A week later, Smoke found himself among the jumbled ranges south of
Indian River. On the divide from the Klondike he had abandoned the
sled and packed his wolf-dogs. The six big huskies each carried fifty
pounds, and on his own back was an equal burden. Through the soft snow
he led the way, packing it down under his snow-shoes, and behind, in
single file, toiled the dogs.
He loved the life, the deep arctic winter, the silent wilderness, the
unending snow-surface unpressed by the foot of any man. About him
towered icy peaks unnamed and uncharted. No hunter's camp-smoke,
rising in the still air of the valleys, ever caught his eye. He, alone,
moved through the brooding quiet of the untravelled wastes; nor was he
oppressed by the solitude. He loved it all, the day's toil, the
bickering wolf-dogs, the making of the camp in the long twilight, the
leaping stars overhead and the flaming pageant of the aurora borealis.
Especially he loved his camp at the end of the day, and in it he saw a
picture which he ever yearned to paint and which he knew he would never
forget--a beaten place in the snow, where burned his fire; his bed, a
couple of rabbit-skin robes spread on fresh-chopped spruce-boughs; his
shelter, a stretched strip of canvas that caught and threw back the
heat of the fire; the blackened coffee-pot and pail resting on a length
of log, the moccasins propped on sticks to dry, the snow-shoes up-ended
in the snow; and across the fire the wolf-dogs snuggling to it for the
warmth, wistful and eager, furry and frost-rimed, with bushy tails
curled protectingly over their feet; and all about, pressed backward
but a space, the wall of encircling darkness.
At such times San Francisco, The Billow, and O'Hara seemed very far
away, lost in a remote past, shadows of dreams that had never happened.
He found it hard to believe that he had known any other life than this
of the wild, and harder still was it for him to reconcile himself to
the fact that he had once dabbled and dawdled in the Bohemian drift of
city life. Alone, with no one to talk to, he thought much, and deeply,
and simply. He was appalled by the wastage of his city years, by the
cheapness, now, of the philosophies of the schools and books, of the
clever cynicism of the studio and editorial room, of the cant of the
business men in their clubs. They knew neither food nor sleep, nor
health; nor could they ever possibly know the sting of real appetite,
the goodly ache of fatigue, nor the rush of mad strong blood that bit
like wine through all one's body as work was done.
And all the time this fine, wise, Spartan North Land had been here, and
he had never known. What puzzled him was, that, with such intrinsic
fitness, he had never heard the slightest calling whisper, had not
himself gone forth to seek. But this, too, he solved in time.
"Look here, Yellow-face, I've got it clear!"
The dog addressed lifted first one fore-foot and then the other with
quick, appeasing movements, curled his bush of a tail about them again,
and laughed across the fire.
"Herbert Spencer was nearly forty before he caught the vision of his
greatest efficiency and desire. I'm none so slow. I didn't have to
wait till I was thirty to catch mine. Right here is my efficiency and
desire. Almost, Yellow Face, do I wish I had been born a wolf-boy and
been brother all my days to you and yours."
For days he wandered through a chaos of canyons and divides which did
not yield themselves to any rational topographical plan. It was as if
they had been flung there by some cosmic joker. In vain he sought for
a creek or feeder that flowed truly south toward the McQuestion and the
Stewart. Then came a mountain storm that blew a blizzard across the
riff-raff of high and shallow divides. Above timber-line, fireless,
for two days, he struggled blindly to find lower levels. On the second
day he came out upon the rim of an enormous palisade. So thickly drove
the snow that he could not see the base of the wall, nor dared he
attempt the descent. He rolled himself in his robes and huddled the
dogs about him in the depths of a snow-drift, but did not permit
himself to sleep.
In the morning, the storm spent, he crawled out to investigate. A
quarter of a mile beneath him, beyond all mistake, lay a frozen,
snow-covered lake. About it, on every side, rose jagged peaks. It
answered the description. Blindly, he had found Surprise Lake.
"Well-named," he muttered, an hour later, as he came out upon its
margin. A clump of aged spruce was the only woods. On his way to it,
he stumbled upon three graves, snow-buried, but marked by hand-hewn
head-posts and undecipherable writing. On the edge of the woods was a
small ramshackle cabin. He pulled the latch and entered. In a corner,
on what had once been a bed of spruce-boughs, still wrapped in mangy
furs, that had rotted to fragments, lay a skeleton. The last visitor
to Surprise Lake, was Smoke's conclusion, as he picked up a lump of
gold as large as his doubled fist. Beside the lump was a pepper-can
filled with nuggets of the size of walnuts, rough-surfaced, showing no
signs of wash.
So true had the tale run, that Smoke accepted without question that the
source of the gold was the lake's bottom. Under many feet of ice and
inaccessible, there was nothing to be done, and at mid-day, from the
rim of the palisade, he took a farewell look back and down at his find.
"It's all right, Mr Lake," he said. "You just keep right on staying
there. I'm coming back to drain you--if that hoodoo doesn't catch me.
I don't know how I got here, but I'll know by the way I go out."