Standing motionless in the dreadful gloom of blindness, insensible to
the growing cold, Bill made himself look his situation in the face. His
mind was no longer blunt and dull. It was cool, analytic; he balanced
one thing against another; he judged the per cent. of his chance. At
present it did not occur to him to give up. It is never the way of the
sons of the wilderness to yield without a fight. They know life in all
its travail and pain, but also they know the Cold and Darkness and Fear
that is death. No matter how long the odds are, the wilderness creature
fights to his last breath. Bill had always fought; his life had been a
great war of which birth was the reveille and death would be retreat.
He was wholly self-contained, his mind under perfect discipline. He
would figure it all out and seek the best way through. Long, weary
miles of trackless forest stretched between him and safety. There was
no food in this cabin, no blankets; and the fire was out. His
Twenty-three Mile cabin was only slightly less distant than the one he
had left. And through those endless drifts and interminable forests the
blind, unaided, could not find their way.
He could conceive of no circumstances whereby Virginia and Harold would
come to look for him short of another day and night. They did not
expect him back until the end of the present day; they could not
possible start forth to seek him until another daylight. And this man
knew what the forest and the cold would do to him in twenty-four hours.
Already the cold was getting to him.
For all that he had no food, he knew that if he could keep warm he could
survive until help came. Yet men cannot fast in these winter woods as
they can in the South. The simple matter of inner fuel is a desperate
and an essential thing. But he had no blankets, and without a fire he
would die, speedily and surely. He didn't deceive himself on this
point. He knew the northern winter only too well. A few hours of
suffering, then a slow warmth that stole through the veins and was the
herald of departure. He had been warmed through in the cabin, but that
warmth would soon pass away. He wondered if he could rebuild the fire.
He was suddenly shaken with terror at the thought that already he did
not know in what direction the fire and the cabin lay. He had become
turned around when he strode out to light the match. Instantly he began
to search for the cabin door. He went down on his hands in the snow,
groping, then moved in a slow, careful circle. Just one little second's
bewilderment, one variation from the circle, and he might lose the cabin
altogether. That meant _death!_ It could mean no other thing.
But in a moment the smoke blew into his face, and he advanced into the
ashes. The next moment, by circling again, he found the cabin door. He
leaned against it, breathing hard.
"It won't do, Bill," he told himself. "Hold steady--for one minute
more."
A spruce log, the last segment of the tree he had cut, lay somewhere a
few feet from his door. But he remembered it had fallen into a thicket
of evergreen: could he find it now? The log would not burn until it was
cut up with his ax: the ax would be hard to find in the pressing
darkness. Even if he found it, even if he could cut kindling with his
knife, he couldn't maintain a blaze. Building and mending a fire with
green timber is a cruel task even with vision; and he knew as well as he
knew the fact of his own life that it would be wholly impossible to the
blind.
Then what was left? Only a deeper, colder darkness than this he knew
now. Death was left--nothing else. In an hour, perhaps in a
half-hour, possibly not until the night had gone and come again with its
wind and its chill, the end would be the same. There was no light to
guide him home, no landmarks that he could see.
Then his thought seized upon an idea so fantastic, seemingly so
impossible of achievement, that at first he could not give it credence.
His mind had flashed to those unfortunates that had sometimes lost their
way in the dark chambers of an underground cavern and thence to that
method by which they guarded against this danger. These men carried
strings, unwinding them as they entered the cavern and following them
out. He had not carried a string-end here, but he had made a trail!
His snowshoe tracks probably were not yet obliterated under the
wind-blown snow. Could he feel his way along them back to the cabin?
The miles were many and long, but he wouldn't have to creep on hands and
knees all the way. Perhaps he could walk, stooped, touching the
depressions in the snow at every step. In his own soul he did not
believe that he had one chance in a hundred of making it through to
safety. Crawling, creeping, groping from track to track would wear him
out quickly. But was there any other course for him? If he didn't try
that, would he have any alternative other than to lie still and die? He
wasn't sure that he could even find the tracks in the snow, but if he
were able to encircle the cabin at a radius of fifty feet he could not
miss them. He groped about at the side of the cabin for his snowshoes.
He found them in a minute, then walked straight as he could fifty feet
out from the door. Once more he went on hands and feet, groping in the
icy snow. He started to make a great circle.
Fifteen feet farther he felt a break in the even surface. The snow had
been so soft and his shoes had sunk so deep that the powdered flakes the
wind had strewn during the night had only half filled his tracks. He
started to follow them down.
He walked stooped, groping with one hand, and after an endless time his
fingers dipped into dry, warm ashes.
Only for a fraction of a second did he fail to understand. And in the
darkness and the silence the man's breath caught in what was almost a
sob. He realized that he had followed the tracks in the wrong
direction, and had traced them straight to the cabin door that he had
just left.
It was only a matter of a hundred feet, but it was tragedy here. Once
more he started on the out-trail.
He soon found that he could not walk in his present stooped position.
Human flesh is not build to stand such a strain as that. Before he had
gone half a mile sharp pains began to attack him, viciously, in the back
and thighs. For all his magnificent strength--largely returned to him
in his hours of rest--he could not progress in this position more than
half a mile farther.
He took another course. He would walk ahead five paces, then drop down
and grope again for the tracks. Sometimes he found them at once, often
he had to go on his hands and feet and start to circle. Then, finding
the trail, he would mush on for five steps more.
Oh, the way was cruel! He could not see to avoid the stinging lash of
the spruce needles, the cruel blows of the branches. Already the
attempt began to partake of a quality of nightmare,--a blind and
stumbling advance over infinite difficulties through the infinity of
time. It was like some torment of an evil Hereafter,--eternal,
remorseless, wholly without hope. Many times he sprawled at full
length, and always it was harder to force himself to his feet.
Five steps on, halting and groping, then five steps more: thus the lone
figure journeyed through the winter forest. The seconds dragged into
the minutes, the minutes into hours. The cold deepened; likely it was
the bitter hour just after dawn. The hand with which he groped for the
tracks had lost all power of feeling.
He could not judge distance or time. Already it seemed to him that he
had been upon the journey endless hours. Because of the faint grayness
before his eyes he judged it was broad daylight: perhaps already the day
was giving over to darkness. He didn't know how far he had come. The
only thought he had left was always to count his terrible five steps,
and count five more.
Nothing else mattered. He had for the moment at least lost sight of all
other things. His thought was not so clear now; it seemed to him that
the forest was no longer silent. There were confused murmurings in his
ear, a curious confusion and perplexity in his brain. It was hard to
remember who he was and where he was going. Just to count his steps,
stoop, grope and find the snowshoe trail, then journey on again.
He tried to increase the number of steps between his gropings--first
six, then seven. Above seven, however, the trail was so hard to find
that time was lost rather than gained. Yes, he thought it was still
daylight. Sometimes he seemed to feel the sunlight on his face. He was
not cold now, and even the pain was gone from his hips and thighs.
He was mistaken in this, however. The pain still sent its fearful
messages to his brain, but in his growing stupor he was no longer aware
of them. Even his hand didn't hurt him now. He wondered if it were
frozen; yet it was still sensitive to the depressions in the drifts. It
could still grope through the snow and find the tracks.
"I can't go on!" his voice suddenly spoke aloud. "I can't go--any
more."
The words seemed to come from an inner man, without volition on his
part. He was a little amazed to hear them. Yet the time had not yet
come to stop and rest. The tracks still led him on.
Always, it seemed to him, he had to grope longer to find the
indentations in the snow. The simple reason was that the motor centers
of his brain had begun to be impaired by cold and exhaustion, and he
could no longer walk in a straight line. He found out, however, that
the trail usually lay to the right rather than to his left. He was
taking a shorter step with his left than with his right--the same
tendency that often makes a tried woodsman walk in a great circle--and
he thus bore constantly to the left. Soon it became necessary to drop
his formula down to six, then to the original five.
On and on, through the long hours. But the fight was almost done.
Exhaustion and hunger, but cold most of all, were swiftly breaking him
down. He advanced with staggering steps.
The indentations were more shallow now. The point where he had begun to
break through the snow crust, because of the softening snow, was passed
long ago: only because he was in a valley sheltered from the wind were
the tracks manifest at all.
The time came at last when he could no longer get upon his feet. And
now, like a Tithonus who could not die, he crawled along the snowshoe
trail on is hands and knees. "I can't go on," he told himself. "I'm
through!" Yet always his muscles made one movement more.
Suddenly he missed the trail. His hand groped in vain over the white
crust. He crept on a few more feet, then as ever, began to circle.
Soon his hand found an indentation in the snow crust, and he started to
creep forward again.
But slowly the conviction grew upon him that he was crawling in a small
circle,--the very circle he had just made. Some way, he had missed
the snowshoe trail. He did not remember how on his journey out he had
once been obliged to backtrack a hundred yards and start on at a new
angle. He had merely come to that point from which he had turned back.
He could not find the trail because he was at its end.
He could not remember that it was his own trail. How he came here, his
purpose and his destination, were all lost and forgotten in the
intricate mazes of the past. He had but one purpose, one theme,--to
keep to his trail an journey on. He would make a bigger circle. He
started to creep forward in the snow.
But as he waited, on hands and knees in the drifts, the Spirit of Mercy
came down to him and gave him one moment of lucid thought. All at once
full consciousness returned to him in a sweep as of a tide, and he
remembered all that had occurred. He saw all things in their exact
relations. And now he knew his course.
No longer would he struggle on, slave to the remorseless instinct of
self-preservation. Was there any glory, any happiness at his journey's
end that would pay him for the agony of one more forward step? He had
waged a mighty battle; but now--in a flash--he realized that the
spoil for which he had fought was not worth one moment of his hours of
pain. He remembered Virginia, Harold, the mind and its revelation: he
recalled that his mission had been merely an expedition after provisions
so that the two could go out of his life. Was there any reason why he
should fight for life, only to find death?
There was nothing in the distant cabin worth having now. He was
suddenly crushed with bitterness at the thought that he had made this
mighty effort for a goal not worth attaining. If he struggled on, even
to success, the only thing that waited him was a moment of farewell with
Virginia and the vision of her slipping away from him, into her lover's
arms. When she departed only the forest and the darkness would be left,
and he had these here.
It would be different if he felt Virginia still needed him. If he could
win her any happiness by fighting on, the struggle would still be worth
while. But she had Harold to show her the way through the winter woods.
It was true that they would have to rely on the fallen grizzly for meat:
an uncomfortable experience, but nothing to compare with any further
movement through the cruel drifts. Harold would come back and claim the
mine; perhaps he would even erect his own notice before his departure,
and the Rutheford family would know the full fruits of their crime of
long ago. But it didn't matter. The only thing that mattered now was
rest and sleep.
Slowly he sank down in the snow.