Before ever that long night was done, clouds had overswept the sky and a
cold rain was beating upon the sea. It swept against the ports of the
little craft and brought troubled dreams to Lenore and Mrs. Hardenworth.
Bess, who knew life better than these two, to whom the whole journey had
been a joyous adventure, did not wholly escape a feeling of uneasiness
and dismay. At this latitude and season the weather was little to be
trusted.
The drizzle changed to snow that lay white on the deck and hissed softly
in the water. As yet, however, it was nothing to fear. Snow was common
in these latitudes in September. The sudden break of winter might lead
to really serious consequences—perhaps the unpleasant prospect of being
ice-bound in some island harbor—but in all probability real winter was
still several weeks distant. The scene looked wintry enough to Lenore
and Ned, however. The air and the sky and the sea seemed choked with
snow.
Lenore found herself wishing she had not been so contemptuous of the
North. Perhaps it would have been better not to have taken so many
worn-out dresses to trade, but to have filled her chests with woolens
and furs. Even in her big coat she couldn’t stay warm on the deck. The
wind was icy out of the Arctic seas.
Once more the craft plied among islands; but now that they had passed
into Bering Sea the character of the land had changed. These were not
the dull-green, wooded isles met with on first entering Alaskan waters.
Wild and inhospitable though the latter had seemed, they were fairy
bowers compared to these. Nor did the mossy mainland continue to show a
marvelous beryl green through mist.
In the first place, even the prevailing color scheme had undergone an
ominous change from blue to gray. The sun kissed the sea no more: under
the sifting snow it stretched infinitely bleak and forbidding. Gray were
the clouds in the sky that had been the purest, most serene blue. And
now even the islands had lost their varied tints.
Evergreen forests almost always look blue at a distance,—bluish-green
when the sun is bright, bluish-black under clouds. But these voyagers
saw, with a dim, haunting dread, that the forests mostly had been left
far behind them. The islands they passed now were no longer heavily
wooded; only a few of the sheltered valleys and the south slopes of the
hills bore thickets of stunted aspen, birch, and Sitka spruce. Mostly
these too were gray, gray as granite, merely a different shade of gray
from that of the sea from which they rose.
The truth was that these islands were far-scattered fragments of the
Barrens, those great wastes of moss and tundra between the timber belt
and the eternal ice cap of the pole. Largely treeless, wind-swept,
mostly unpeopled except for a few furtive creatures of the wild, they
seemed no part of the world that Ned and Lenore had previously known.
They were all so gray, so bleak, swept with an unearthly sadness, silent
except for the weary beat of waves upon their craggy shores.
Mostly the islands were mere snow-swept mountains protruding above the
waters, at a distance seemingly as gray as the rest of the toneless
landscape. Only the less mountainous of the islands had human occupants,
and these were in small, far-scattered Indian villages. Seemingly they
had reached the dim, gray limits of the world: surely they must soon
turn back. Indeed, these were the Skopins, the group that comprised
Ned’s first trading ground, and Muchinoff Island, the northern-most land
in the group and the point selected as his first stopping place, from
which he would begin the long homeward journey from island to island,
was only a few days’ journey beyond.
Yet they sped northward a while more, nothing changing except day and
night. Indeed, day and night itself seemed no longer the unvarying
reality that it used to be. Between the dark clouds and the dark sea,
night never seemed to go completely away. Day after day they caught no
glimpse of the sun.
The islands were seen but dimly through mist, as might the outlying
shores of a Twilight Land, a place where souls might come but never
living men,—a gray and eerie training camp like that of which Ned’s
father had spoken. It was all real enough, truly, remorselessly real;
yet Ned couldn’t escape from the superstitious fear he had known at
first. The gray, desolate character of the islands seemed to bear it
out. It grew on him, rather than lessened.
Yet his standards were changing. Things that had not concerned him a few
weeks before mattered terribly now. For instance, the bareness of the
islands oppressed him, and he found himself longing for the sight of
trees. Just trees,—bending in the wind, shaking off their leaves in the
fall. They hadn’t mattered before: he had regarded them as mere
ornaments that nature supplied for lawns and parks, if indeed he had
ever consciously regarded them at all; but now they were ever so much
more important than a hundred things that had previously seemed
absolutely essential to his life and happiness. Had his thought reached
further, he could have understood, now, the joy of Columbus—journeying
in waters scarcely less known than these—at the sight of the floating
branch; or the exultation in the Ark when the dove returned with its
sprig of greenery.
Lately the ship had taken a northeastern turn, following the island
chain, and the cloudy, windy, rainy days found them not far from the
mainland, in a region that would be wholly ice-bound in a few weeks
more. And when they were still a full day from their turning point,
Knutsen sought out Ned on the deck.
“Mr. Cornet, do you know where we’re getting?” he asked quietly.
Unconsciously startled by his tone, Ned whirled toward him. “I don’t
know these waters,” he replied. “I suppose we’re approaching Muchinoff
Island.”
“Quite a sail between here and der, yet. Mr. Cornet, we’re getting into
de most unknown and untraveled waters in all dis part of the Nort’. De
boats to Nome go way outside here, and de trut’ is I’m way out of my old
haunts. I’m traveling by chart only; neither me nor McNab, nor very many
oder people know very much the waterways between dese islands. You’re up
here to trade for furs, and you haven’t got all winter. You know dat
dese waters here, shut off from the currents, are going to be tighter
dan a drum before very many weeks. Why don’t you make your destination
Tzar Island, and start back from dere?”
“You think it’s really dangerous?”
“Not really dangerous, maybe, but mighty awkward if anyt’ing should go
wrong wit’ de old brig. You understan’ dat not one out of four of dese
little islands is inhabited. Some of de larger islands have only a
scattered village or two; some of ’em haven’t a living human being.
Der’s plenty and plenty of islands not even named in dis chart, and I’d
hate to hit the reefs of one after dark! Der’s no one to send S. O. S.
calls to, in case of trouble, even if we had wireless. De only boat I
know dat works carefully through dis country is anot’er trader, the
_Intrepid_—and dat won’t be along till spring. Mr. Cornet, it’s best
for you to know dat you’re in one of the most uninhabited and barren
countries——”
“And the most dreary and generally damnable,” Ned agreed with
enthusiasm. “Why didn’t you tell me this before? Muchinoff Island isn’t
anything in my young life. I picked it out as a starting point simply
because it was the farthest north of the Skopins, but since there seems
to be plenty of territory——”
“It will make you hump some to cover all de good territory now,
including some of the best of de Aleuts, and get around Alaskan
Peninsula before winter sets in, in earnest. Tzar Island is yust to our
nort’east. Shall I head toward it?”
“How long will it take——”
“Depends on de wind. Dis is a ticklish stretch of water in here, shallow
in spots, but safe enough, I guess. I think we can skim along and make
it in long before dawn.”
“Then do it!” Ned’s face suddenly brightened. “The sooner I can shake my
legs on shore, the better I’ll like it.”
The seaman left him, and for a moment Ned stood almost drunk with
exultation on the deck. Even now they were nearing the journey’s end. A
few hours more, and they could turn back from this dreary, accursed
wintry sea,—this gray, unpeopled desolation that had chilled his heart.
It was true that the long journey home, broken by many stops, still lay
before, but at least he would face the south! Once on his native shores,
forever out of this twilight land and away from its voice of reproach,
he could be content with his old standards, regain his old
self-confidence. He could take up his old life where he had left it,
forgetting these desolate wastes as he would a dream.
He was a fool ever to regret his wasted days! He laughed at himself for
ever giving an instant’s thought to his father’s doleful words. The
worst of the journey was over, they had only to go back the way they had
come; and his puzzling sense of weakness, his premonition of disaster,
most of all his superstitious fear of death had been the veriest
nonsense. His imagination had simply got out of bounds.
The old _Charon_! He had been afraid of her name. Seemingly he had
forgotten, for the time, that he was a man of the twentieth century, the
product of the most wonderful civilization the world had ever seen. He
had been frightened by old bogeys, maudlin with time-worn sentiments.
And now his old egotism had returned to him, seemingly unshaken.
Presently he turned, made his way into the hold, and opened one of a
pile of iron-bound wooden cases. When he returned to the dining saloon
he carried a dark bottle in each hand.
“All hands celebrate to-night!” he cried. “We’re going to go home!”
Out of the sea the wind seemed to answer him. It swept by, laughing.