A year later a prospector was slowly pushing his way through the
wilderness some seventy miles northward of St. Marys. It was
springtime and the air was mild, but, while the ridges were already
bare, great banks of snow still lay in the deep folds of the hills
where the sun but touched them at noon hour. The endless lacework of
naked branches now began to be feathered with tender green, and
everywhere the bush was alive with the voices of wild things whose
blood was stirred to mating by the soft caresses of the southerly wind.
Thrusting through a patch of tangled undergrowth, the man reached
higher ground and, advancing to a hillock, stood with his hat off and
his brown face steaming with sweat.
He was of middle age, with short, sturdy frame, a broad face of pale,
copper color, swarthy black brows and a small, stringy mustache. His
feet were enclosed in shoepacks, soggy with water, and he was otherwise
clad in the nondescript fashion of old bushmen. Around his shoulders
were strung a compass, binoculars and map case, and at his belt dangled
a small ax and a prospector's hammer pick. He was torn, scratched, and
in a general way disheveled, but the clear glance of the black eyes and
the easy grace of his pose proclaimed him fit for action.
He stood for some time while his keen glance searched the country
ahead--a frozen sea in which congealed billows of rock thrust up their
tumbled heads in a gigantic confusion. Here and there were more
definite ridges that took a general trend, but for the most part it was
a chaos of rock and timber, slope and swamp, the refuse from the
construction of a more attractive country which had been assembled
elsewhere.
Presently Fisette took out his compass, balanced it in the palm of his
sinewy hand and glanced at the needle. As he glanced, this filament of
soft iron began to tremble and swing. He stood fascinated. Slowly at
first, but gradually with more active and jerky motions, the thing
became possessed. It vibrated as though in doubt, then moved off in
continued restlessness. Not by any means could Fisette end these
vagaries. After a little, a slow light grew in his eyes, his strong
face broadened into a smile and, snapping back the compass lid, he
strode down hill.
A quarter of an hour later he was chipping the edges of a ridge of
blackish-gray rock from which he had stripped great rolls of damp,
green moss. The rock lay exposed and glistening, its polished surface
scarred with the scratches of hard stones that once lay embedded in the
feet of prehistoric glaciers, but Fisette, screwing his bushy brows
over a tiny magnifying glass and peering at the sparkling fragments in
his palm and balancing their weight, cared nothing for glaciers. He
only knew he had found that which he had been seeking for more than a
year.
There is no measuring device for joy, and no foot-rule one can lay on
emotion, but it is questionable if to the heart of any man comes
greater lightness than to that of the one who by stress and endurance
in the wilderness, upturns the treasure he has so arduously sought.
These moments are few and rapt and precious, and they glowed in the
slow brain of the half-breed Fisette as nothing else had ever glowed.
It was true that he stood to do well and earn independence out of this
discovery, but he was conscious at the instant of a reward greater than
ease and comfort and money to spend. He had backed himself,
single-handed, against the wilderness, and he had won. Again he
unrolled from a strip of caribou skin the fragment of ore Clark had
given him--the fragment he was to match--and laid it amongst the fresh
chippings at his feet. Only by size and shape could he distinguish it.
Now it may be assumed that Fisette forthwith threw his tattered hat
into the air and gave way to noisy manifestations of joy. He did
nothing of the kind, for in his hairy breast were combined the
practical side of his French father and the noiseless secrecy of an
Indian mother. There was much to be done, and he went about it with
voiceless determination. First of all he blazed a jack pine whose
knotted roots grasped nakedly at the ridge, and marked it boldly with
his name and the number of his prospecting license and the date, which
latter, he remembered contentedly, was the birthday of his youngest
child.
This accomplished, he disappeared in the bush and two hours later
reappeared bending forward under a pack strap whose broad center
strained against his swarthy forehead. And in the pack were a small
shed tent and his camping outfit. Making a tiny, smokeless fire of dry
wood, he cooked and ate, stopping now and again to listen intently.
But all he heard was the chuckle of a hidden spring and the insolent
familiarity of a blue jay, which, perched in a branch immediately
above, eyed the prospector's frying pan with a bright inquiring gaze.
By noon of the second day Fisette had blazed the enclosing boundaries
of three claims, along the middle of which for three quarters of a mile
he had traced the ridge of ore, and when corner posts were in, he
shouldered his pack and, stepping quietly to the river where his canoe
was hidden three miles away, began his homeward journey. He paddled
easily, squatting in the middle like his ancestors, and feeling a new
pleasure in the steady pressure of his noiseless blade. He did not
experience any particular sense of triumph, but when, six hours
afterward, he saw the glint of Lake Superior around a bend in the river
he laughed softly to himself.