IN THE HEART OF THE SILENT LAND
Waseche Bill and his little partner followed blindly the directions upon
Carlson's map, which led them across snow as trackless and unscarred as
the day it fell.
"Fr. C 3 N 3d. to FLAT MT. C 2 on rock-ledge at flagpole," read the
directions on the map found in the _cache_, which was the exact reverse
of the directions in the notebook which read: "Fr. FLAT MT. C 2. S 3d.
to C 3. in spruce grove at _igloo_." The man had carefully mapped his
trail as he proceeded, and then reversed the notes for the benefit of
any chance backtrailer.
So far, the trail of Carlson was but a projection of their own trail in
search of the Tatonduk divide, and for two days they mushed steadily
northward, skirting the great range that lay to the westward. To the
north-east and east, as far as the eye could reach, stretched vast level
snow barrens, and to the southward rolled the low-lying foothills toward
the glacier-studded range which was still visible, its jagged peaks
flashing blue-white in the distance. Hour after hour they threaded in
and out among the foothills, avoiding the deeper ravines, and with tail
rope and gee pole working the outfit across coulees.
Toward evening of the third day, both Connie and Waseche scanned the
range eagerly for a glimpse of the flat mountain, but the early winter
darkness settled about them without the sight of a mountain that could,
by any stretch of imagination, be called "flat."
"Prob'ly we-all ah mushin' sloweh than what he done," ventured Waseche,
as he peered into the gloom from the top of a rounded hill. "I hate to
camp, an' I hate to mush on an' pass the landmahk in the dahk. It's mo'
or less guesswo'k, followin' a cold trail. Landmahks change some, an'
even if they don't, the time of yeah makes a diffe'nce, an' then,
things looks diffe'nt to one man from what they look to anotheh.
Likewise, things looks diffe'nt nights, than daytimes. Of co'se, a flat
mountain couldn't hahdly look like nothin' else but a flat mountain
nohow, but yo' cain't tell----"
"I'm sure we haven't passed it," interrupted the boy.
"No, we ain't _passed_ it. What's pestehin' me is, did Carlson know
whetheh he mushed three days or ten? An' whetheh he c'd tell a flat
mountain from a peaked one? I've saw fog hang so that eveh' mountain yo'
seen looked flat--cut right squah acrost in the middle."
"Let's mush on for a couple of hours. There is light enough to see the
mountains, and we might as well be lost one place as another." The man
grinned at the philosophical suggestion.
"All right, kid. Keep yo' eyes peeled, an' when yo' get enough jest yelp
an' we 'll camp."
Hour after hour they pushed northward among the little hills. The sled
runners slipped smoothly over the hard, dry snow, and overhead a
million stars glittered in cold brilliance against the blue-black pall
of the night sky. And in all the vast solitude of the great white world
the only living things were the fur-clad man and boy and the
shaggy-coated dogs that drew the sleds steadily northward. Gradually it
grew lighter and the stars paled before the increasing glow of the
aurora. Broad banners flashed and waned in the heavens, and thin
streamers of changing lights writhed and twisted sinuously, illuminating
the drear landscape with a dull, uncanny light in which objects appeared
strangely distorted and unreal.
Was it possible that other eyes had looked upon these cold, dead
mountains? That other feet had trodden the snows of this forsaken
world-waste? It seemed to the tired boy that they had passed the
uttermost reach of men, and gazed for the first time upon a new and
lifeless land.
They eased out of a ravine on a long slant, and at the top Connie halted
McDougall's _malamutes_ and waited for Waseche Bill, whose sled had
nosed deep into the soft snow of a huge drift. The man wrenched it free
and urged on his dogs, which humped to the pull and clawed their way to
the top, sending little showers of flinty snow rustling into the ravine.
As the boy started the big ten-team, the light grew suddenly brighter.
The whole North seemed bathed in a weird, greenish glow. Directly before
him a broad banner flashed and blazed, and in the bright flare of light,
upon the very edge of the vast frozen plain, loomed a great white
mountain whose top seemed sheared by a single stroke of a giant sword!
The boy's heart leaped with joy.
"The flat mountain! It's here! It's here!" he cried, and up over the rim
of the ravine rushed Waseche Bill, and in silence they gazed upon the
welcome sight until the light disappeared in a final blaze of glory--and
it was night.
_Cache_ number two was easily located upon a shelf of rock before which
a wind-whipped piece of cloth fluttered dejectedly at the top of a
sapling firmly embedded in the snow. In spite of the increased
confidence in Carlson's map, it was not without some trepidation that
the partners set out the following day upon the second lap of the dead
man's lonely trail.
"Fr. FLAT MT. C 2. DUE E 4d C 1 STONE CAIRN RT. BANK FORK OF RIV. FOL.
RIV. N-E." were the directions upon the trail map pinned with a sliver
to a caribou haunch. It had been well enough to skirt the great mountain
range beyond which, to the westward, lay Alaska. It was quite another
thing, however, to turn their backs upon this range and strike due east
across the vast snow-covered plain which stretched, far as the eye could
reach, as level as the surface of a frozen sea. For four days they must
mush eastward across this white expanse, without so much as a hill or a
thicket to guide--must hold, by compass alone, a course so true that it
would bring them, at the end of four days, to a certain solitary rock
cairn at the fork of an unnamed river. Even the hardened old _tillicum_,
Waseche Bill, hesitated as the dogs stood harnessed, awaiting the word
of command, and glanced questioningly into the upturned face of the
small boy:
"It's a long shot, son, what do yo' say?" His answer was the thin whine
of the boy's long-lashed dog whip that ended in a vicious crack at the
ears of McDougall's leaders:
"Mush-u, mush-u, hi!" and the boy whirled the long ten-team away from
the mountains, straight into the heart of the Lillimuit.
The crust of the snow that lay deep over the frozen muskeg and tundra
was ideal for sled-travel and, of course, rendered unnecessary the use
of snowshoes. All day long the steel-blue, cold fog hung in the north,
obliterating the line of the flat horizon. The bitter wind that whipped
and tore out of the Arctic died down at nightfall and, for the first
time in their lives, the two felt the awful depression of the real
Arctic silence. Mountain men, these, used to the mighty uproar of
frost-tortured nature. The silence they knew was punctuated by the long
crash of snow cornices as they tore loose from mountain crags and
plunged into deep valleys to the roar of a riven forest; by the sudden
boom of exploding trees; and the wild bellowing of lake ice, split from
shore to wooded shore in the mighty grip of the frost king.
But here, on the frozen muskeg, was no sound--only the dead, unearthly
silence that pressed upon them like an all-pervading _thing_. Closer and
closer it pressed, until their lungs breathed, not air--but
_silence_--the dreaded, surcharged silence of the void--the uncanny
silence that has caused strong men to leap, screaming and shrieking,
upon it and, bare-handed, seek to wring its awful secrets from its
heart--and then to fall back upon the snow and maunder and laugh at the
blood stains where the claw-like nails have bitten deep into their
palms--but they feel no pain and gloat foolishly--for to their poor,
tortured brains this blood is the heart's blood of the Silence of the
North.
On the fourth day the ground rose slightly from the low level of the
muskeg. All day they traversed long, low hills--which were not hills at
all, but the roll of the barren ground, and in the evening came upon the
bank of the river, but whether above or below the fork they could not
tell.
"We'll follow it down--nawthwahd--fo' that's what the map says, an' if
we do miss the _cache_, we'll strike the Ignatook camp in two mo' days.
We got grub enough if a stawm don't hit us. I sho' am glad we-all didn't
get catched out yondeh." The man's eyes swept the wide expanse of
barrens that lay between them and the distant peaks. "It's a good
hund'ed an' fifty mile acrost them flats--we sho' was lucky!"
The ice-locked river upon which they found themselves was a stream of
considerable size which flowed north, with a decided trend to the
eastward. The muskeg and tundra had given place to the rocky formation
of the barren lands which cropped out upon the banks of the river in
rock reefs and ledges. Scrub trees and bushes in sickly patches fringed
the banks, their leafless branches rattling in the wind.
An hour's travel on the snow-covered ice of the river brought them to a
sharp bend where a river flowed in from the eastward, and there, almost
at the confluence of the two streams, stood the solitary rock cairn, a
monument some seven feet in height and five feet in diameter at its
base.
"He didn't _cache_ no great sight of meat heah," observed Waseche as,
one by one, they removed the stones of the cairn. "We got a plenty, but
I counted on this fo' the dawgs." Even as he spoke, they came upon a
flat stone midway of the pile, which required their combined strength to
displace. With a harsh, grating sound it slid sidewise into the snow,
disclosing a considerable cavity, in the centre of which lay, not the
expected _cache_ of caribou meat, but a human skull, whose fleshless
jaws grinned into their startled faces in sardonic mockery. Beside the
skull lay a leaf torn from Carlson's notebook, and in Carlson's
handwriting the words:
FOL. RIV. 2d N to CREEK OF STEAM. FOL. UP CREEK 2m. CAMP W BANK IN
OLD MINE TUNNEL. DISCOVERY 100ft. E. TUNNEL MOUTH. 1 ABOVE
CLAIM--STAKED FOR PETE MATEESE. LOOK OUT FOR WHITE INJUNS.
"Ol' mine tunnel! White Injuns!" exclaimed Waseche. "I tell yo' what,
son: so fah, Carlson's maps has hit out, but when he begins writin'
about white Injuns an' ol' mine tunnels, an' _cachin'_ skull bones,
'stead of meat! It's jest as I tol' yo'! We-all got to keep on now, but
I sho' wisht we'd neveh found Carlson an' his crazy maps."
"Whose skull do you suppose it is? And why did he _cache_ it, I wonder?"
asked Connie, as he handled gingerly the gruesome object.
"Seahch me!" said the man, glancing at the weather blackened skull.
"Come on, le's mush."
As they advanced the surface of the surrounding land became more broken
and the river descended rapidly in a series of falls, enclosed by the
freezing spray, in huge irregular masses of green-hued ice, which
impeded their progress and taxed to the utmost the skill of the drivers
and the tricks of the trail-wise dogs in preventing the sleds from being
dashed to pieces upon the slope of the ice domes, from whose hollow
interiors came the muffled roar of the plunging falls.
The dogs were again on half ration, and even this was a serious drain
upon the supply of meat. The walls of the river became higher until, on
the second day, they were threading a veritable canyon. At noon the
light dimmed suddenly, and the two gazed in surprise at the sun which
glowed with a sickly, vapoury glare, while all about them the air was
filled with tiny glittering frost flakes, which lay thick and fluffy
under their feet and collected in diamond flashing clusters on the rocks
and bushes of the canyon walls.
"It's snowing!" cried Connie, excitedly. "Snowing at forty below!"
"'Tain't snow, son. It's frozen fog, an' I cain't sense it. I c'n see
how it might thick up an' snow, even at forty below, but fog! Doggone
it! It takes wahm weatheh to _make_ fog--_an' it ain't wahm!_"
Toggling the lead dogs, they selected a spot where the wall of the
canyon was riven by the deep gash of a small feeder and climbed
laboriously to the top for a better view of the puzzling phenomenon.
Scarcely a quarter of a mile ahead a great bank of fog ascended, rolling
and twisting toward the heavens. Slowly it rose from out of the snow,
spreading into the motionless air like a giant mushroom of glittering
diamond points which danced merrily earthward, converting the whole
landscape into a mystic tinsel world. Far to the westward the bank
extended, winding and twisting like some great living monster.
"It's the creek of the steam!" cried Waseche Bill. "It's theah wheah
Carlson's camp is." But, so entranced was the boy with the weird beauty
of the scene, that he scarcely heard. He pointed excitedly toward a low
hill whose sides were wooded with the scrub timber of the country, where
each stunted tree, each limb and spiney leaf curved gracefully under its
weight of flashing rime. Towers, battlements, and spires glinted in the
brilliant splendour, for, out of the direct line of the fog bank that
hung above the course of the narrow creek, the sun shone as clear and
bright as the low-hung winter sun of the sub-Arctic ever does shine, and
its slanting rays flashed sharply from a billion tiny facets.
"It's the frozen forest that he wrote about!" exclaimed the delighted
boy. "It's the most beautiful thing in the world! Now, aren't you glad
you came?" But Waseche Bill shook his head dubiously, and began the
descent to the canyon.
"Why! Where are the dogs!" cried the boy, who was first upon the surface
of the river. Waseche hurried to his side; sure enough, neither dogs nor
sleds were in sight and the man leaped forward to examine the thick
carpet of rime.
[Illustration: "The two partners stared open-mouthed at the apparition.
_The face was white!_"]
"It's Injuns!" he announced. "Nine or ten of 'em, an' they headed
nawth!" And, even as he spoke, a grotesquely feathered, beaver-topped
head appeared above a frost-coated rock, almost at his elbow, and the
two partners stared open-mouthed at the apparition. _The face was
white!_