THE LAST SEARCH
In the morning the three friends started on foot to search the island.
They made Dutton’s old camp their starting-point and from there went
north on the east side of the island. There was no doubt about the
place having been the lost man’s camp-site, but all the signs about the
camp were old. The dog sniffed at some caribou bones, but showed no
indications of scenting recent footprints. They had gone about a mile
north, following a plain caribou trail, when Bruce raised his hand and
stopped short. “I smell fire,” he announced, turning back to his
companions. “Do you smell it, too, or is my imagination deceiving me?”
Ray and Ganawa could not smell it, but Tawny sniffed the air, and
looked at Bruce as if he would say, “You are right, I can smell it.”
The young man increased his pace, and very soon he turned back a second
time, his face flushed and his nostrils dilated. “Can’t you smell it?”
he asked anxiously. “It is getting stronger. I am sure now that I am
not mistaken.”
Ganawa smelled it, too, in fact the pungent odor of burning peat was
now quite plain. “My sons,” he explained, “I think it is a peat fire
started by lightning.”
But Bruce scarcely heard the old hunter’s explanation. “Let us go on,”
he spoke in a low voice. “It may be Jack Dutton’s fire.” And he walked
forward so briskly that his companions could hardly keep pace with him.
In a little while he stopped again. “Listen, friends,” he asked with a
trembling voice, “do you hear a noise? A man working in the timber?
With an ax? Listen! Can’t you hear it?” And Bruce walked ahead without
waiting for an answer. The sound ceased, and he remembered that Jack
Dutton had lost his ax. “I must be dreaming,” he thought. “I certainly
smelled a peat fire but I must have heard a caribou break through the
brush. Poor Jack is dead and gone!”
No, that was not a caribou. The sound came plainly now. Once, twice,
half a dozen times. It was the sound of a man breaking or cutting
branches with an ax or sledge or some other tool. Bruce forgot his
companions. He rushed forward until he stood within sight of a small
clearing. A man was swinging a stone sledge or ax breaking the branches
off a number of spruce-trees. And there were small peat fires burning
all around him. But the man swinging the stone ax was not Jack Dutton.
He was some fearsome wild giant. He was naked, except for a caribou
skin tied about his waist. His long dark hair was tied at the back of
his neck, and his face was covered with a heavy dark beard; and the
color of his skin was almost as dark as that of Ganawa.
Now the man raised up and drew his arm across his forehead to wipe off
the perspiration and for the first time Bruce caught the deep blue
color of the man’s eyes. And suddenly the whole man changed in the eyes
of Bruce. Gone was his tanned skin, his beard, and long hair. Bruce
rushed up to him, crying: “Merciful God! Jack Dutton! Is it you? Or is
it a wild man?”
When Ganawa and Ray came running to the clearing, Bruce and the wild
man were having a wrestling match, with Tawny savagely barking and
dancing around them, ready to take sides in what looked to him like a
real fight.
And then Jack Dutton had to tell his story. “We hunted around so long,”
he related, “after the thieves who stole our best fur and our gold ore
that we did not reach this island before the first part of September.
We had recovered the fur, but we never caught the thieves and our
specimens of gold we did not recover. When we had explored this island
and become convinced that the reddish sand wasn’t gold but just
ordinary sand, the autumn storms set in and we were afraid to risk
crossing the open lake in our canoe; and as the island was well stocked
with caribou, we decided to do something which no man had ever done: We
decided to winter on Caribou Island. It was lots of fun. We lived on
the fat of the land. We not only had an abundance of caribou meat, fat
and lean, just as we liked it; we also laid in a supply of smoked
geese, ducks and swans. We caught the finest whitefish and lake trout.
Early in fall we caught them with hook and line and after the lake
froze over we speared them through the ice, Indian fashion. We also had
a little flour and corn-meal and had a bushel of dried blueberries. We
lived like kings and had more fun than a hundred Indians.
“We had almost made up our minds to spend another year on the island,
for I never heard from you, and thought you had given up coming to the
Indian country. Then about six weeks ago something happened. One
morning I went up the island after a young caribou and my partner,
Pierre Landeau, took out the canoe to catch a few trout among the big
rocks south of the island. And that was the last I ever saw of Pierre
Landeau and his canoe.
“The first night I spent alone in camp I didn’t worry much as I came
home very late myself. I thought Pierre had just run in somewhere and
lain down to sleep. We often did that, because black flies and
mosquitoes never bothered us on our island. Next day I circled the
island in search of Pierre. I spent a week looking for him in every
corner of the island. He might be somewhere with a broken leg. I was
beside myself with grief, for Pierre and I had become close friends.
When I regained my balance of mind, my clothes had been torn to shreds
in my search through the brush and thickets, but I never saw a sign of
him.
“Pierre was one of the best canoeists in the country, but he had the
habit of ballasting his canoe with rocks when he went fishing alone. I
had often asked him to use logs instead of rocks. I have thought it all
out many times, and I think this is what happened: A squall filled his
canoe, it sunk to the bottom, and Pierre drowned in the ice cold water.
He had left our ax in the canoe. I was marooned on an island, which
nobody ever visited. I had no canoe, and no ax to build even a raft. I
had my gun and ammunition, but my only tool was a hunting-knife.
“For a few days I was in despair. I thought of building a raft of
driftwood, but most of the material was too small. The large logs were
still attached to the roots and I had no way of cutting and clearing
the trunks. Then I braced up. ‘I am going to get off,’ I said to
myself. ‘I will find a way.’ I had no ax, but I had fire; for each of
us always carried flint, steel, and tinder. I found a place where
lightning had started a fire and killed two or three dozen black
spruces big enough for a raft. These dry logs were just what I needed.
I built a fire around a tree near the ground, and when the tree fell, I
burnt off the top. With rawhide I tied a handle to a sharp rock, and
with my stone ax I knocked off any remaining branches. After I had
worked on this plan a day, I was sure that I could build a raft. I
planned to tie the logs together with watap, spruce roots. Rawhide
stretches when it gets wet, but watap does not. I wanted dry logs
because they float much better than green ones, and they are not nearly
so heavy. Remember I could not use logs that were too heavy for one man
to drag or carry.
“I figured that it might take me two days and a night to reach the
mainland with a favorable and gentle west wind. I intended to hoist a
sail, and I had planned to build a kind of bunk above the wash of the
waves, so I might snatch a little rest and sleep, if necessary. I don’t
know how my raft would have worked, but in about a week I should have
been ready to start, if you had not found me.
“Now, friends, come along to my camp. We’ll make feast and celebrate.”