By now it was the first week in March. The weather began to assume a new
aspect. During the winter months it had not snowed, for the moisture had
all been squeezed from the air, leaving it crisp, brilliant, sparkling.
Now the sun, long hesitant, at last began to swing up the sky. Far south
the warmer airs of spring were awakening the Kansas fields. Here in the
barren country the steel sky melted to a haze. During the day, when the
sun was up, the surface of the snow even softened a little, and a very
perceptible warmth allowed them to rest, their parkas thrown back,
without discomfort.
The men noticed this, and knew it as the precursor of the spring
snow-fall. Dick grew desperately uneasy, desperately anxious to push on,
to catch up before the complete obliteration of the trail, when his
resources would perforce run out for lack of an object to which to apply
them. He knew perfectly well that this must be what the Indian had
anticipated, the reason why he had dared to go out into the barren
grounds, and to his present helpless lack of a further expedient the
defaulter's confidence in the natural sequence seemed only too well
justified. Sam remained inscrutable.
The expected happened late one afternoon. All day the haze had
thickened, until at last, without definite transition, it had become a
cloud covering the entire sky. Then it had snowed. The great, clogging
flakes sifted down gently, ziz-zagging through the air like so many
pieces of paper. They impacted softly against the world, standing away
from each other and from the surface on which they alighted by the full
stretch of their crystal arms. In an hour three inches had fallen. The
hollows and depressions were filling to the level; the Trail was growing
indistinct.
Dick watched from the shelter of a growing despair. Never had he felt so
helpless. This thing was so simple, yet so effective; and nothing he
could do would nullify its results. As sometimes in a crisis a man will
give his whole attention to a trivial thing, so Dick fastened his gaze
on a single snow-shoe track on the edge of a covered bowlder. By it he
gauged the progress of the storm. When at last even his imagination
could not differentiate it from the surface on either side, he looked
up. The visible world was white and smooth and level. No faintest trace
of the Trail remained. East, west, north, south, lay uniformity. The
Indian had disappeared utterly from the face of the earth.
The storm lightened and faint streaks of light shot through the clouds.
"Well, let's be moving," said Sam.
"Moving where?" demanded Dick, bitterly. But the old man led forward the
hound.
"Remember the lake where we lost the track of that Chippewa?" he
inquired. "Well, a foot of light snow is nothing. Mush on, Mack!"
The hound sniffed deep, filling his nostrils with the feather snow,
which promptly he sneezed out. Then he swung off easily on his little
dog-trot, never at fault, never hesitant, picking up the turns and
twistings of the Indian's newer purpose as surely as a mind-reader the
concealed pin.
[Illustration: The hound sniffed deep, filling his nostrils with the
feather snow]
For Jingoss had been awaiting eagerly this fall of snow, as this
immediate change of direction showed. He was sure that now they could no
longer follow him. It was for this he had lured them farther and
farther into the wilderness, waiting for the great enemy of them all to
cover his track, to throw across his vanishing figure her ultimate
denial of their purposes. At once, convinced of his safety, he turned to
the west and southwest.
At just what moment he discovered that he was still followed it was
impossible to determine. But very shortly a certain indecision could be
read in the signs of his journeying. He turned to the south, changed his
mind, doubled on his tracks like a rabbit, finally, his purpose decided,
he shot away on the direct line again for the frozen reaches of
desolation in the north.
The moment's flicker of encouragement lighted by the success of the dog,
fell again to blackness as the three faced further incursion into the
land of starvation. They had allowed themselves for a moment to believe
that the Indian might now have reached the limit of his intention; that
now he might turn toward a chance at least of life. But this showed that
his purpose, or obstinacy or madness remained unchanged, and this newer
proof indicated that it possessed a depth of determination that might
lead to any extreme. They had to readjust themselves to the idea.
Perforce they had to extend their faith, had to believe in the caribou
herds. From every little rise they looked abroad, insisting on a
childish confidence in the existence of game. They could not afford to
take the reasonable view, could not afford to estimate the chances
against their encountering in all that vastness of space the single
pin-point where grazed abundance.
From time to time, thereafter, the snow fell. On the mere fact of their
persistence it had litle effect; but it clogged their snow-shoes, it
wore them down. A twig tripped them; and the efforts of all three were
needed to aid one to rise. A dozen steps were all they could accomplish
without rest; a dozen short, stumbling steps that were, nevertheless, so
many mile-posts in the progress to their final exhaustion. When one
fell, he lay huddled, unable at once to rally his vital forces to
attempt the exertion of regaining his feet. The day's journey was
pitifully short, pitifully inadequate to the imperious demands of that
onward-leading Trail, and yet each day's journey lessened the always
desperate chance of a return to the game country. In spite of that, it
never again crossed their minds that it might be well to abandon the
task. They might die, but it would be on the Trail, and the death clutch
of their fingers would still be extended toward the north, where dwelt
their enemy, and into whose protective arms their quarry had fled.
As his strength ebbed Dick Herron's energies concentrated more and more
to his monomania of pursuit. The round, full curves of his body had
shrunken to angles, the fresh tints of his skin had turned to leather,
the flesh of his cheeks had sunken, his teeth showed in the drawing back
of his lips. All these signs spoke of exhaustion and of ultimate
collapse. But as the case grew more desperate, he seemed to discover in
some unsuspected quality of his spirit, or perhaps merely of his youth,
a fitful and wonderful power. He collapsed from weakness, to be sure;
but in a moment his iron will, apparently angered to incandescence, got
him to his feet and on his way with an excess of energy. He helped the
others. He urged the dog. And then slowly the fictitious vigour ran out.
The light, the red, terrible glare of madness, faded from his eye; it
became glazed and lifeless; his shoulders dropped; his head hung; he
fell.
Gradually in the transition period between the darkness of winter and
the coming of spring the world took on an unearthly aspect. It became an
inferno of light without corresponding warmth, of blinding, flaring,
intolerable light reflected from the snow. It became luminous, as though
the ghosts of the ancient days of incandescence had revisited the
calendar. It was raw, new, huge, uncouth, embryonic, adapted to the
production of tremendous monsters, unfit for the habitation of tiny men
with delicate physical and mental adjustments. Only to the mind of a
Caliban could it be other than terrifying. Things grew to a size out of
all reason. The horizon was infinitely remote, lost in snow-mists,
fearful with the large-blown mirages of little things. Strange and
indeterminate somethings menaced on all sides, menaced in greater and
greater threat, until with actual proximity they mysteriously
disappeared, leaving behind them as a blind to conceal their real
identity such small matters as a stunted shrub, an exposed rock, the
shadow of a wind-rift on the snow. And low in the sky danced in unholy
revel the suns, sometimes as many as eight of them, gazing with the
abandoned red eyes of debauchees on the insignificant travellers groping
feebly amid phantasmagoria.
The great light, the dazzle, the glitter, the incessant movement of the
mirages, the shining of the mock suns, all these created an impression
of heat, of light, of the pleasantness of a warmed land. Yet still
persisted, only modified by the sun, the cold of the northern winter.
And this denial of appearance sufficed to render unreal all the round
globe, so that at any moment the eye anticipated its crumbling like a
dust apple, with its cold, its vastness, its emptiness, its hunger, its
indecently many suns, leaving the human soul in the abyss of space. The
North threw over them the power of her spell, so that to them the step
from life to death seemed a short, an easy, a natural one to take.
Nevertheless their souls made struggle, as did their bodies. They fought
down the feeling of illusion just as they had fought down the feelings
of hunger, of weariness, and of cold. Sam fashioned rough wooden
spectacles with tiny transverse slits through which to look, and these
they assumed against the snow-blindness. They kept a sharp watch for
freezing. Already their faces were blackened and parched by the frost,
and cracked through the thick skin down to the raw. Sam had frozen his
great toe, and had with his knife cut to the bone in order to prevent
mortification. They tried to talk a little in order to combat by unison
of spirit the dreadful influence the North was bringing to bear. They
gained ten feet as a saint of the early church gained his soul for
paradise.
Now it came to the point where they could no longer afford to eat their
pemmican. They boiled it, along with strips of the rawhide dog-harness,
and drank the soup. It sufficed not at all to appease the pain of their
hunger, nor appreciably did it give them strength, but somehow it fed
the vital spark. They endured fearful cramps. So far had their faculties
lost vigour that only by a distinct effort of the will could they focus
their eyes to the examination of any object.
Their obsessions of mind were now two. They followed the Trail; they
looked for the caribou herds. After a time the improbability became
tenuous. They actually expected the impossible, felt defrauded at not
obtaining it, cried out weakly against their ill fortune in not
encountering the herd that was probably two thousand miles away. In its
withholding the North seemed to play unfairly. She denied them the
chances of the game.
And the Trail! Not the freezing nor the starvation nor the illusion were
so potent in the deeper discouragement of the spirit as that. Always it
led on. They could see it; they could see its direction; that was all.
Tireless it ran on and on and on. For all they knew the Indian, hearty
and confident in his wilderness strength, might be watching them at
every moment, laughing at the feeble thirty feet their pain bought them,
gliding on swiftly in an hour farther than they could travel in a day.
This possibility persisted until, in their minds, it became the fact.
They endowed their enemy with all they themselves lacked; with strength,
with swiftness, with the sustenance of life. Yet never for a moment did
it occur to them to abandon the pursuit.
Sam was growing uncertain in his movements; Dick was plainly going mad.
The girl followed; that was all one could say, for whatever suffering
she proved was hidden beneath race stolidity, and more nobly beneath a
great devotion.
And then late one afternoon they came to a bloody spot on the snow. Here
Jingoss had killed. Here he had found what had been denied them, what
they needed so sorely. The North was on his side. He now had meat in
plenty, and meat meant strength, and strength meant swiftness, and
swiftness meant the safety of this world for him and the certainty of
the next for them. The tenuous hope that had persisted through all the
psychological pressure the North had brought to bear, the hope that they
had not even acknowledged to themselves, the hope based merely on the
circumstance that they did not _know_, was routed by this one fact. Now
they could no longer shelter behind the flimsy screen of an ignorance of
their enemy's condition. They knew. The most profound discouragement
descended on them.
But even yet they did not yield to the great antagonist. The strength of
meat lacked them: the strength of despair remained. A rapid dash might
bring them to grapples. And somewhere in the depths of their indomitable
spirits, somewhere in the line of their hardy, Anglo-Saxon descent,
they knew they would find the necessary vitality.
Stars glittered like sparks on polished steel. On the northwest wind
swooped the chill of the winter's end, and in that chill was the breath
of the North. Sam Bolton, crushed by the weight of a great exhaustion,
recognised the familiar menace, and raised his head, gazing long from
glazed eyes out into the Silent Places.
"Not yet!" he said aloud.