Chapter XIV

This camp was home, but in Dorothy’s mind it was a very empty and desolate place when both Ivan and Pete were absent. It is true that in her hours of solitude she learned more than a little of the mystery of the sea that rolled ceaselessly in front and of the everlasting hills behind, and through these, of the mysteries of life, but this did not wholly save her from loneliness. The tone of the land, coming true and plain to her ears, wakened an ardent need of companionship never fully experienced before.

So when Pete started to his hunting on the afternoon of the second day Dorothy expressed a wish to accompany him. The man’s delight knew no bounds; and soon they were tramping side by side over the tundra. It was not the kind of day that one ordinarily chooses for a walk abroad. The clouds were sullen and gray, low-hung so that the white peaks of the divide were obscured, and the seas were gray in their shadow; a brisk inshore wind blustered at them as they climbed the ridge, chilling them, threatening them with the travail of the winter that would soon strike down. The threat of winter carried through the whole tone of the day: neither of them could mistake it. But they were not depressed, only made thoughtful and, perhaps, brought to a finer companionship.

She was not afraid with Pete beside her. She felt that he was a veteran, not only by personal experience but by race-heritage, of many long wars against such savage, wilderness powers. She found herself falling into his mood, forgetting—for the hour—that he was a servant and she the mistress. She forgot all barriers of caste and simply enjoyed the man himself.

The face of the wilderness had changed since she had last walked abroad. In the cold hollows some of the tall grass had been beaten down and lay in silvered snarls, the hills themselves had lost some of their bright-green hue; and the leaves of the alder were golden from the alchemy of the frost. “Soon these creeks will freeze tight,” Pete told her, “and the snow will fall until this is just one great, glittering snowfield from the mountain tops to the sea.”

As they climbed farther into the hills, and the sense of solitude deepened about them and the grandeur of the peaks went into them, she fell ever more completely into his mood, and thus she was able to bring out some of his most treasured confidences, his most secret beliefs. He had undergone great stress—this man of the wild places—and he had had many lonely nights to meditate. Trial had built him up, molded his character, quickened rather than dulled his imagination, shaped his standards; and also it had immeasurably increased the depth and sphere of his thought.

“You wouldn’t know this place in a couple of months more—maybe before that. You can look till your eyes are tired, and not see a living thing. Of course there _are_ a few living things abroad—foxes and mink and otters—but they seem to stay out of sight. The big bears are under the snow and might just as well be dead. The ptarmigan and the snowshoe rabbits are too white to see, and the ptarmigans sometimes creep into the snow too.”

“It’s a dead world. It doesn’t seem as if it could be part of the world at all—the world that moves, and is full of people. It’s all like something dreamed of, long ago, and forgotten.”

“You know, Mrs. Newhall, the forests never have the atmosphere of these big, rocky barrens. No matter how lonely you are in the woods, you always have the trees—big friends who were there before you were, who know all that you know and more, and who talk to you when you want to listen and are still when you don’t. Little murmurings that the old-timers say you get to understand, after while; but when you do, it’s time to get out, because you’re heading for the madhouse from most people’s point of view. Those big trees break the wind for you, and hold back the storms, and their branches shade you from the sun. If you’d ask me the first blessing of the wild, I believe I’d say it was trees.

“Even when the snow lies on them you remember them—you remember there’s something alive there besides yourself, something that’s fighting the elements the same as you are. Here the snow covers up the alders and hides them, leaving just a snow pile, and the wind yells across and nothing dares to raise its head. But we’ll win in the end, Mrs. Newhall.”

“We win——?” She noted the far-away expression in his blue eyes; and her interest quickened. “I don’t know that I understand what you mean.”

“I don’t know that I do either, entirely.” He smiled boyishly, but was instantly sober again. “Maybe I can put it this way: that life is going to win against death. We’re on the side of life, and the wind and the air and the elements are on the side of death. We made them work for us, after a while, but in the beginning they’re all against us. Every little living organism is a cousin of ours, and though some of ’em prey on us from time to time, and various living things prey on each other, we’re all fighting the same fight—the fight for life. Every little organism has in it what we have in us—the fire, the knowledge, the spark—you can’t get any name for it—that is life; the impulse to spread out and keep going. We’ve won over most of the world, but we’ve got plenty of fighting to do yet on this stormy Peninsula.

“Maybe I’m not making myself clear. In the beginning this was a peninsula of barren rocks that rose up from the sea. All the legions of death were in control then—the snow fell, and nothing was left uncovered, and the storms swept over it and there wasn’t even an alder thicket to check the speed of the wind. The elements ruled supreme! But soon moss began to grow on the rocks, and kept growing, no matter how hard the elements—the winter’s cold and the frost—tried to stop it. And you can be sure they did try, because that moss was a foothold that will beat ’em and conquer ’em yet. Then grass began to grow in the drier places, and little animals came that lived on the grass roots; and as the soil deepened, the alder thickets began to grow on the hillsides. Where does it lead to, Mrs. Newhall? Sooner or later the soil will deepen, natural drainage will ensue, and there will be forests here. It’s not too far north for forests to grow—it’s just too rocky and too marshy—and too new. Then there will be big trees in these empty spaces, and no matter how hard the elements try to smother ’em with snow, their tall tops will still rise up to remind them that they’re licked, that life has come here to stay.

“The battle is won when the trees come. They hold the ground until men are ready to come too, hew out their farms and build their homes—standing, some places, through the ages with their heads still lifted up in defiance, and still groaning and complaining one to another about how old and tired they are getting; and all the time the soil is getting deeper and richer, so that men can reap big harvests when they have laid out their farms. Trees are first cousins of mine, Mrs. Newhall—big friends and big brothers that have held the fort! I don’t like to see any one waste them or cut them down when it isn’t necessary.

“In time, all this will be forested, and then it will be just a little while more until hard-boiled, hard-fisted frontiersmen come along this way, with their dogs and their live stock, and their lack of education in knowing how to give up. And then this won’t be an outcast world any more. It will become part of the family possessions.

“Of course, the powers of death will keep on fighting, long as they can. They’ll make things just as tough as possible for the first comers—the animals and birds—covering up their food in winter, persecuting ’em with storms. They’ll lay traps for human beings too—volcanos to shatter the earth’s surface and drown them with molten lava, bogs and snowslides, treacherous passes and hidden eddies in the rivers. There is always a trap for the unsuspecting. If they can’t do anything else, they’ll catch us out, sometime, away from shelter; and when we’re too tired to fight lay us out with cold. No one ever knows when they’re going to strike. But we’ll beat them in the end.”

She was rather sorry when a wolverine emerged from a brush covert and broke the train of Pete’s thought. This was the demon of the waste places—only a small animal, truly, yet so savage and ferocious that he menaces the caribou fawns on the barrens and kills the otter on the beach. They watched him with the great interest of true nature lovers. Once they saw a black fox whose expensive fur was already long and dense in preparation for winter; and Dorothy found him even more to be admired here in his native setting—as he raced across a patch of old snow and shimmered in living beauty—than as a neckpiece in a fashionable fur shop in her native city.

On the high, windy ridges and just below the long, white sweep of the main range they flushed up a small herd of caribou. They were out of rifle range before ever Pete got sight of them, far across the gulch, and it was almost incredible to Dorothy how quickly they disappeared. The country was open except for scattered clumps of alder brush, and it would seem that she could watch them for miles; yet their graceful forms were out of sight in a moment.

“Too bad we didn’t see them in time,” Pete commented. “We’re going to need lots of dry meat for the trip out in the dory—and for my winter supply. And, by George, we might get them yet——”

“Chase them down?” the girl asked.

“With an airship, yes! That’s a blind canyon they are running up, and it’s an old caribou trick to come swinging back. Mrs. Newhall, if you want to be in at the death, you’ll have to travel quick——”

“Go on. If I can’t keep up, I’ll wait for you.”

So they started at a fast pace down the steep slope of the ridge with the idea of crossing into the valley and meeting the herd as it swept back. Almost at once Dorothy saw that she could not keep pace. Pete was traveling down hill in long, swift steps. Soon he was down from the first, steep pitch of the ridge and had reached the edge of a deep gully in which a small creek flowed, such as they had followed their first day in the wilds.

From where Dorothy stood she saw that the man was disconcerted. The gully was evidently almost an abrupt precipice, too steep to descend easily; and if he should lower himself down without mishap, the time required to climb the opposite precipice would make him too late to intercept the returning herd. He hesitated but an instant, then turned rapidly up the edge of the gully, seeking an easier place to cross.

He soon reached a bank of old snow stretching completely across,—apparently a thick crust such as often endures in these latitudes from one year to another over the cold, deep gullies. He turned to laugh back at the girl, waved his arm gayly—a vivid, cheering picture that the stress of civilization would not soon wipe from her memory—then started to cross.

Her first impulse was to shout a warning. Did he not know that often such snowbanks melt from the bottom until they were merely fragile crusts? Her instinct was to stop him at no matter what cost of her dignity and caste-pride; to run after him, crying; to order him back; to stretch her arms to him. Her fear was so great that it partook of the nature of actual premonition. Yet he knew what he was doing. This was his home land; and if he took risks they were on his own head. It was not for her to show such interest in him, a guide. Some shadow of her old false standards had hold of her yet, and these repressed this noble impulse before she acted upon it. Partly through shame, partly through fear of what heart secret might be revealed to her, she strove to crush back the devastating fear that gripped her heart and to repel the cold of growing horror in her veins.

It was all folly, at best. The man knew what he was doing. He was advancing with some degree of caution at least,—one foot placed gingerly before he stepped. Surely if he let his zeal for hunting—always a passion with the Anglo-Saxon—carry him into danger, it was no cause for her to lose her cool poise on which she prided herself. Likely it was only a silly trick of the imagination.

Yet the shadow that had crossed and darkened her had been that of a predestined event. Her inner warning had been true; and with shameful falsehood to herself she had disregarded it. She had watched breathlessly, and suddenly she uttered a strange, small dim sound that the wind scattered into the vastness.

The elemental powers had been in ambush, just as Pete had said; and he had fallen into their trap. When he was halfway across, the fragile crust broke beneath his weight, and he dropped through as when the trap is sprung on the gallows.