Two miles across the ridges, Dan and Snowbird saw a faint mist blowing
between the trees. They didn't recognize it at first. It might be fine
snow, blown by the wind, or even one of those mysterious fogs that
sometimes sweep over the snow.
"But it looks like smoke," Snowbird said.
"But it couldn't be. The trees are too wet to burn."
But then a sound that at first was just the faintest whisper in which
neither of them would let themselves believe, became distinct past all
denying. It was that menacing crackle of a great fire, that in the whole
world of sounds is perhaps the most terrible. They were trained by the
hills, and neither of them tried to mince words. They had learned to
face the truth, and they faced it now.
"It's our house," Snowbird told him. "And father can't get out."
She spoke very quietly. Perhaps the most terrible truths of life are
always spoken in that same quiet voice. Then both of them started across
the snow, fast as their unwieldy snowshoes would permit.
"He can crawl a little," Dan called to her. "Don't give up, Snowbird
mine. I think he'll be safe."
They mounted to the top of the ridge; and the long sweep of the forest
was revealed to them. The house was a singular tall pillar of flame,
already glowing that dreadful red from which firemen, despairing, turn
away. Then the girl seized his hands and danced about him in a mad
circle.
"He's alive," she cried. "You can see him--just a dot on the snow. He
crawled out to safety."
She turned and sped at a breakneck pace down the ridge. Dan had to race
to keep up with her. But it wasn't entirely wise to try to mush so fast.
A dead log lay beneath the snow with a broken limb stretched almost to
its surface, and it caught her snowshoe. The wood cracked sharply, and
she fell forward in the snow. But she wasn't hurt, and the snowshoe
itself, in spite of a small crack in the wood, was still serviceable.
"Haste makes waste," he told her. "Keep your feet on the ground,
Snowbird; the house is gone already and your father is safe. Remember
what lies before us."
The thought sobered and halted her. She glanced once at the dark face of
her companion. Dan couldn't understand the strange light that suddenly
leaped to her eyes. Perhaps she herself couldn't have explained the wave
of tenderness that swept over her,--with no cause except the look in
Dan's earnest gray eyes and the lines that cut so deep. Since the world
was new, it has been the boast of the boldest of men that they looked
their Fate in the face. And this is no mean looking. For fate is a sword
from the darkness, a power that reaches out of the mystery, and cannot
be classed with sights of human origin. It burns out the eyes of all but
the strongest men. Yet Dan was looking at his fate now, and his eyes
held straight.
They walked together down to the ruined house, and the three of them sat
silent while the fire burned red. Then Lennox turned to them with a
half-smile.
"You're wasting time, you two," he said. "Remember all our food is gone.
If you start now, and walk hard, maybe you can make it out."
"There are several things to do first," Dan answered simply.
"I don't know what they are. It isn't going to be any picnic, Dan. A man
can travel only so far without food to keep up his strength,
particularly over such ridges as you have to cross. It will be easy to
give up and die. It's the test, man; it's the test."
"And what about you?" his daughter asked.
"Oh, I'll be all right. Besides--it's the only thing that can be done. I
can't walk, and you can't carry me on your backs. What else remains?
I'll stay here--and I'll scrape together enough wood to keep a fire.
Then you can bring help."
He kept his eyes averted when he talked. He was afraid for Dan to see
them, knowing that he could read the lie in them.
"How do you expect to find wood--in this snow?" Dan asked him. "It will
take four days to get out; do you think you could lie here and battle
with a fire for four days, and then four days more that it will take to
come back? You'd have two choices: to burn green wood that I'd cut for
you before I left, or the rain-soaked dead wood under the snow. You
couldn't keep either one of them burning, and you'd die in a night.
Besides--this is no time for an unarmed man to be alone in the hills."
Lennox's voice grew pleading. "Be sensible, Dan!" he cried. "That
Cranston's got us, and got us right. I've only one thing more I care
about--and that is that you pay the debt! I can't hope to get out
myself. I say that I can't even hope to. But if you bring my daughter
through--and when the spring comes, pay what we owe to Cranston--I'll be
content. Heavens, son--I've lived my life. The old pack leader dies when
his time comes, and so does a man."
His daughter crept to him and sheltered his gray head against her
breast. "I'll stay with you then," she cried.
"Don't be a little fool, Snowbird," he urged. "My clothes are wet
already from the melted snow. It's too long a way--it will be too hard a
fight, and children--I'm old and tired out. I don't want to make the
try--hunger and cold; and even if you'd stay here and grub wood,
Snowbird, they'd find us both dead when they came back in a week. We
can't live without food, and work and keep warm--and there isn't a
living creature in the hills."
"Except the wolves," Dan reminded him.
"Except the wolves," Lennox echoed. "Remember, we're unarmed--and they'd
find it out. You're young, Snowbird, and so is Dan--and you two will be
happy. I know how things are, you two--more than you know
yourselves--and in the end you'll be happy. But me--I'm too tired to
make the try. I don't care about it enough. I'm going to wave you
good-by, and smile, and lie here and let the cold come down. You feel
warm in a little while--"
But she stopped his lips with her hand. And he bent and kissed it.
"If anybody's going to stay with you," Dan told them in a clear, firm
voice, "it's going to be me. But aren't any of the cabins occupied?"
"You know they aren't," Lennox answered. "Not even the houses beyond the
North Fork, even if we could get across. The nearest help is over
seventy miles."
"And Snowbird, think! Haven't any supplies been left in the ranger
station?"
"Not one thing," the girl told him. "You know Cranston and his crowd
robbed the place last winter. And the telephone lines were disconnected
when the rangers left."
"Then the only way is for me to stay here. You can take the pistol, and
you'll have a fair chance of getting through. I'll grub wood for our
camp meanwhile, and you can bring help."
"And if the wolves come, or if help didn't come in time," Lennox
whispered, passion-drawn for the first time, "who would pay what we owe
to Cranston?"
"But her life counts--first of all."
"I know it does--but mine doesn't count at all. Believe me, you two. I'm
speaking from my own desires when I say I don't want to make the fight.
Snowbird would never make it through alone. There are the wolves, and
maybe Cranston too--the worst wolf of all. A woman can't mush across
those ridges four days without food, without some one who loves her and
forces her on! Neither can she stay here with me and try to make green
branches burn in a fire. She's got three little pistol balls--and we'd
all die for a whim. Oh, please, please--"
But Dan leaped for his hand with glowing eyes. "Listen, man!" he cried.
"I know another way yet. I know more than one way; but one, if we've got
the strength, is almost sure. There is an ax in the kitchen, and the
blade will still be good."
"Likely dulled with the fire--"
"I'll cut a limb with my jackknife for the handle. There will be nails
in the ashes, plenty of them. We'll make a rude sledge, and we'll get
you out too."
Lennox seemed to be studying his wasted hands. "It's a chance, but it
isn't worth it," he said at last. "You'll have fight enough, without
tugging at a heavy sled. It will take all night to build it, and it
would cut down your chances of getting out by pretty near half. Remember
the ridges, Dan--"
"But we'll climb every ridge--besides, its a slow, down grade most of
the way. Snowbird--tell him he must do it."
Snowbird told him, overpowering him with her enthusiasm. And Dan shook
his shoulders with rough hands. "You're hurting, boy!" Lennox warned.
"I'm a bag of broken bones."
"I'll tote you down there if I have to tie you in," Dan Failing replied.
"Before, I've bowed to your will; but this time you have to bow to mine.
I'm not going to let you stay here and die, no matter if you beg on your
knees! It's the test--and I'm going to bring you through."
He meant what he said. If mortal strength and sinew could survive such a
test, he would succeed. There was nothing in these words to suggest the
physical weakling that both of them had known a few months before. The
eyes were earnest, the dark face intent, the determined voice did not
waver at all.
"Dan Failing speaks!" Lennox replied with glowing eyes. He was recalling
another Dan Failing of the dead years, a boyhood hero, and his
remembered voice had never been more determined, more masterful than
this he had just heard.
"And Cranston didn't get his purpose, after all." To prove his words,
Dan thrust his hand into his inner coat pocket. He drew forth a little,
flat package, half as thick as a pack of cards. He held it up for them
to see. "The thing Bert Cranston burned the house down to destroy," he
explained. "I'm learning to know this mountain breed, Lennox. I kept it
in my pocket where I could fight for it, at any minute."
Cranston had been mistaken, after all, in thinking that in fear of
himself Dan would be afraid to keep the packet on his person, and would
cravenly conceal it in the house. He would have been even more surprised
to know that Dan had lived in constant hope of meeting Cranston on the
ridges, showing him what it contained, and fighting him for it, hands to
hands. And even yet, perhaps the day would come when Cranston would know
at last that Snowbird's words, after the fight of long ago, were true.
The twilight was falling over the snow, so Snowbird and Dan turned to
the toil of building a sled.
V
The snow was steel-gray in the moonlight when the little party made
their start down the long trail. Their preparations, simple and crude as
they were, had taken hours of ceaseless labor on the part of the three.
The ax, its edge dulled by the flame and its handle burned away, had
been cooled in the snow, and with his one sound arm, Lennox had driven
the hot nails that Snowbird gathered from the ashes of one of the
outbuildings. The embers of the house itself still glowed red in the
darkness.
Dan had cut the green limbs of the trees and planed them with his ax.
The sled had been completed, handles attached for pushing it, and a
piece of fence wire fastened with nails as a rope to pull it. The warm
mackinaws of both of them as well as the one blanket that Lennox had
saved from the fire were wrapped about the old frontiersman's wasted
body,--Dan and Snowbird hoping to keep warm by the exercise of
propelling the sled. Except for the dull ax and the half-empty pistol,
their only equipment was a single charred pot for melting snow that Dan
had recovered from the ashes of the kitchen.
The three had worked almost in silence. Words didn't help now. They
wasted no sorely-needed breath. But they did have one minute of talk
when they got to the top of the little ridge that had overlooked the
house.
"We'll travel mostly at night," Dan told them. "We can see in the snow,
and by taking our rest in the daytime, when the sun is bright and warm,
we can save our strength. We won't have to keep such big fires then--and
at night our exertion will keep us as warm as we can hope for. Getting
up all night to cut green wood with this dull ax in the snow would break
us to pieces very soon, for remember that we haven't any food. I know
how to build a fire even in the snow--especially if I can find the dead,
dry heart of a rotten log--but it isn't any fun to keep it going with
green wood. We don't want to have to spend any more of our strength
stripping off wet bark and hacking at saplings than we can help; and
that means we'd better do our resting in the heat of the day. After all,
it's a fight against starvation more than anything else."
"Just think," the girl told them, reproaching herself, "if I'd just shot
straight at that wolf to-day, we could have gone back and got his body.
It might have carried us through."
Neither of the others as much as looked surprised at these amazing
regrets over the lost, unsavory flesh of a wolf. They were up against
realities, and they didn't mince words. Dan smiled at her gently, and
his great shoulder leaned against the traces.
They moved through a dead world. The ever-present manifestations of wild
life that had been such a delight to Dan in the summer and fall were
quite lacking now. The snow was trackless. Once they thought they saw a
snowshoe rabbit, a strange shadow on the snow, but he was too far away
for Snowbird to risk a pistol shot. The pound or two of flesh would be
sorely needed before the journey was over, but the pistol cartridges
might be needed still more. She didn't let her mind rest on certain
possibilities wherein they might be needed. Such thoughts stole the
courage from the spirit, and courage was essential beyond all things
else to bring them through.
Once a flock of wild geese, stragglers from the main army of waterfowl,
passed overhead on their southern migration. They were many months too
late. They called down their eerie cries,--that song that they had
learned from the noise the wind makes, blowing over the bleak marshes.
It wailed down to them a long time after the flock was hidden by the
distant tree tops, and seemed to shiver, with curious echoes, among the
pines. Trudging on, they listened to its last note. And possibly they
understood the cry as never before. It was one of the untamed, primitive
voices of the wilderness, and they could realize something of its
sadness, its infinite yearning and complaint. They knew the wilderness
now, just as the geese themselves did. They knew its cold, its hunger,
its remorselessness, and beyond all, the fear that was bright eyes in
the darkness. No man could have crossed that first twenty miles with
them and remained a tenderfoot. The wild was sending home its lessons,
one after another, until the spirit broke beneath them. It was showing
its teeth. It was reminding them, very clearly, that in spite of houses
built on the ridges and cattle pens and rifles and all the tools and
aids of civilization, it was still unconquered.
Mostly the forest was heavily laden with silence. And silence, in this
case, didn't seem to be merely an absence of sound. It seemed like a
substance in itself, something that lay over the snow, in which all
sound was immediately smothered and extinguished. They heard their own
footfalls in the snow and the crunch of the sled. But the sound only
went a little way. Once in a long time distant trees cracked in the
frost; and they all stood still a moment, trying to fight down the vain
hope that this might be some hunter from the valleys who would come to
their aid. A few times they heard the snow sliding, with the dull sound
of rolling window shade, down from the overburdened limbs. The trees
were inert with their load of snow.
As the dawn came out, they all stood still and listened to the wolf
pack, singing on the ridge somewhere behind them. It was a large pack.
They couldn't make out individual voices,--neither the more shrill cry
of the females, the yapping of the cubs, or the low, clear
G-below-middle-C note of the males.
"If they should cross our tracks--" Lennox suggested.
"No use worrying about that now--not until we come to it," Dan told him.
The morning broke, the sun rose bright in a clear sky. But still they
trudged on. In spite of the fact that the sled was heavy and broke
through the snow crust as they tugged at it, they had made good time
since their departure. But now every step was a pronounced effort. It
was the dreadful beginning of fatigue that only food and warmth and rest
could rectify.
"We'll rest now," Dan told them at ten o'clock. "The sun is warm enough
so that we won't need much of a fire. And we'll try to get five hours'
sleep."
"Too long, if we're going to make it out," Lennox objected.
"That leaves a work-day of nineteen hours," Dan persisted. "Not any too
little. Five hours it will be."
He found where the snow had drifted against a great, dead log, leaving
the white covering only a foot in depth on the lee side. He began to
scrape the snow away, then hacked at the log with his ax until he had
procured a piece of comparatively dry wood from its center. They all
stood breathless while he lighted the little pile of kindling and heaped
it with green wood,--the only wood procurable. But it didn't burn
freely. It smoked fitfully, threatening to die out, and emitting very
little heat.
But they didn't particularly care. The sun was warm above, as always in
the mountain winters of Southern Oregon. Snowbird and Dan cleared spaces
beside the fire and slept. Lennox, who had rested on the journey, lay on
his sled and with his uninjured arm tried to hack enough wood from the
saplings that Dan had cut to keep the fire burning.
At three they got up, still tired and aching in their bones from
exposure. Twenty-four hours had passed since they had tasted food, and
their unreplenished systems complained. There is no better engine in the
wide world than the human body. It will stand more neglect and abuse
than the finest steel motors ever made by the hands of European
craftsmen. A man may fast many days if he lies quietly in one place and
keeps warm. But fasting is a deadly proposition while pulling sledges
over the snow.
Dan was less hopeful now. His face told what his words did not. The
lines cleft deeper about his lips and eyes; and Snowbird's heart ached
when he tried to encourage her with a smile. It was a wan, strange smile
that couldn't quite hide the first sickness of despair.
The shadows quickly lengthened--simply leaping over the snow from the
fast-falling sun. Soon it dropped down behind the ridge; and the gray of
twilight began to deepen among the more distant trees. It blurred the
outline and dulled the sight. With the twilight came the cold, first
crisp, then bitter and penetrating to the vitals. The twilight deepened,
the snow turned gray, and then, in a vague way, the journey began to
partake of a quality of unreality. It was not that the cold and the
snow and their hunger were not entirely real, or that the wilderness
was no longer naked to their eyes. It was just that their whole effort
seemed like some dreadful, emburdened journey in a dream,--a stumbling
advance under difficulties too many and real to be true.
The first sign was the far-off cry of the wolf pack. It was very faint,
simply a stir in the ear drums, yet it was entirely clear. That clear,
cold mountain air was a perfect telephone system, conveying a message
distinctly, no matter how faintly. There were no tall buildings or
cities to disturb the ether waves. And all three of them knew at the
same instant it was not exactly the cry they had heard before.
They couldn't have told just why, even if they had wished to talk about
it. In some dim way, it had lost the strange quality of despair that it
had held before. It was as if the pack were running with renewed life,
that each wolf was calling to another with a dreadful sort of
exultation. It was an excited cry too,--not the long, sad song they had
learned to listen for. It sounded immediately behind them.
They couldn't help but listen. No human ears could have shut out the
sound. But none of them pretended that they had heard. And this was the
worst sign of all. Each one of the three was hoping against hope in his
very heart; and at the same time, hoping that the others did not
understand.
For a long time, as the darkness deepened about them, the forests were
still. Perhaps, Dan thought, he had been mistaken after all. His
shoulders straightened. Then the chorus blared again.
The man looked back at the girl, smiling into her eyes. Lennox lay as if
asleep, the lines of his dark face curiously pronounced. And the girl,
because she was of the mountains, body and soul, answered Dan's smile.
Then they knew that all of them knew the truth. Not even an
inexperienced ear could have any delusions about the pack song now. It
was that oldest of wilderness songs, the hunting-cry,--that frenzied
song of blood-lust that the wolf pack utters when it is running on the
trail of game. It had found the track of living flesh at last.
"There's no use stopping, or trying to climb a tree," Dan told them
simply. "In the first place, Lennox can't do it. In the second, we've
got to take a chance--for cold and hunger can get up a tree where the
wolf pack can't."
He spoke wholly without emotion. Once more he tightened the traces of
the sled.
"I've heard that sometimes the pack will chase a man for days without
attacking," Lennox told them. "It all depends on how long they've gone
without food. Keep on and try to forget 'em. Maybe we can keep 'em
bluffed."
But as the hours passed, it became increasingly difficult to forget the
wolf pack. It was only a matter of turning the head and peering for an
instant into the shadows to catch a glimpse of one of the creatures.
Their forms, when they emerged from the shadows of the tree trunks, were
entirely visible against the snow. They no longer yapped and howled.
They acted very intent and stealthy. They had spread out in a great
wing, slipping from shadow and shadow, and what were their mental
processes no human being may even guess. It was a new game; and they
seemed to be seeking the best means of attack. Their usual fear of men,
always their first emotion, had given way wholly to a hunting cunning:
an effort to procure their game without too great risk of their own
lives. In the desperation of their hunger they could not remember such
things as the fear of men. They spread out farther, and at last Dan
looked up to find one of the gray beasts waiting, like a shadow himself,
in the shadow of a tree not one hundred feet from the sled. Snowbird
whipped out her pistol.
"Don't dare!" Dan's voice cracked out to her. He didn't speak loudly;
yet the words came so sharp and commanding, so like pistol fire itself,
that they penetrated into her consciousness and choked back the nervous
reflexes that in an instant might have lost them one of their three
precious shells. She caught herself with a sob. Dan shouted at the wolf,
and it melted into the shadows.
"You won't do it again, Snowbird?" he asked her very humbly. But his
meaning was clear. He was not as skilled with a pistol as she; but if
her nerves were breaking, the gun must be taken from her hands. The
three shells must be saved to the moment of utmost need.
"No," she told him, looking straight into his eyes. "I won't do it
again."
He believed her. He knew that she spoke the truth. He met her eyes with
a half smile. Then, wholly without warning, Fate played its last trump.
Again the wilderness reminded them of its might, and their brave spirits
were almost broken by the utter remorselessness of the blow. The girl
went on her face with a crack of wood. Her snowshoe had been cracked by
her fall of the day before, when running to the fire, and whether she
struck some other obstruction in the snow, or whether the cracked wood
had simply given way under her weight, mattered not even enough for them
to investigate. As in all great disasters, only the result remained. The
result in this case was that her snowshoe, without which she could not
walk at all in the snow, was irreparably broken.