Chapter XXVII

Into the mouth of the broad Stikine the two voyageurs guided their laden bidarka; and it was like starting anew into the river of life. Fugitives though they were, they meant to make the best of this canoe-adventure, reconcile themselves to its hardships, and take all that uncertain pleasure which is to be derived from close communion with raw, robust nature. At least this free journeying through pleasant water vistas was more pleasant than pacing a darkened cell.

Both knew something about handling a canoe, but since Molly seemed to be the most skilled, she took the stern seat. When the river flowed quietly, they made their way by paddling; but a large part of the way the boat was “lined” up the bank—the two voyageurs walking along the water’s edge and pulling the bidarka by means of a rope fastened at bow and stern. When night lowered they pushed just far enough into the heavy timber to hide their supper fire, beside which they made a primitive camp.

Almost after the first hour they were in the deep wilderness. They saw no other living things but the wild creatures in the water and on the bank; hair seal and waterfowl, fur-bearer and big game. On the frowning cliffs of nearby mountains the flocks of wild goats looked like minute patches of last winter’s snow; and often a surly, peevish, sulky old grizzly, fishing on the bank, looked at them with sullen eyes, no doubt resenting their intrusion into his fastnesses. Once they glimpsed that scientific curiosity, the glacier bear, and although they had scarcely reached the edge of the moose country, they met on the fourth day out an old cow moose that was also a voyageur—swimming staunchly on some adventure across the wide river. This was the “backwoods” of which Jeff had often spoken with contempt—but that was before he had met them face to face. He would never scorn them hereafter. Before the end of the first day he learned that, compared to them, his proud strength was less than a leaf that the wind ravishes and hurls down.

This was the spruce forest, unbroken except for its waters and the heights of snowy ranges. Here were wonders past any man’s imagining: gentleness, and at the same time, savagery; deep peace, and in the same breath, the realization of never-ending war; desolation and eternal hospitality. He saw scenes of moving beauty: glaciers, cataracts, sequestered lakes, snowy peaks dreaming in the sun, hidden sloughs flashed over by wings of mallard and brant, rivulets creeping through ferns, a wooded sky line between him and a rising moon.

He tasted of the hardships of the trail, the rough life that is the only possible life in the wilderness. After paddling or pulling all day he knew what it was to make camp in the gray, bleak twilight: building fires, cutting fuel, spreading their canvas fly that was all they had in the way of a tent. He ate the rough food, much of it poorly cooked over the camp fire; laborer’s food, he thought it was, yet sustaining him in his toil and satisfying his strengthening body. When they made their permanent winter’s camp, almost a hundred miles up the river and a half mile back from its shore on the bank of a small stream, he knew the arduous labor of cabin-building.

Molly helped him a great deal, but the heavy work naturally fell to his greater strength. He had to cut trees and float the logs down the creek to the selected site, haul them out on the bank beyond high-water line, then lift them into place. He made many mistakes, he was awkward from sheer inexperience, and the work which an experienced woodsman could have done in three days took him almost a fortnight. He had to hunt meat—the caribou and moose that thronged these more open forests back from the coast line—packing it on his back into camp; and to lay in fuel for the Northern winter which was surely encroaching upon them.

There was nothing extraordinary about this toil. All frontiersmen were obliged to perform the same arduous tasks, and in addition clear the land for corn and run their trap lines into the forest. Yet it was all wonderfully enlightening to Jeff Sharp. By just such labor and hardship the steel of America had been forged.

He had always before taken America for granted. If he had thought about it at all, he assumed it had “just happened”; and the fact that it had been hewn out of the wilderness by his own forefathers had never occurred to him. He had never regarded America as a priceless heritage, won through just such mighty toil as he was doing now. Women and lords could pamper a culture, but by God! it took men to make a nation.

Trying though they sometimes were, these days in the wildwood were good for Jeff. From this far place he seemed to get a perspective on all of life; and his standards underwent revolutionary change. Things mattered deeply that before were as nothing; and many things he once set store by were now as dust. He did not believe he would continue to deplore the absence of a vested nobility in America. Nobility, meaning exalted birth, would not count for much out here, when there were trees to fell and logs to lift and cabins to build. It was even possible that the nation governed by and for a hardy, industrious, adventurous rank and file was in some ways to be preferred to that where a cultured aristocracy sat comfortably on the necks of crushed and hopeless peasantry. It was a revolutionary thought, yet it haunted his meditative hours.

He had never been proud of America. It was a backwoods nation, and even its oldest cities were but yesterday the haunts of wolf and deer. The mighty, marching spirit that had made America was shut from his sight; and thus he had not been inclined to appreciate the victories it had won. Now that he had cut a few trees himself he experienced a healthy wonder at the vast areas newly cleared and sown to grain. He made at last a surprising discovery: that America was rich and great purely because her eagle’s brood had made her so.

Perhaps such a land was worth a man’s loyalty, its ideals worth fighting for. Perhaps the brave and warlike people whose fortitude and daring had made it possible were worthy of his respect, even more than cultured lords and ladies far away. Since it had been ordained that the Union should stand and that the Southern people were not to establish a government exactly to fill their needs, perhaps the country as a whole could still be worth his allegiance. Perhaps one should feel pride in the mere fact of being an American, a representative of America’s strong and marching citizenry.

He found himself regarding Molly in a new light. He no longer patronized her, nor did he measure her by any scale other than that of intrinsic worth. She had served him a long time, but now the hour of reckoning was at hand. Fully appreciative at last of all she had done for him, he soberly concluded that it was now his time to serve, and this he did to the limit of his power.

He was willing to work his fingers to the bone to add to Molly’s comfort, meanwhile trying to save her all except the more pleasant tasks. He spared no pains to make the cabin comfortable for her, and in every way to prepare for the rigorous winter which was encroaching so swiftly upon them. He maintained a constant attitude of cheer so that she might be cheered, and his unvarying consideration and chivalry was actually a wonder—worthy of the best traditions of the South. In these passing weeks he did, indeed, pay some of the debt he owed her in the past, although he was not blind to the fact that her very presence here, beside him in his hour of trial, was an accumulative obligation that never could be fully paid. On one occasion he risked his own life to hold her when she slipped on a steep mountain side, and all of one chill, rainy, dismal night he spent at her side purely to administer to a vicious, raging toothache for which no soothing drugs could be found short of Sitka. His tenderness that night was even more dear to her because it had been called forth by a malady of no lasting seriousness and which was not a traditional occasion for chivalric service.

With the deepening cold and lengthening nights they knew a growing need of mutual service. The Northern wilderness is dreary and dark in the late fall, stricken by the threat of coming winter, and only by a fine, gay companionship could the two exiles escape its brooding mood.

They learned to find manna in the wilderness and to derive certain happiness from their sylvan home. The fear of capture by the Russians was largely past now. Since they had left the _Ethan Allen_ they had not so much as glimpsed a human form; and naturally Jeff could hardly believe his eyes when, one chill November morning, he saw unaccustomed traffic on the broad Stikine.

From the bank where he stood gaffing salmon for winter use he distinguished a black, moving speck far up the stream. At first he thought it was a piece of driftwood—perhaps a tree top such as often floated by like a green-sailed ship—but flotsam does not hasten toward the sea with the aid of flashing paddles. Peering intently, Jeff saw it was a canoe manned by a single voyageur; and without waiting for further scrutiny, he scrambled up the bank behind screening thickets.

A wild animal could have scarcely found cover more quickly. Even in his few weeks here he had picked up something of that strange furtiveness that marks all denizens of the hushed woods, a power to drift away like smoke into the maze of light and shadow of the underbrush. Now he lingered out of sight, watching intently.

The voyageur was plainly an Indian. White men do not as a rule race the salmon down the riffles with such slight effort; besides, his skin showed bronze against the long blue sheen behind. Following the deepest part of the channel the boat swung in and approached within fifty feet of him. And now Jeff recognized the brown, aquiline face past any possibility of doubt.

“Big Eagle!” he called suddenly. And he stepped out on to the bank so that the man could see him plainly.

Big Eagle started and whirled, but he did not snatch up his musket. He knew perfectly that the voice from the shore was not that of an enemy, simply because it issued from human vocal chords instead of from the maw of a gun. He had offered a good target, and it was the way of his foes to shoot first and speak afterward. He saw Jeff, and turning his canoe in a swift, graceful circle, he made a skillful landing just at the white man’s feet.

“Heap fighter!” the Indian observed eloquently. “Lick’m Roosian soldiers on Kolosh Ryeka trail.”

“That’s right, Big Eagle! What in the world you doing here?”

But the native was still absorbed in what seemed to him a miraculous meeting. “Big Eagle’s friend,” said he. “Where big, strong, skookem squaw?”

Jeff grinned. “Molly? She’s back at our cabin.”