Polaris--Of the Snows
By CHARLES B. STILSON
_Copyright 1915 by The Frank A. Munsey Company_
This story appeared in The All-Story Cavalier for December 18, 1915
"North! North! To the north, Polaris. Tell the world--ah, tell
them--boy--The north! The north! You must go, Polaris!"
Throwing the covers from his low couch, the old man arose and stood, a
giant, tottering figure. Higher and higher he towered. He tossed his
arms high, his features became convulsed; his eyes glazed. In his
throat the rising tide of dissolution choked his voice to a hoarse
rattle. He swayed.
With a last desperate rallying of his failing powers he extended his
right arm and pointed to the north. Then he fell, as a tree falls,
quivered, and was still.
His companion bent over the pallet, and with light, sure fingers closed
his eyes. In all the world he knew, Polaris never had seen a human
being die. In all the world he now was utterly alone!
He sat down at the foot of the cot, and for many minutes gazed steadily
at the wall with fixed, unseeing eyes. A sputtering little lamp, which
stood on a table in the center of the room; flickered and went out. The
flames of the fireplace played strange tricks in the strange room. In
their uncertain glare, the features of the dead man seemed to writhe
uncannily.
Garments and hangings of the skins of beasts stirred in the wavering
shadows, as though the ghosts of their one-time tenants were struggling
to reassert their dominion. At the one door and the lone window the
wind whispered, fretted, and shrieked. Snow as fine and hard as the
sands of the sea rasped across the panes. Somewhere without a dog
howled--the long, throaty ululation of the wolf breed. Another joined
in, and another, until a full score of canine voices wailed a weird
requiem.
Unheeding, the living man sat as still as the dead.
Once, twice, thrice, a little clock struck a halting, uncertain stroke.
When the fourth hour was passed it rattled crazily and stopped. The
fire died away to embers; the embers paled to ashes. As though they
were aware that something had gone awry, the dogs never ceased their
baying. The wind rose higher and higher, and assailed the house with
repeated shocks. Pale-gray and changeless day that lay across a sea of
snows peered furtively through the windows.
At length the watcher relaxed his silent vigil. He arose, cast off
his coat of white furs, stepped to the wall of the room opposite to
the door, and shoved back a heavy wooden panel. A dark aperture was
disclosed. He disappeared and came forth presently, carrying several
large chunks of what appeared to be crumbling black rock.
He threw them on the dying fire, where they snapped briskly, caught
fire, and flamed brightly. They were coal.
From a platform above the fireplace he dragged down a portion of the
skinned carcass of a walrus. With the long, heavy-bladed knife from his
belt he cut it into strips. Laden with the meat, he opened the door
and went out into the dim day.
The house was set against the side of a cliff of solid, black,
lusterless coal. A compact stockade of great boulders enclosed the
front of the dwelling. From the back of the building, along the base
of the cliff, ran a low shed of timber slabs, from which sounded the
howling and worrying of the dogs.
As Polaris entered the stockade the clamor was redoubled. The rude
plank at the front of the shed, which was its door, was shaken
repeatedly as heavy bodies were hurled against it.
Kicking an accumulation of loose snow away from the door, the man took
from its racks the bar which made it fast and let it drop forward.
A reek of steam floated from its opening. A shaggy head was thrust
forth, followed immediately by a great, gray body, which shot out as if
propelled from a catapult.
Catching in its jaws the strip of flesh which the man dangled in front
of the doorway, the brute dashed across the stockade and crouched
against the wall, tearing at the meat. Dog after dog piled pell-mell
through the doorway, until at least twenty-five grizzled animals were
distributed about the enclosure, bolting their meal of walrus-flesh.
* * * * *
For a few moments the man sat on the roof of the shed and watched the
animals. Although the raw flesh stiffened in the frigid air before even
the jaws of the dogs could devour it and the wind cut like the lash of
a whip, the man, coatless and with head and arms bared, seemed to mind
neither the cold nor the blast.
He had not the ruggedness of figure or the great height of the man who
lay dead within the house. He was of considerably more than medium
height, but so broad of shoulder and deep of chest that he seemed
short. Every line of his compact figure bespoke unusual strength--the
wiry, swift strength of an animal.
His arms, white and shapely, rippled with muscles at the least
movement of his fingers. His hands were small, but powerfully shaped.
His neck was straight and not long. The thews spread from it to his
wide shoulders like those of a splendid athlete. The ears were set
close above the angle of a firm jaw, and were nearly hidden in a mass
of tawny, yellow hair, as fine as a woman's which swept over his
shoulders.
Above a square chin were full lips and a thin, aquiline nose. Deep,
brown eyes, fringed with black lashes, made a marked contrast with the
fairness of his complexion and his yellow hair and brows. He was not
more than twenty-four years old.
Presently he re-entered the house. The dogs flocked after him to the
door, whining and rubbing against his legs, but he allowed none of them
to enter with him. He stood before the dead man and, for the first time
in many hours, he spoke:
"For this day, my father, you have waited many years. I shall not
delay. I will not fail you."
From a skin sack he filled the small lamp with oil and lighted its wick
with a splinter of blazing coal. He set it where its feeble light shone
on the face of the dead. Lifting the corpse, he composed its limbs and
wrapped it in the great white pelt of a polar bear, tying it with many
thongs. Before he hid from view the quiet features he stood back with
folded arms and bowed head.
"I think he would have wished this," he whispered, and he sang softly
that grand old hymn which has sped so many Christian soldiers from
their battlefield. "Nearer, My God, to Thee," he sang in a subdued,
melodious baritone. From a shelf of books which hung on the wall he
reached a leather-covered volume. "It was his religion," he muttered:
"It may be mine," and he read from the book: "_I am the resurrection
and the life, whoso believeth in Me, even though he die--_" and on
through the sonorous burial service.
He dropped the book within the folds of the bearskin, covered the dead
face, and made fast the robe. Although the body was of great weight, he
shouldered it without apparent effort, took the lamp in one hand, and
passed through the panel in the wall.
Within the bowels of the cliff a large cavern had been hollowed in the
coal. In a far corner a gray boulder had been hewn into the shape of a
tombstone. On its face were carved side by side two words: "Anne" and
"Stephen." At the foot of the stone were a mound and an open grave. He
laid the body in the grave and covered it with earth and loose coal.
Again he paused, while the lamplight shone on the tomb.
"May you rest in peace, O Anne, my mother, and Stephen, my father. I
never knew you, my mother, and, my father, I knew not who you were nor
who I am. I go to carry your message."
* * * * *
He rolled boulders onto the two mounds. The opening to the cave he
walled up with other boulders, piling a heap of them and of large
pieces of coal until it filled the low arch of the entrance.
In the cabin he made preparations for a journey.
One by one he threw on the fire books and other articles within the
room, until little was left but skins and garments of fur and an
assortment of barbaric weapons of the chase.
Last he dragged from under the cot a long, oaken chest.
Failing to find its key, he tore the lid from it with his strong hands.
Some articles of feminine wearing apparel which were within it he
handled reverently, and at the same time curiously; for they were of
cloth. Wonderingly he ran his fingers over silk and fine laces. Those
he also burned.
From the bottom of the chest he took a short, brown rifle and a brace
of heavy revolvers of a pattern and caliber famous in the annals of the
plainsmen. With them were belt and holsters.
He counted the cartridges in the belt. Forty there were, and in the
chambers of the revolvers and the magazine of the rifle, eighteen
more. Fifty-eight shots with which to meet the perils that lay between
himself and that world of men to the north--if, indeed, the passing
years had not spoiled the ammunition.
He divested himself of his clothing, bathed with melted snow-water, and
dressed himself anew in white furs. An omelet of eggs of wild birds and
a cutlet of walrus-flesh sufficed to stay his hunger, and he was ready
to face the unknown.
In the stockade was a strongly built sledge. Polaris packed it with
quantities of meat both fresh and dried, of which there was a large
store in the cabin. What he did not pack on the sledge he threw to the
eager dogs.
He laid his harness out on the snow, cracked his long whip, and called
up his team. "Octavius, Nero, Julius." Three powerful brutes bounded to
him and took their places in the string. "Juno, Hector, Pallas." Three
more grizzled snow-runners sprang into line. "Marcus." The great,
gray leader trotted sedately to the place at the head of the team. A
seven-dog team it was, all of them bearing the names before which Rome
and Greece had bowed.
Polaris added to the burden of the sledge the brown rifle, several
spears, carved from oaken beams and tipped with steel, and a sealskin
filled with boiled snow-water. On his last trip into the cabin he took
from a drawer in the table a small, flat packet, sewn in membranous
parchment.
"This is to tell the world my father's message and to tell who I am,"
he said, and hid it in an inner pocket of his vest of furs. He buckled
on the revolver-belt, took whip and staff from the fireside, and drove
his dog-team out of the stockade onto the prairie of snow, closing the
gate on the howling chorus left behind.
He proceeded several hundred yards, then tethered his dogs with a word
of admonition, and retraced his steps.
In the stockade he did a strange and terrible thing. Long used to
seeing him depart from his team, the dogs had scattered and were
mumbling their bones in various corners. "If I leave these behind me,
they will perish miserably, or they will break out and follow, and I
may not take them with me," he muttered.
From dog to dog he passed. To each he spoke a word of farewell. Each he
caressed with a pat on the head. Each he killed with a single grip of
his muscular hands, gripping them at the nape of the neck, where the
bones parted in his powerful fingers. Silently and swiftly he proceeded
until only one dog remained alive, old Paulus, the patriarch of the
pack.
He bent over the animal, which raised its dim eyes to his and licked at
his hands.
"Paulus, dear old friend that I have grown up with; farewell, Paulus,"
he said. He pressed his face against the noble head of the dog. When
he raised it tears were coursing down his cheeks. Then Paulus's spirit
sped.
Two by two he dragged the bodies into the cabin.
"Of old a great general in that far world of men burned his ships that
he might not turn back. I will not turn back," he murmured. With a
splinter of blazing coal he fired the house and the dog-shed. He tore
the gate of the stockade from its hinges and cast it into the ruins.
With his great strength he toppled over the capping-stones of the
wall, and left it a ruin also.
Then he rejoined the dog-team, set his back to the south pole, and
began his journey.
CHAPTER II
THE FIRST WOMAN
Probably in all the world there was not the equal of the team of dogs
which Polaris had selected for his journey. Their ancestors in the long
ago had been the fierce, gray timberwolves of the north. Carefully
cross-bred, the strains in their blood were of the wolf, the great
Dane, and the mastiff; but the wolf strain held dominant. They had
the loyalty of the mastiff, the strength of the great Dane, and the
tireless sinews of the wolf. From the environment of their rearing they
were well furred and inured to the cold and hardships of the Antarctic.
They would travel far.
Polaris did not ride on the sledge. He ran with the dogs, as swift and
tireless as they. A wonderful example of the adaptability to conditions
of the human race, his upbringing had given him the strength and
endurance of an animal. He had never seen the dog that he could not run
down.
He, too, would travel fast and far.
In the nature of the land through which they journeyed on their first
dash to the northward, there were few obstacles to quick progress. It
was a prairie of snow, wind-swept, and stretching like a desert as far
as eye could discern. Occasionally were upcroppings of coal cliffs
similar to the one where had been Polaris's home. On the first drive
they made a good fifty miles.
Need of sleep, more than fatigue, warned both man and beasts of
camping-time. Polaris, who seemed to have a definite point in view,
urged on the dogs for an hour longer than was usual on an ordinary
trip, and they came to the border of the immense snow-plain.
To the northeast lay a ridge of what appeared to be snow-covered hills.
Beyond the edge of the white prairie was a forest of ice. Millions
of jagged monoliths stood and lay, jammed closely together, in every
conceivable shape and angle.
At some time a giant ice-flow had crashed down upon the land. It had
fretted and torn at the shore, had heaved itself up, with its myriad
gleaming tusks bared for destruction. Then nature had laid upon it a
calm, white hand, and had frozen it quiet and still and changeless.
Away to the east a path was open, which skirted the field of broken ice
and led in toward the base of the hills.
Polaris did not take that path. He turned west, following the line of
the ice-belt. Presently he found what he sought. A narrow lane led into
the heart of the icebergs.
At the end of it, caught in the jaws of two giant bergs, hung fast,
as it had hung for years, the sorry wreck of a stout ship. Scarred
and rent by the grinding of its prison-ice and weather-beaten by the
rasping of wind-driven snow in a land where the snow never melts, still
on the square stern of the vessel could be read the dimming letters
which spelled "Yedda."
Polaris unharnessed the pack, and man and dogs crept on board the hulk.
It was but a timber shell. Much of the decking had been cut away, and
everything movable had been taken from it for the building of the cabin
and the shed, now in black ruins fifty miles to the south.
In an angle of the ice-wall, a few yards from the ship, Polaris pitched
his camp and built a fire with timbers from the wreck. He struck his
flame with a rudely fashioned tinder-box, catching the spark in fine
scrapings of wood and nursing it with his breath. He fed the dogs and
toasted meat for his own meal at the fire. With a large robe from the
sledge he bedded the team snugly beside the fire.
With his own parka of furs he clambered aboard the ship, found a bunk
in the forecastle, and curled up for the night.
Several hours later hideous clamor broke his dreamless slumber.
He started from the bunk and leaped from the ship's side into the
ice-lane. Every dog of the pack was bristling and snarling with rage.
Mixed with their uproar was a deeper, hoarser note of anger that came
from the throat of no dog--a note which the man knew well.
The team was bunched a few feet ahead of the fire as Polaris came over
the rail of the ship. Almost shoulder to shoulder the seven crouched,
every head pointed up the path. They were quivering from head to tail
with anger, and seemed to be about to charge.
Whipping the dogs back, the son of the snows ran forward to meet the
danger alone. He could afford to lose no dogs. He had forgotten the
guns, but he bore weapons with which he was better acquainted.
With a long-hafted spear in his hand and the knife loosened in his belt
he bounded up the pathway and stood, wary but unafraid, fronting an
immense white bear.
He was not a moment too soon. The huge animal had set himself for the
charge, and in another instant would have hurled its enormous weight
down on the dogs. The beast hesitated, confronted by this new enemy,
and sat back on its haunches to consider.
Knowing his foe aforetime, Polaris took that opportunity to deliver
his own charge. He bounded forward and drove his tough spear with all
his strength into the white chest below the throat. Balanced as it
was on its haunches, the shock of the man's onset upset the bear, and
it rolled backward, a jet of blood spurting over its shaggy coat and
dyeing the snow.
Like a flash the man followed his advantage. Before the brute could
turn or recover Polaris reached its back and drove his long-bladed
knife under the left shoulder. Twice he struck deep, and sprang aside.
The battle was finished.
The beast made a last mighty effort to rear erect, tearing at the
spear-shaft, and went down under an avalanche of snarling, ferocious
dogs. For the team could refrain from conflict no longer, and charged
like a flying wedge to worry the dying foe.
Replenishing his store of meat with strips from the newly slain bear,
Polaris allowed the pack to make a famous meal on the carcass. When
they were ready to take the trail again, he fired the ship with a
blazing brand, and they trotted forth along the snow-path to the east
with the skeleton of the stout old Yedda roaring and flaming behind
them.
* * * * *
For days Polaris pressed northward. To his right extended the range of
the white hills. To the left was the seemingly endless ice-field that
looked like the angry billows of a storm-tossed sea which had been
arrested at the height of tempest, its white-capped, upthrown waves
paralyzed cold and dead.
Down the shore-line, where his path lay, a fierce wind blew
continuously and with increasing rigor. He was puzzled to find that
instead of becoming warmer as he progressed to the north and away from
the pole, the air was more frigid than it had been in his homeland.
Hardy as he was, there were times when the furious blasts chilled him
to the bone and when his magnificent dogs flinched and whimpered.
Still he pushed on. The sledge grew lighter as the provisions were
consumed, and there were few marches that did not cover forty miles.
Polaris slept with the dogs, huddled in robes. The very food they
ate they must warm with the heat of their bodies before it could be
devoured. There was no vestige of anything to make fuel for a camp-fire.
He had covered some hundreds of miles when he found the contour of the
country was changing. The chain of the hills swung sharply away to the
east, and the path broadened, fanwise, east and west. An undulating
plain of snow and ice-caps, rent by many fissures, lay ahead.
This was the most difficult traveling of all.
In the middle of their second march across the plain, the man noticed
that his gray snow-coursers were uneasy. They threw their snouts up to
the wind and growled angrily, scenting some unseen danger. Although he
had seen nothing larger than a fox since he entered the plain, bear
signs had been frequent, and Polaris welcomed a hunt to replenish his
larder.
He halted the team and outspanned the dogs so they would be unhampered
by the sledge in case of attack. Bidding them remain behind, he went to
reconnoiter.
He clambered to the summit of a snow-covered ice-crest and gazed ahead.
A great joy welled into his heart, a thanksgiving so keen that it
brought a mist to his eyes.
He had found man!
Not a quarter of a mile ahead of him, standing in the lee of a low
ridge, were two figures unmistakably human. At the instant he saw them
the wind brought to his nostrils, sensitive as those of an animal, a
strange scent that set his pulses bounding. He _smelled_ man and man's
fire! A thin spiral of smoke was curling over the back of the ridge. He
hurried forward.
Hidden by the undulations of slopes and drifts he approached within
a few feet of them without being discovered. On the point of crying
aloud to them he stopped, paralyzed, and crouched behind a drift. For
these men to whom his heart called madly--the first of his own kind but
one whom he had ever seen--were tearing at each other's throats like
maddened beasts in an effort to take life!
Like a man in a dream, Polaris heard their voices raised in curses.
They struggled fiercely but weakly. They were on the brink of one of
the deep fissures, or crevasses, which seamed this strange, forgotten
land. Each was striving to push the other into the chasm.
Then one who seemed the stronger wrenched himself free and struck the
other in the face. The stricken man staggered, threw his arms above his
head, toppled, and crashed down the precipice.
Polaris's first introduction to the civilization which he sought was
murder! For those were civilized white men who had fought. They wore
garments of cloth. Revolvers hung from their belts. Their speech, of
which he had heard little but cursing, was civilized English.
Pale to the lips, the son of the wilderness leaped over the snow-drift
and strode toward the survivor. In the teachings of his father, murder
was the greatest of all crimes; its punishment was swift death. This
man who stood on the brink of the chasm which had swallowed his
companion had been the aggressor in the fight. He had struck first. He
had killed. In the heart of Polaris arose a terrible sense of outraged
justice. This waif of the eternal snows became the law.
The stranger turned and saw him. He started violently, paled, and then
an angry flush mounted to his temples and an angry glint came into his
eyes. His crime had been witnessed, and by a strange white man.
His hand flew to his hip, and he swung a heavy revolver up and fired,
speeding the bullet with a curse. He missed and would have fired again,
but his hour had struck. With the precision of an automaton Polaris
snatched one of his own pistols from the holster. He raised it above
the level of his shoulder, and fired on the drop.
Not for nothing had he spent long hours practicing with his father's
guns, sighting and pulling the trigger countless times, although they
were empty. The man in front of him staggered, dropped his pistol, and
reeled dizzily. A stream of blood gushed from his lips. He choked,
clawed at the air, and pitched backward.
The chasm which had received his victim, received the murderer also.
Polaris heard a shrill scream to his right, and turned swiftly on his
heel, automatically swinging up his revolver to meet a new peril.
Another being stood on the brow of the ridge--stood with clasped hands
and horror-stricken eyes. Clad almost the same as the others, there was
yet a subtle difference which garments could not disguise.
Polaris leaned forward with his whole soul in his eyes. His hand fell
to his side. He had made his second discovery. He had discovered woman!