This camp was home, but in Dorothy’s mind it was a very empty and
desolate place when both Ivan and Pete were absent. It is true that in
her hours of solitude she learned more than a little of the mystery of
the sea that rolled ceaselessly in front and of the everlasting hills
behind, and through these, of the mysteries of life, but this did not
wholly save her from loneliness. The tone of the land, coming true and
plain to her ears, wakened an ardent need of companionship never fully
experienced before.
So when Pete started to his hunting on the afternoon of the second day
Dorothy expressed a wish to accompany him. The man’s delight knew no
bounds; and soon they were tramping side by side over the tundra. It was
not the kind of day that one ordinarily chooses for a walk abroad. The
clouds were sullen and gray, low-hung so that the white peaks of the
divide were obscured, and the seas were gray in their shadow; a brisk
inshore wind blustered at them as they climbed the ridge, chilling them,
threatening them with the travail of the winter that would soon strike
down. The threat of winter carried through the whole tone of the day:
neither of them could mistake it. But they were not depressed, only made
thoughtful and, perhaps, brought to a finer companionship.
She was not afraid with Pete beside her. She felt that he was a veteran,
not only by personal experience but by race-heritage, of many long wars
against such savage, wilderness powers. She found herself falling into
his mood, forgetting—for the hour—that he was a servant and she the
mistress. She forgot all barriers of caste and simply enjoyed the man
himself.
The face of the wilderness had changed since she had last walked abroad.
In the cold hollows some of the tall grass had been beaten down and lay
in silvered snarls, the hills themselves had lost some of their
bright-green hue; and the leaves of the alder were golden from the
alchemy of the frost. “Soon these creeks will freeze tight,” Pete told
her, “and the snow will fall until this is just one great, glittering
snowfield from the mountain tops to the sea.”
As they climbed farther into the hills, and the sense of solitude
deepened about them and the grandeur of the peaks went into them, she
fell ever more completely into his mood, and thus she was able to bring
out some of his most treasured confidences, his most secret beliefs. He
had undergone great stress—this man of the wild places—and he had had
many lonely nights to meditate. Trial had built him up, molded his
character, quickened rather than dulled his imagination, shaped his
standards; and also it had immeasurably increased the depth and sphere
of his thought.
“You wouldn’t know this place in a couple of months more—maybe before
that. You can look till your eyes are tired, and not see a living thing.
Of course there _are_ a few living things abroad—foxes and mink and
otters—but they seem to stay out of sight. The big bears are under the
snow and might just as well be dead. The ptarmigan and the snowshoe
rabbits are too white to see, and the ptarmigans sometimes creep into
the snow too.”
“It’s a dead world. It doesn’t seem as if it could be part of the world
at all—the world that moves, and is full of people. It’s all like
something dreamed of, long ago, and forgotten.”
“You know, Mrs. Newhall, the forests never have the atmosphere of these
big, rocky barrens. No matter how lonely you are in the woods, you
always have the trees—big friends who were there before you were, who
know all that you know and more, and who talk to you when you want to
listen and are still when you don’t. Little murmurings that the
old-timers say you get to understand, after while; but when you do, it’s
time to get out, because you’re heading for the madhouse from most
people’s point of view. Those big trees break the wind for you, and hold
back the storms, and their branches shade you from the sun. If you’d ask
me the first blessing of the wild, I believe I’d say it was trees.
“Even when the snow lies on them you remember them—you remember there’s
something alive there besides yourself, something that’s fighting the
elements the same as you are. Here the snow covers up the alders and
hides them, leaving just a snow pile, and the wind yells across and
nothing dares to raise its head. But we’ll win in the end, Mrs.
Newhall.”
“We win——?” She noted the far-away expression in his blue eyes; and
her interest quickened. “I don’t know that I understand what you mean.”
“I don’t know that I do either, entirely.” He smiled boyishly, but was
instantly sober again. “Maybe I can put it this way: that life is going
to win against death. We’re on the side of life, and the wind and the
air and the elements are on the side of death. We made them work for us,
after a while, but in the beginning they’re all against us. Every little
living organism is a cousin of ours, and though some of ’em prey on us
from time to time, and various living things prey on each other, we’re
all fighting the same fight—the fight for life. Every little organism
has in it what we have in us—the fire, the knowledge, the spark—you
can’t get any name for it—that is life; the impulse to spread out and
keep going. We’ve won over most of the world, but we’ve got plenty of
fighting to do yet on this stormy Peninsula.
“Maybe I’m not making myself clear. In the beginning this was a
peninsula of barren rocks that rose up from the sea. All the legions of
death were in control then—the snow fell, and nothing was left
uncovered, and the storms swept over it and there wasn’t even an alder
thicket to check the speed of the wind. The elements ruled supreme! But
soon moss began to grow on the rocks, and kept growing, no matter how
hard the elements—the winter’s cold and the frost—tried to stop it.
And you can be sure they did try, because that moss was a foothold that
will beat ’em and conquer ’em yet. Then grass began to grow in the drier
places, and little animals came that lived on the grass roots; and as
the soil deepened, the alder thickets began to grow on the hillsides.
Where does it lead to, Mrs. Newhall? Sooner or later the soil will
deepen, natural drainage will ensue, and there will be forests here.
It’s not too far north for forests to grow—it’s just too rocky and too
marshy—and too new. Then there will be big trees in these empty spaces,
and no matter how hard the elements try to smother ’em with snow, their
tall tops will still rise up to remind them that they’re licked, that
life has come here to stay.
“The battle is won when the trees come. They hold the ground until men
are ready to come too, hew out their farms and build their
homes—standing, some places, through the ages with their heads still
lifted up in defiance, and still groaning and complaining one to another
about how old and tired they are getting; and all the time the soil is
getting deeper and richer, so that men can reap big harvests when they
have laid out their farms. Trees are first cousins of mine, Mrs.
Newhall—big friends and big brothers that have held the fort! I don’t
like to see any one waste them or cut them down when it isn’t necessary.
“In time, all this will be forested, and then it will be just a little
while more until hard-boiled, hard-fisted frontiersmen come along this
way, with their dogs and their live stock, and their lack of education
in knowing how to give up. And then this won’t be an outcast world any
more. It will become part of the family possessions.
“Of course, the powers of death will keep on fighting, long as they can.
They’ll make things just as tough as possible for the first comers—the
animals and birds—covering up their food in winter, persecuting ’em
with storms. They’ll lay traps for human beings too—volcanos to shatter
the earth’s surface and drown them with molten lava, bogs and
snowslides, treacherous passes and hidden eddies in the rivers. There is
always a trap for the unsuspecting. If they can’t do anything else,
they’ll catch us out, sometime, away from shelter; and when we’re too
tired to fight lay us out with cold. No one ever knows when they’re
going to strike. But we’ll beat them in the end.”
She was rather sorry when a wolverine emerged from a brush covert and
broke the train of Pete’s thought. This was the demon of the waste
places—only a small animal, truly, yet so savage and ferocious that he
menaces the caribou fawns on the barrens and kills the otter on the
beach. They watched him with the great interest of true nature lovers.
Once they saw a black fox whose expensive fur was already long and dense
in preparation for winter; and Dorothy found him even more to be admired
here in his native setting—as he raced across a patch of old snow and
shimmered in living beauty—than as a neckpiece in a fashionable fur
shop in her native city.
On the high, windy ridges and just below the long, white sweep of the
main range they flushed up a small herd of caribou. They were out of
rifle range before ever Pete got sight of them, far across the gulch,
and it was almost incredible to Dorothy how quickly they disappeared.
The country was open except for scattered clumps of alder brush, and it
would seem that she could watch them for miles; yet their graceful forms
were out of sight in a moment.
“Too bad we didn’t see them in time,” Pete commented. “We’re going to
need lots of dry meat for the trip out in the dory—and for my winter
supply. And, by George, we might get them yet——”
“Chase them down?” the girl asked.
“With an airship, yes! That’s a blind canyon they are running up, and
it’s an old caribou trick to come swinging back. Mrs. Newhall, if you
want to be in at the death, you’ll have to travel quick——”
“Go on. If I can’t keep up, I’ll wait for you.”
So they started at a fast pace down the steep slope of the ridge with
the idea of crossing into the valley and meeting the herd as it swept
back. Almost at once Dorothy saw that she could not keep pace. Pete was
traveling down hill in long, swift steps. Soon he was down from the
first, steep pitch of the ridge and had reached the edge of a deep gully
in which a small creek flowed, such as they had followed their first day
in the wilds.
From where Dorothy stood she saw that the man was disconcerted. The
gully was evidently almost an abrupt precipice, too steep to descend
easily; and if he should lower himself down without mishap, the time
required to climb the opposite precipice would make him too late to
intercept the returning herd. He hesitated but an instant, then turned
rapidly up the edge of the gully, seeking an easier place to cross.
He soon reached a bank of old snow stretching completely
across,—apparently a thick crust such as often endures in these
latitudes from one year to another over the cold, deep gullies. He
turned to laugh back at the girl, waved his arm gayly—a vivid, cheering
picture that the stress of civilization would not soon wipe from her
memory—then started to cross.
Her first impulse was to shout a warning. Did he not know that often
such snowbanks melt from the bottom until they were merely fragile
crusts? Her instinct was to stop him at no matter what cost of her
dignity and caste-pride; to run after him, crying; to order him back; to
stretch her arms to him. Her fear was so great that it partook of the
nature of actual premonition. Yet he knew what he was doing. This was
his home land; and if he took risks they were on his own head. It was
not for her to show such interest in him, a guide. Some shadow of her
old false standards had hold of her yet, and these repressed this noble
impulse before she acted upon it. Partly through shame, partly through
fear of what heart secret might be revealed to her, she strove to crush
back the devastating fear that gripped her heart and to repel the cold
of growing horror in her veins.
It was all folly, at best. The man knew what he was doing. He was
advancing with some degree of caution at least,—one foot placed
gingerly before he stepped. Surely if he let his zeal for
hunting—always a passion with the Anglo-Saxon—carry him into danger,
it was no cause for her to lose her cool poise on which she prided
herself. Likely it was only a silly trick of the imagination.
Yet the shadow that had crossed and darkened her had been that of a
predestined event. Her inner warning had been true; and with shameful
falsehood to herself she had disregarded it. She had watched
breathlessly, and suddenly she uttered a strange, small dim sound that
the wind scattered into the vastness.
The elemental powers had been in ambush, just as Pete had said; and he
had fallen into their trap. When he was halfway across, the fragile
crust broke beneath his weight, and he dropped through as when the trap
is sprung on the gallows.