No shanty fires shall cheer them,
No comrades march beside,
But the northern lights shall beckon
And the wandering winds shall guide.
They shall cross the silent waters
By a trail that is wild and far.
To the place of the lonely lodges
Under a lonely star.
_La Longue Traverse._
“Bob, is this Lake Lemaire?”
Bob Lemaire, leaning against a wind-twisted tamarack on the ridge above
the portage, looked long and very long at the desolate country spread
out beneath them. Then he looked at a map, drawn on parchment in faded
ink, which he had just unfolded from a waterproof case. “I can’t
identify it,” he confessed at last, “but I think—”
“If you say another word,” groaned Barrett, “about the reliability of
your grandfather, I—I’ll heave rocks at you.” Lemaire smiled slowly,
and the smile transfigured his lean, serious face; he folded the map and
replaced it in the little case “Well,” he answered, comfortingly, “we
can’t mistake P’tite Babiche, anyway, when we come to it.”
“If the thing exists. . . Oh, I know your grandfather said he found it,
and stuck it on his map. But no one else has ever found it since.”
“No one else,” said Lemaire, quietly, “has been so far west from the
Gran’ Babiche.”
He looked again at the land, one of the most desolate in the world,
across which they must go. Lake, rapid, river; rock, scrub, pine, and
caribou moss—here the world held only these things, repeated to
infinity. But as Lemaire’s grave eyes rested on them, those eyes showed
nothing but stillness and a strange content. And Barrett, who had been
watching his friend and not the new chain of lakes ahead, cried
suddenly, “Bob, I believe you like it!”
“Yes, I like it—if like is the word.”
“O gosh! And you never saw it till five years ago?”
“No.”
“And your father never saw it at all?”
“No. He married young, you know, and had no money. He worked in an
office all his life. My mother said he used to talk in his sleep of—all
this—which he had never seen. And when I saw it, it just seemed
to—come natural.” He smiled again. “We’ve three—four—more portages,”
he went on, “before we camp.”
“And it’s along of having Forbes Lemaire for a grandfather,” groaned
Barrett, as he limped after Lemaire’s light stride, down the rocky slope
to the little beach where they had left their canoe.
They launched the canoe, thigh deep in the rush of the ice-clear water,
and put out into yet another of that endless chain of unknown and
uncharted lakes whose course they were following. Only one map in the
world showed these lakes, those low iron hills, that swamp—the map made
by Bob Lemaire’s grandfather fifty years before; as far as was known,
only one white man before themselves had ever tried the journey from the
Gran’ Babiche due west to the P’tite Babiche, that mythical river; and
that had been Forbes Lemaire. As Barrett said, it was a tour personally
conducted by the ghost of a grandfather.
Another wet portage—tripping and sliding under a low cliff among fallen
shale and willow bushes—another lake, as wide, as lonely, as the former
one. So for three hours. And then the afternoon shut down in drive on
drive of damp gray mist; and they edged the canoe inshore, and beached
it at last upon a dun ridge of sand, the shadows of dwarfed bullpines
promising firing.
Too tired to speak, they made their camp, deftly, as long practice had
taught them. Tinned beef, flapjacks and coffee had power, however, to
change the very aspect of the weather. And Barrett, smoking the pipe of
repletion, under a wisp of tent, had time to admire the Japanese effect
of the writhed pines in the fog, to hear a sort of wild music in the
voices of rain and water, and to meditate on the chances of an
ouananiche for the morning’s meal.
The shadows of the fog were changing to the shadows of night, and the
silent Lemaire rose and flung wood on the fire. It sent out a warm glow;
and as if it had been a signal, a living shadow crept from the shadow of
the rocks, and very timidly approached the light.
Both men rose with an exclamation; for they had not seen a human being
for nearly a month. Barrett said, “An Indian,” and sank back on his
blanket, leaving Lemaire to ask questions. Lemaire went round the fire,
and stooped over the queer huddled shadow on the ground.
“Well?” Barrett called after him at last.
“A Montagnais,” Lemaire answered after a pause, some trouble in his
voice. “About the oldest old Indian I’ve ever seen; they aren’t
long-lived. . . . . . He seems a bit wrong in the head. He doesn’t seem
to know his name or where he comes from. But—he says he’s going to a
big encampment many day’s journey west. He says he’s been following us.
He says he’s a friend of mine.”
“Is he?”
“I never saw him before. . . That’s all I can get out of him. He’s
probably been cast off by his tribe. Why? Oh, too old to be useful.”
“Cruel brutes.”
“Not so cruel as some white men,” said Lemaire, half to himself. He had
come back to the firelight, and was rummaging among their stores, none
too plentiful. He returned to the old Indian, carrying food; and
presently Barrett heard snapping sounds, as of a hungry dog feeding.
Lemaire came again to his nook under the tent; and Barrett smoked out
his pipe in silence. Then, as he knocked the ashes, fizzling, into a
little pool of rain, he said gently, “Bob, what makes you so uncommonly
good to the Indians?”
Quiet Lemaire did not attempt to evade the direct question. But a rather
shy flush rose to his dark, lean cheeks as he said diffidently, “I
suppose—because I feel my family—any one of my name—owes ’em
something.”
“The grandfather again, eh?”
“Yes. . . . Men had no souls in those days, Barrett. I think the
tremendous loneliness—the newness—the lack of
responsibility—something killed their souls. . . . . . Wait.”
Leaning forward, he flung more wood on the fire. And the red light
flickered on his strong and gentle face. He glanced at his friend, and
went on abruptly. “I’ve my grandfather’s maps and journals, you
know—what my father called the shameful records of his fame. He was
absolutely explicit in ’em. I never saw them in father’s lifetime, but
he left them to me, saying I could read them or not, as I liked. I was
very proud of them. I read them. And upon my word—though from them I
got the hints that may lead us to the rediscovery of the Lost
Babiche—I’m almost sorry I did. It leaves a bad taste in the mind, if
you know what I mean, to think that one’s father’s father was such a
heroic scoundrel.”
“A bad record, Bobby?”
“Bad even for those days. Listen to me. While he was on this very
expedition we’re on now, he was taken sick. He was very sick, and going
to be worse. He knew what it was. He was near the big summer camp of a
tribe of Indians that had been very kind to him, coast Indians, come
inland for the caribou hunting; he went to them. He was sick, and they
took him in, and nursed him. And all the time he knew what it was he
had. It was the smallpox.
“You know what La Picotte is in the wilds. They’ve a song about it
still, down along the Lamennais. . . For of all that tribe, only one
family, they say, escaped. All the others died; they died as if the
Angel of Destruction had come among them with his sword—they died like
flies, they died in heaps. And over the bones of the dead the tepees
stood for years, ragged, blowing in the winds. And then the skins
rotted, and the bare poles stood, gleaming white, over the rotting bones
that covered an acre of ground, they say. No one ever went to that place
any more. It was cursed. . . because of my grandfather.”
“Monsieur Forbes made his get-away?”
“Yes, or I shouldn’t be telling you about it.” Lemaire summoned a smile,
but his eyes were sombre. “And so I guess—that’s one reason why. One
among many.”
“You’re a likeable old freak,” murmured Barrett affectionately,
“but—_you_ ain’t responsible, you know!”
“As I look at it, we’re all responsible.”
“Well—anyway, I wouldn’t give that old scarecrow too much of our
grubstake, old man. We’ve none too much, if the Babiche doesn’t turn up
according to schedule.”
“Probably we won’t see any more of him. He’ll be gone by the morning.”
He was gone with the morning. But as day followed weary day, and there
was still no sign of the lakes narrowing to the long-sought river,
Barrett was increasingly conscious that the old man was close upon their
trail. Sometimes, in the brief radiance of the September dawns, he would
see, far and far behind on the wrinkled silver water, a warped canoe
paddling feebly. They always hauled away, by miles, from that decrepit
canoe. But always, some time in the dark hours, it crept up again.
Sometimes, he would see, in the sunset, a wavering thread of smoke
arising from the site of their last-camp-but-one. It irritated him at
last; the thought of that ragged, cranky canoe, paddled by the ragged,
dirty, old imbecile, forever following them—creeping, creeping, under
the great gaunt stars, creeping, creeping, under the flying dawns, the
stormy moons; when he found Lemaire leaving little scraps of precious
tobacco, a pinch of flour in a screw of paper, or a fresh-caught fish
beside the trodden ashes of their cooking-place, he exploded.
“I can’t help it,” Lemaire apologized, “I _know_ I’m all kinds of a
fool, Barrett. But the poor old wretch is nearly blind—from long-ago
smallpox, I should think. He can’t catch things for himself much.”
Barrett, aware that wisdom was on his side, yet felt sorry for his
explosion. He said nothing more. Soon he forgot the matter, having much
else to think about.
For the Lost Babiche, the once-discovered river, did not “turn up
according to schedule.”
The chain of lakes they had been following turned due south. They left
them, and, after a terrible portage, launched the canoe in a stream that
ran west. Here their progress was very slow, for there were rapids, and
consequent portages, every mile or so. This stream, instead of feeding
another lake, died out in impassable quaking mosses. They saw a range of
low hills some four or five miles ahead; so again they left the canoe
and struck out for them on foot, half-wading, half-walking. It was
exhausting work. At last they climbed the barren spurs and saw beyond,
under a flaring yellow sunset, a world of interlacing waterways,
unvisited and unknown, that seemed then as if they smoked under the vast
clouds and spirals of wildfowl settling homeward to the reeds. The two
men watched that wonderful sight in silence.
At last, “They’re gathering to go south,” said Lemaire briefly. And
Barrett answered, “D’you know what date it is? It’s the day on which we
said we’d turn back if we hadn’t found the Lost Babiche. It’s the
fifteenth of September.”
“Well. . . are we going back?”
“Not till we’ve found our river,” cried Barrett, with half a laugh and
half a curse. They gripped hands, smiling rather grimly. They made a
miserable, fireless camp, and went back the next day, carrying canoe and
supplies, in four toilsome trips, across the hills; repacking and
relaunching the second day on a new lake, where in all probability no
white man—but one—had ever before dipped paddle.
They had been in the wilderness so long that they had fallen into the
habit of carrying on conversations as if the lapse of two or three days
had been as many minutes. Barrett knew to what Lemaire referred when he
said abruptly, “After all, it isn’t as if you were ignorant of the
risks.”
“I guess I know just as much about them as you,” said Barrett, cheerily.
“We’re taking chances on the grub, aren’t we? If we find the Lost
Babiche before the game moves, we’ll be alright, though our own supplies
won’t take us there. Once there, Bob, we’re pretty sure to find friendly
Indians when we link up with the Silver Fork—which we do seventy miles
down the P’tite Babiche if your grandpa’s map’s correct. Well there are
a good many ‘if’s’ in the programme, but don’t you worry. We’ll get
through or out, somehow. There’s always fish. I’ve a feeling that this
country _can’t_ go back on a Lemaire!”
They went on to a pleasant camp that night on a sandy islet overgrown
with dwarf willow, and a wild-duck supper. The current of these new
lakes went west with such increasing strength that Lemaire thought they
were feeling the “pull” of some big river into which the system drained;
and if so, it could be no river but the lost Babiche. They slept, all
a-tingle with the fever of discovery and re-made maps in their dreams.
Behind them many miles, a wandering smoke arose from the ashes of their
last camp. The old Indian, about whom they had almost forgotten, had
gained on them while they packed their supplies over the hills. Now he
was close upon them again.
The life of that old savage seemed thin and wavering as the smoke of the
fire he made. All night he sat in the ashes, motionless as a stone. Only
once, just before the fierce dawn, he rose to his feet with an
inarticulate cry, stirred to some instinctive excitement. For in a
moment the vast, chill dusk was filled with a musical thrill, a
tremendous clamour and rush of life, as thousand by thousand after their
kinds, teal and widgeon, mallard and sheldrake, lifted from the reeds
and fled before the coming cold. As the old man dimly watched, two
delicate things fell and touched his face; one was a feather, the second
was a flake of snow.
In those few delicate flakes, Lemaire and Barrett seemed to feel for the
first time the ever-present hostility of nature; with such a brief,
exquisite touch were they first made aware of the powers against which
they strove. The new waterways seemed to stretch interminably. Each time
they cleared one of the deep-cut channels which linked lake with lake as
regularly as a thread links beads, they looked ahead with the same
question. Each time they saw the same expanse of gray water, low islets,
barren shores; the country passed them changing and unchanging as a
dream. They seemed to be moving in a dream, conscious of nothing but the
pressure of the current on their paddles.
Then came the mist.
It shut them into a circle ten feet wide, a pearl-white prison. Outside
the circle were shadows, wandering voices, trees as men walking. For two
days they felt their way westward through this fog; two nights they
shivered over a damp-wood fire, hearing nothing but water beading and
dripping everywhere with a sound of grief. It strangely broke Lemaire’s
steel nerve. On the second night he said, restlessly, “We must turn back
to-morrow.”
“Bob!”
He flung out a tanned hand passionately. “I know. . . . But can’t you
feel it? Things have turned against us. These things.” He pointed at the
veiled sky, the milky water. “I daren’t go on. If we don’t find the
river to-morrow, we’ll go back. And then. . . . the land will have done
for me what it never did for my grandfather.”
“What, Bob, old fellow?”
“Beaten me,” said Lemaire, and rolled into his blankets without another
word.
He woke next morning with the touch of clear sunlight on his eyelids. He
leaped to his feet silently, without waking Barrett, and as he did so,
ice broke and tinkled like glass where the edge of the blankets had lain
in a little pool of moisture. The last of the fog was draining in golden
smoke from the low, dark hills. He strode to the edge of the water, and
stopped, shaking suddenly as if he were cold. Then he went to Barrett,
and stooped over him.
“Hullo, Bob, is it morning?” Then, as he saw Lemaire’s face, “My God,
what is it?”
Twice Lemaire tried to speak. Then he pointed eastward to three high
rocky islands which lay across the water, exactly spaced, like the
ruined spans of a great bridge which once had stretched from shore to
shore.
“Barrett,” he said huskily, “We entered the Lost Babiche yesterday in
the fog, and never knew. Those islands are ten miles down the river on
Forbes Lemaire’s map.”
They faced each other in silence, too much moved to speak. Their hands
met in a long grip. Then Barrett said suddenly, “Anything else.”
“Yes. It’s freezing hard.”
“But. . . we’ve won, Bob, we’ve won!”
“Not yet,” said the man whose fathers had been bred in the wilderness,
and wed to it. “Not yet. It’s still against us.”
But there was no talk now of turning back.
The Lost Babiche—lost no more—was a noble river; a gray and ice-clear
stream winding in generous curves between high cliffs of slate-coloured
rock. These cliffs were much cut into ravines and gullies, where grew
timber of fine size for that country. But as their tense excitement
lessened a little, they were struck by the absence of all life; even in
the deep rock-shadows they saw no fish. Of human life there was not a
sign; though in Forbes Lemaire’s days the country had supported many
Indians. And now—“Not a soul but ourselves,” said Barrett, in an awed
voice; “not a living soul. . .”
Yes. One soul yet living. Far behind them, in the staggering old canoe,
the old Indian paddled valiantly on their trail. But he had forgotten
them now, as they had long forgotten him. He stopped no more for the
offal of their camps. A stronger instinct even than that of hunger was
drawing him on the way they also went; down the Lost Babiche. Had they
looked, they would not have seen him. And soon, between him and them,
the clouds which had been gathering all day dropped a curtain of fine
snow.
The first sting of the tiny balled flakes on his knuckles was to Lemaire
like the thunder of guns, the opening of a battle.
He had no need to speak to Barrett. They bent over the paddles and the
canoe surged forward. It was a race; a race between the early winter and
themselves. If the cold weather set in so soon, if they found no Indians
on the little-known Silver Fork—there were a dozen “ifs” in their minds
as, mile after mile, they fled down the P’tite Babiche. Even as they
fled from the winter, so that other white man long ago had fled from the
sickness; seen those stark bluffs unrolling; viewed perhaps those very
trees.
They made a record distance that day. “We’re winning, Bob, we’re
winning,” said Barrett over the fire that night. Lemaire had not the
heart to contradict him; but Lemaire’s instincts, inherited from
generations, told him that the wilderness was still mysteriously their
enemy. He sat smoking, silent, hearing nothing but the faint,
innumerable hiss of the snowflakes falling into the flames.
The snow was thickening in the morning, and by noon a bitter wind arose,
blowing in their faces and against the stream. Soon the canoe was
smack-smack-smacking on the waves, and the snow was driving almost
level. The continual pressure of wind and snow drugged their senses.
They never heard the voice of the rapids until, rounding an abrupt bend,
the ravelled water seemed to leap at them from under the very bow of the
canoe.
There was only one thing to be done, and—“Let her go!” yelled Lemaire,
crouching tense as a spring above the steering paddle.
Now for the trained eye, the strong hand—the eye to see the momentary
chance, the hand to obey without a falter.
Now for the sleeping instincts of a brain inherited from far generations
of wanderers and voyageurs. Flash on flash of leaping water, the drive
of spray and snow, the canoe staggering and checking like a thing hurt,
but always recovering.
Barrett, in the bows, paddled blindly. His life lay in Bob Lemaire’s
hands, and he was content to leave it there during those roaring
moments. But those hands failed—by an inch.
They were in smooth water. Barrett would have paused to take breath, but
Lemaire’s voice barked at him from the stern. He obeyed. The canoe drove
forward again—forward in great leaps, towards the point of a small
island ahead, dimly seen through the snow—something wrong, though,
thought Barrett, grunting; he could get no “beef” on the thing—it
dragged; you’d have thought Bob was paddling against him. Then,
suddenly, he understood. He called up the last of his strength, drove
the paddle in, once, twice—again—heard a shout, flung himself overside
into water waist-deep, and just as the canoe was sinking under them, he
and Lemaire caught it and ran it ashore. Then, dripping, they looked
each other in the face, and each seemed to see the face of disaster.
“It was a rock,” said Lemaire at last, very quietly, “a few inches below
the surface. It has almost cut the canoe in two.”
“What’s to be done?”
“Find shelter, I suppose.”
They were very quiet about it. There was no shelter on their islet but a
few rocks and a dead spruce in the middle. Here they set up their tent
as a wind-break. It was bitterly cold; the island was sheathed with
white ice, for the spray from the rough water froze now as it fell;
everything in the canoe was wet; they were wet to their waists. They
tried to induce the dead tree to burn, but the wood was so rotted with
wet it only smouldered and went out. They had a little cooking-lamp and
a few squares of compressed fuel for it; they lighted this, and Lemaire
made tea with numbed hands. It renewed the life in them, but could not
dry them. They huddled against the little lamp in silence,
waiting—waiting.
After some time Lemaire heard a curious sound from Barrett; his teeth
were chattering. Lemaire saw that his face had taken a waxy white hue.
He spoke to him, and Barrett looked up, but his eyes were dim and
glazed. “It’ll be all right,” he said, thickly, “we’ll get through,
somehow. I’ve a feeling that this country can’t go back on a Lemaire.”
They were the first symptoms of collapse. Lemaire groaned. He got to his
feet, and staggered across the slippery rocks. He shook his fist in the
implacable face of the desolation. He shouted, foolish rage and
defiance, caught back at his sanity; shouted again. . . . This time he
thought he heard a faint cry in the snow. It whipped him back to
self-control. He splashed out into the curdling shallows, shouting
desperately.
Out of the gray drive of snow loomed the ghost of a canoe, paddled, as
it seemed, by a ghost. It was the old Indian, whom Lemaire had long
forgotten; the weather had not hindered him, the rapids had not wrecked
him. At Lemaire’s cry he raised his head, and the canoe put inshore,
waveringly. Lemaire splashed to meet it, met the incurious gaze of the
half-blind old eyes under the scarred lids, and read into the wrinkled,
foul old face, a sort of animal kindness.
Five minutes later he was desperately trying to rouse Barrett. Barrett
looked at him at last, and Lemaire saw that the brief delirium was past.
“What is it, Bob?” he asked, weakly. And Lemaire broke into a torrent of
words.
“The old Indian—the old Indian you said was a hoodoo—don’t you
remember? He’s here. He has caught us up, God knows how. He says his
canoe’ll hold three. He says that a very little way on there’s a big
camp, and that he’ll take us there—in a very little while. He says his
tribe is always kind to strangers, to white men. . . . I can’t make out
all he says, he’s queer in his head. But he’s dead sure of the
encampment. He says it’s always there. .”
Still talking eagerly, Lemaire snatched together a few things, got an
arm round Barrett, lifted him up to his feet, got him reeling to the
canoe, laid him in the bottom, and helped the old Indian push off. There
was no second paddle. There was no need of it. The current took them at
once.
The cold was increasing, as the wind died and the snow thinned. Lemaire
ceased to be conscious of the passing of time, but within himself the
stubborn life burned; he was strongly curious to know the end, to
discover what it was the wilderness had in store for him after five
years, to read the riddle of that relationship with himself which had
called him from the cities to this.
He was aware, at last, of a vast, golden light. The clouds were parting
behind the snow, and the sunset was gleaming through. It turned the snow
into a mist of rose and molten gold. The old Indian feebly turned the
canoe. It crept toward the shore.
“The lodges of my people,” muttered the old Indian. He stood erect, and
pointed with his bleached paddle. “They are very many—a very strong
tribe.”
Lemaire also looked, and saw.
Silently, the canoe took the half-frozen sand. Silently, very slowly,
Lemaire stepped out. The old Indian waited for him. It seemed that the
whole world was waiting for him.
He, like a man in a dream, moved slowly into the midst of a level
stretch of sand, and stood there. All about him, covering the whole
level, were the ridgepoles of wigwams, but the coverings had long fallen
away and rotted, and the sunset glowed through the gaunt poles. Lemaire
stretched out his hand, and touched the nearest; they fell into dust and
rot. . . . Under his feet he crushed the bones of the dead—the dead,
who had died fifty years before, and had waited for him here ever since,
under the blown sand and the ground willows . . . . “They’ve a song
about it, down along the Lamennais. For of all that tribe, only one
family, they say, escaped. All the others died . . . . they died like
flies, they died in heaps. And over the bones of the dead the tepees
stood for years . . . . No one ever went to that place any more. It was
cursed . . . . because of my grandfather . . . .”
He went back to the canoe. Whining like an old animal, the old Indian
was busied above Barrett. “The lodges of my people,” he muttered, “a
very strong tribe, and kind to the white men.”
Very gently, Lemaire put aside the blind old hands that touched
Barrett’s unconscious face. “Don’t wake him,” he said.