual curiosity drew them on, and after several cautious halts, they
arrived before a low-roofed, dismal-looking structure of hewn logs, that
stood, apparently, in the middle of an abandoned clearing. There was no
sound within, no glimmer of light; the place smelled of emptiness,
desolation and decay.
Kit moved under the dank front wall, and waited with his mouth half open
and his head alertly tilted. The open doorway yawned at him and the
puncheon door hung on one rusted hinge that creaked faintly with the
pressure of the wind. At the right and left loomed the dark squares of
two broken-shuttered windows. In the faint odor of must that emanated
from the interior murk he caught no scent of smoke nor savor of recent
cooking. The one-time occupants of the cabin must have been a long while
absent.
Kitchener’s sense told him that he might enter the place openly, and
that there would be no one to deny him the right. But something more
than mere instinct of caution urged him to hesitate. His hand went down
to unbutton the flap of his pistol holster, and that simple, unthinking
act made him bold. He shouldered aside the swaying door and stepped into
the cabin.
Something squeaked and scuttled away overhead, and became silent. The
old roof evidently sheltered squirrels, or rats. There was something
else. It was a low, measured sound, lifting and falling, like a man
breathing in the dark.
The dead air within seemed many degrees colder than the zero weather
outside. Kit found himself shivering as he stared into the frigid
obscurity, striving with every nerve aquiver to locate the source of
that strange, breathy heaving.
Diane Durand had come into the cabin and remained a stilled shadow at
his side. The dogs were cowering in their tangled traces at the doorway,
snuffing audibly at whatever it was the darkness hid. It might have
seemed that they were afraid to stay alone outside, and fearful of
coming in.
Kitchener had his flashlight in hand, his thumb irresolute on the
button. He drew a quick breath and suddenly pressed the contact. A spot
of light danced on the farther wall, and he swung it in a circuit of the
room.
His swift reconnoitering disclosed nothing immediately alarming. The
brilliant bull’s-eye flicked from wall to wall, illuminating bare,
peeled logs, warped and moldy and showing wide cracks at places where
the chinking had crumbled. The first hurried survey revealed a clay
fireplace choked with stale kitchen litter, a greasy iron pot hanging on
a crane, a broken-legged table covered with tattered oilcloth, a slab
bench, a trash heap of empty tins and battered cooking utensils, a
sheet-iron stove and stove-pipe flaked red with rust, a disused ax
driven to the hilt into one of the sill-logs, and a double-decked bunk
made of poles and stuffed with withered balsam branches and
frowsy-looking bed clothing.
The single, four-square room held no visible habitant, and yet,
deliberate and rhythmic as tick-tocks, the breathing sounds continued.
Kitchener felt his eyes growing bigger as he switched his light back to
the bunk. There was something in the lower section, a shapeless bulge
hidden by a red blanket.
For lengthening seconds he watched and listened so particularly to the
other breathing that he himself forgot to breathe. At first he thought
the blanket had shifted slightly, but as he eyed it closely he changed
his mind and decided that nothing had moved. But still the strange,
bellows-like pulsations filled and expired, lifted and died again.
Slowly his glance turned upward, and then he shot his light towards the
ceiling beams. There was a gaping hole in the roof, where a patch of
shakes had rotted through; and one of the rafters had loosened at the
eaves. A current of air sucked through the door and drew out through the
vent overhead, causing the sagging roof to billow at intervals like a
tent-top in a wind. It was the cabin that was breathing.
Kitchener should have been relieved when he traced the source of
disturbing sound. But he wasn’t. There was something wrong about this
place. He felt it. He knew it. He felt it in the air, in the chilling
darkness, in his blood and nerves and in the marrow of his bones. The
light flickered back to the bunk. He looked, took a couple of steps
forward, and looked harder.
The red blanket was an old Hudson’s Bay Company four pointer. He saw the
marking stripes at the corner that hung off the edge of the bunk, and
also he saw a charred spot in the fabric, down near the border. A spark
had hopped out of the camp fire his first night in the woods and
scorched that hole in the wool. It was Grandfather Tearl’s old red
blanket. There was no mistaking it. He had given it to Jerry when they
traded clothes and equipment, two days ago. Jerry was here, or had been
here.
With misgivings that he could never have explained, Kit moved to the
bunk and pulled at the edge of the blanket. He tugged tentatively, and
then jerked it to the floor. In the middle of the bunk was a crumpled
garment--a gray stag shirt--and nothing else.
Kitchener stood like a torpid man, staring senselessly at his own bare
hand. His fingers were wet and sticky. He turned the light towards
himself and felt weak and sick. The blanket had left a gory smear across
his palm.
As though he had suddenly aroused himself from a stupor he snatched up
the shirt from the mattress of browse. He looked at the label under the
neck band. It was the shirt he himself had purchased not long ago at a
New York store of outfitters. His brother had it when they last saw each
other.
In an access of horror Kit spread wide the garment and brought his lamp
to bear. And then his eyes shut as though with an anguish that was
almost too great to bear. In the center of the back, where the cloth
would stretch over the wearer’s shoulder blades, he found a small, round
hole, soggy to the touch and stained an ugly crimson.
“Jerry!” The name stuck in his throat, choking him.
He whirled with his light to see Diane Durand standing behind him, her
lips apart, her eyes wildly gleaming as she stared at the bunk. “What is
it?” she gasped.
Kit said nothing. His spot-light was a will-o’-the-wisp, darting about
the room. A bare floor of hard-packed earth; bare, log walls; naked
timber-rafters supporting the roof: there was no hiding-place here. He
heard nothing except the thumping of his heart, the sighing of the old
cabin, the horrible sniffing of the dogs in the doorway.
The snow had swirled down through the hole in the roof, whitening the
floor in the middle of the room. In the snow Kit discovered the pattern
of a man’s boot-sole fouled with red. The light blazed a path through
the darkness as he moved forward, crouching almost to his knees. There
were other bloodspots on the floor, a spattering trail leading to the
broken window at the far end of the cabin.
On the floor beneath the casement there was an ugly, dark pool and the
windowsill was similarly bedabbled. He stood up, looked into the outer
darkness. Shrinking from contact with the red-stained sill, he thrust
his head out of doors and turned his lamp downward. His breath stopped
short as he peered after the piercing light beam.
The cabin, he discovered, had been erected on the brink of Great Owl
Run. The embankment descended in a sheer drop, straight down to the
stream, twenty or thirty feet below. In the flash of his lamp he caught
the gleam of black, open water racing under a yawning ice-tunnel a
little farther downstream.
He turned away, his eyes in a stinging mist, conjuring the image of his
lusty brother: the dauntless Jerry who had started with such supreme
self-confidence on his journey to Queen Maud Sea.
Kit needed to search no farther. He knew what had happened. Jerry must
have been in the lead, traveling down the Vermilion River and up the
course of Great Owl Run with Hell Bent only a mile or so, a couple of
hours, behind. Jerry could have had no warning that he was being
followed. Tired out after bucking the blizzard all day he had crept into
the bunk with his clothes on, rolled up in Grandfather Tearl’s blankets,
and slept.
It did not take a morbid imagination to visualize the rest. The second
man arrived stealthily under the cover of the storm. He would have
paused outside for a moment to remove his waffle-meshed snowshoes. Then
he tiptoed into the gloomy cabin, pausing to listen and searched out the
location of the bunk.
Probably the rats squeaked and scuttled away in the rafters. Silence
after that, save for the sighing of the cabin and the breathing of the
sleeping man. A furtive approach; a shot fired at close range. Utter
quiet then. Only the wind drawing softly through the cabin roof.
The valiant, resourceful Jerry had been caught asleep with his boots on.
Kit could visualize only too vividly the subsequent horrors: the
stripping off of blanket and shirt, the search of pockets; a limp shape
toppled off the bunk, dragged across the snowy floor, boosted to the
window sill and dumped overside. A plummet-like drop, a cold splash in
the darkness below.
Kitchener’s gun was in his hand, but he was not thinking of himself or
of lurking dangers. He was staring in direful fascination at the black
window opening, hearing only the swirl and gurgle of Great Owl Run, the
downpouring waters that ran under ice to empty their flotsam at last
into the frozen wastes of Queen Maud Sea.