On returning next morning towards the outpost from our encampment in the
woods, Lumley and I made a discovery which excited us greatly. It was
nothing more than a track in the snow, but there was a revelation in the
track which sent the blood tingling through our veins.
It was not the track of a Polar bear. We should have been somewhat
surprised, no doubt, but not greatly excited by that. Neither was it
the track of a deer or an Arctic fox. It was only the track of a
sledge!
"Is that all?" exclaims the reader. No, that is not all. But, in order
that you may understand it better, let me explain.
Fort Dunregan, in which we dwelt, stood more than a thousand miles
distant from the utmost verge of civilised life in Canada. We were
buried, so to speak, in the heart of the great northern wilderness. Our
nearest neighbour lived in an outpost between one and two hundred miles
distant, similar to our own in all respects but even more lonely, being
in charge of a certain Scotsman named Macnab, whose army of occupation
consisted of only six men and two Indian women! The forests around us
were not peopled. Those vast solitudes were indeed here and there
broken in upon, as it were, by a few families of wandering Red-Indians,
who dwelt in movable tents--were here to-day and away to-morrow--but
they could not be said to be peopled, except by deer and bears and foxes
and kindred spirits.
Of course, therefore, we were far beyond the every day influences of
civilised life. We had no newspapers, no mails; no communication
whatever, in short, with the outer world except twice in the year. The
one occasion was in summer, when a brigade of boats arrived with our
outfit of goods for the year's trade with the few scattered Indians
above referred to; the other occasion was in the depth of our apparently
interminable winter, when a packet of letters was forwarded from outpost
to outpost throughout the land by the agents of the Hudson's Bay Company
which we served.
This half-yearly interval between mails had a double effect on our
minds. In the first place, it induced a strange feeling that the great
world and all its affairs were things of the past, with which we had
little or nothing to do--a sort of dream--and that the little world of
our outpost, with its eight or ten men and three or four Indian women,
its hunting, and trapping, and firewood-cutting, and fishing, and
trading, and small domestic arrangements and dissensions, was the one
place of vital importance and interest, before which empires and
dynasties and the trifling matter of politics sank into mere
insignificance! In the second place, it created an intense longing--a
hungering and thirsting--for news of our kindred "at home."
Our chief, Mr Strang, and our two selves, with another fellow-clerk who
was named Spooner, as well as most of our men, were from "the old
country," where we had left fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters--in some
cases sweethearts--behind us. It may be conceived then with what
anxiety and yearning we looked forward to the periodical break in the
weary six months of total silence that had enveloped us. Men in
civilised, or even semi-civilised communities, cannot understand this.
Convicts on penal servitude for long periods may have some faint notion
of it, but even these have periods of literary intercourse more
frequently than we had. The reader must just take the statement on
trust therefore, that our anxious yearnings were remarkably powerful.
What might not have occurred in these six months of dark silence! Who
might not have been married, born, laid low by sickness, banished to the
ends of the earth like ourselves, or even removed by death!
Is it surprising, then, that we caught our breath and flushed, and that
our hearts leaped when we came unexpectedly upon the track of the two
men who had dragged news from home for hundreds of miles over the snow?
We knew the tracks well. Our intimate acquaintance with every species
of track that was possible in that particular region, rendered a mistake
out of the question. There was the step of the leader, who wore a
snow-shoe the shape of which, although not unknown, was somewhat
unfamiliar to us. There was the print of the sled, or toboggan, which
was different in pattern from those used at Dunregan, and there was the
footprint of the man in rear, whose snow-shoe also made an unfamiliar
impression.
"The packet!" exclaimed Lumley, opening his solemn grey eyes to their
widest as he looked up from the track to me.
"At last!" I returned, unconsciously betraying the prolonged state of
suspense with which my mind had been afflicted.
"Come along!" said my companion, starting off homeward at a pace that
was almost too much for me.
We soon reached the outpost, and there stood the makers of the track
which had roused in us so much excitement.
Two strong men, chosen expressly for a duty which required mental
endurance and perseverance as well as physical vigour. They stood at
the door of the entrance-hall, talking with Mr Strang, the one with his
snow-shoes slung over his shoulder on the butt of his gun, the other
using the same implements as a rest for his hands, while Spooner, in a
state of great excitement, was hastily undoing the lashings of the sled,
to get at the precious box which contained "the packet."
"Well, gentlemen, here it is at last," said our chief, with a genial
smile as we came up.
"Yes, we followed the track immediately we struck it," said Lumley,
stooping to assist Spooner in his work.
We soon had the box carried to our chief's private room, while the two
strangers were had off by our men to their own house, there to be
feasted on venison, ptarmigan, salt-pork, fish, and pease-pudding to
satiety, and afterwards "pumped" to a state of exhaustion.
I followed our chief, who had a provokingly deliberate way of opening
the packet and examining its contents, while my feverish agitation and
expectancy increased. There was a humorous twinkle in his eye, I
thought, which told of mischievous purpose, while he kept up a murmuring
commentary.
"Hm! as I expected--no news from Macnab. What's this?--ah! The
Governor! A voluminous epistle, and--hallo! Lumley's friends must be
fond of him. His packet is the biggest in the box. And Spooner too,
not so bad for him. Here, take these to them. Stay--here is a bundle
of letters for the men. You'd better deliver these yourself."