The Isle of Retribution/Chapter 21

began a week of trial for Ned. For the first time in his life he was thrown wholly upon his own resources, standing or falling by his own worth. Should he fall insensible in the snow there were none to seek him and bring him into shelter. If he should go astray and miss the cabins there was no one to set him on the right path again. He was meeting the wilderness alone, and face to face.

Cooking his meals, cutting the fuel and building the fires that kept him warm, meeting the storm in its fury and fighting a lone fight from the gray of dawn to the day's gray close, Ned made the long circuit of his trap line. The qualities that carried him far in his home city—such things as wealth and position and culture—were as dust here. His reliance now was the axe on his shoulder and the hunting knife at his hip; but most of all his own stamina, his own steadfastness, the cunning of his brain and the strength of his sinews. And every day found him stronger and better able to meet the next.

Certain muscles most used in tugging through the snow, seemingly worn to shreds the first day's march, strengthened under the stress, and he found he did his daily stint with ever greater ease. Ever he handled the little, daily crises with greater skill, and this with less loss of vital energy: the crossing of a swollen stream or a perilous morass; or the climbing of a slippery glacier. Every day the wilderness unrolled its pages to his eyes.

The little daily encounters with the wild life were ever a greater delight. He found pleasure in trying to guess the identity of the lesser, scurrying people he met on the trail: he found a moving beauty in the far-off glimpse of the running pack, in a vivid silhouette on the ridge at twilight; the sight of a bull caribou tossing his far-spreading antlers sent his blood moving fast in his veins. By the grace of the Red Gods he was afforded the excitement of being obliged to backtrack two hundred yards in order gracefully to yield the trail to a great, surly Alaskan bear already seeking a lair for his winter sleep.

He crossed the divide to Forks cabin, followed the springs to Thirty-Mile cabin, descended to the sea, and along the shore to the home cabin, just as he had been told to do. He put out his traps as he went in what seemed to him the most likely places, using every wile Doomsdorf had taught him to in crease his chances for a catch. In spite of the fact that he went alone, the second day was ever so much easier than the first; and he came into the home cabin only painfully tired, but not absolutely exhausted, on the fifth. Of course he didn't forget that, other things being equal, these first five days were his easiest days. Actual trapping had not yet started: he had not been obliged to stop, thaw out and skin such larger animals as would be found dead in his traps; nor yet work late into the night fleshing and stretching the pelts. A greater factor was the moderate weather: light snowfall and temperature above freezing, a considerable variance from the deadly blizzards that would ensue.

All through the five days he had strengthened himself with the thought that Lenore awaited him at the journey's end; and she had never seemed so lovely to him as when, returning in the gray twilight, he saw her standing framed in the lighted doorway of the home cabin. She had suffered no ill-treatment in his absence. The great fear that had been upon his heart was groundless, after all: her face was fresh, her eyes bright, she was not lost in despair. In spite of his aching muscles, his face lighted with hopefulness and relief that was almost happiness.

Doubtless it was his own eagerness that made her seem so slow in coming into his arms; and his own great fire that caused her to seem to lack warmth. He had been boyishly anticipatory, foolishly exultant. Yet it was all sweet enough. The girl fluttered a single instant in his arms, and he felt repaid for everything.

“Let me go,” she whispered tensely, when his arms tried to hold her. “Don't let Doomsdorf see. He might kill you”

But it came about that she didn't finish the warning. Presently she felt his arms turn to steel. She felt herself thrust back until her eyes looked straight into his.

She had never seen Ned in this mood before. Indeed she couldn't ever remember experiencing the sensation that swept her now: secretly appalled at him, burnt with his fire, wavering beneath his will. She didn't know he had arms like that. His face, when she tried to meet it, hardly seemed his own. The flesh was like gray iron, the eyes cold as stones.

“What has Doomsdorf to do with it?” he demanded. “Has he any claim on you?”

“Of course not,” she hastened to reply. “He's treated me as well as could be expected. But you know—he makes claims on us all.”

The fact could not be denied. Ned turned from her, nestling to the fire for warmth.

The happiness he had expected in this long-awaited night had failed to materialize. He ate his great meal, sat awhile in sporadic conversation with the girl in the snug cabin; then went wearily to his blankets. He hardly knew what was missing. Her beauty was no less; it was enhanced, if anything, by the flush of the wind on her cheeks. Yet she didn't understand what he had been doing, what he had been through. He held her interest but slightly as he told of his adventures on the trail. When in turn she talked to him, it was of her own wrongs; and the old quick, eager sympathy somehow failed to reach his heart. But it was all he could expect on this terrible island. He must thank what gods there were for the one kiss she had given him—and be content. All happiness was clouded here.

Often, in the little hour after supper about the stove, he wakened from his revery to find that he had been thinking about Bess. She had come in from her line the previous day and had gone out again; and he had not dreamed that her absence could leave such a gap in their little circle. He had hardly regarded her at all, yet he found himself missing her. She was always so high-spirited, encouraging him with her own high heart. Of course the very fact that they were just three, exiled among foes, would make her absence keenly felt. The mere bond of common humanity would do that. Yet he found himself wishing that he had shown greater appreciation of her kindness, her courage, her sweet solicitude for him. On her lonely trap line out in the wastes it was as if she had gone for ever. He found himself resenting the fact that Lenore had but cold assent to his praise of her, wholly unappreciative of the fact that her own ease was due largely to Bess's offer to do additional work.

But his blankets gave him slumber, and he rose in the early hours, breakfasted, and started out on his lonely trap line. He was not a little excited as to the results of this morning's tramp. Every skin he took was his, to protect his own body from the bitter, impending cold.

The first few traps had not been sprung. Outwitting the wild creatures was seemingly not the easy thing he had anticipated. The bait had been stolen from a marten trap at the edge of the barrens, but the jaws had failed to go home, and a subsequent light snowfall had concealed the tracks by which he might have identified the thief. Was this the answer to his high hopes? But he had cause to halt when he neared the trap on the beaver dam.

For a moment he couldn't locate the trap. Then he saw that the wire, fastened securely to the bank, had become mysteriously taut. Not daring to hope he began to tug it in.

At the end of the wire he found his trap, and in the trap was a large beaver, drowned and in prime condition.

The moment was really a significant one for Ned. The little traps of steel, placed here and there through the wilderness, had seemed a doubtful project at best; but now they had shown results. The incident gave him added confidence in himself and his ability to battle successfully these perilous wilds. The rich, warm skin would help to clothe him, and he would easily catch others to complete his wardrobe.

The beaver was of course not frozen; and the skin stripped off easily under the little, sawing strokes of his skinning knife. He was rather surprised at its size. It came off nearly round, and it would stretch fully thirty-two inches in diameter. Washing it carefully, he put it over his back and started on.

Other traps yielded pelts in his long day's march. The trap on the beaver landing contained a muskrat; he found several more of the same furred rodents in his traps along the creek; and small skins though they were, he had a place for every one. Once an otter, caught securely by the hind leg, showed fight and had to be dispatched by a blow on the head with a club; and once he was startled when a mink, scarcely larger than his hand, leaped from the snowy weeds, trap and all, straight for his ankle.

There was no more ferocious creature in all the mammalian world than this. “Little Death,” was a name for him in an aboriginal tongue; and it was perfectly in accord with his disposition. His eyes were scarlet; he opened his rapacious jaws so wide that they resembled those of a deadly serpent; he screamed again and again in the most appalling fury. This was the demon of the Little People: the snaky Stealth that murdered the nestlings in the dead of night; the cruel and remorseless hunter whose red eyes froze the snowshoe hare with terror.

Tired out, barely able to stand erect, yet wholly content with his day's catch, Ned made the cabin in the twilight, built his fire, and cooked his meager supper. After supper he skinned out such little animals as he had not taken time to skin on the trail, fleshed and stretched his pelts, then hung them up to dry. He was almost too tired to remove his wet garments when the work was done. He hardly remembered drawing the blankets over him.

Thus ended the first of a long series of arduous days. The hardship was incomparably greater than that endured by the great run of those hardy men, the northern trappers, not only because of his inadequate clothes, but because the line had been laid out by a giant's rule. Doomsdorf had spaced his cabins according to his own idea of a full day's work, and that meant they were nearly twice as far apart as those of the average trap line. Bess had been given the line he had laid out for his squaw, hardly half so rigorous, yet all the average man would care to attempt.

But in spite of the hardship, the wrack of cold, the fatigue that crept upon him like a dreadful sickness, Ned had many moments of comparative pleasure. One of these moments, seemingly yielding him much more delight than the occasion warranted, occurred at the end of the second day of actual trapping.

This day's march had taken him to the Forks cabin; and there, as twilight drew about him, he was amazed to hear the nearing sound of footsteps in the snow. Some one was coming laboriously toward him, with the slow, dragging tread of deep fatigue.

The thing made no sense at all. Human companionship, in these gray and melancholy wastes, was beyond the scope of the imagination. For a moment he stared in dumb bewilderment like a man at the first seizure of madness. Then he sprang through the door and out on the snowy slope.

It was not just a whim of the fancy. A dim form moved toward him out of the grayness, hastening, now that his lantern light gleamed on the snow. Presently Ned saw the truth.

It was Bess, of course. At this point their lines coincided. It was her third stop, and since she had left the home cabin a day ahead of him, she was perfectly on schedule. He could hardly explain the delight that flashed through him at the sight of her. In this loneliness and silence mere human companionship was blessing enough.

His appearance in the doorway was not a surprise to Bess. She had counted the days carefully, and she knew his schedule would bring him here. But now she was too near dead with fatigue to give him more than a smile.

The night that ensued was one of revelation to Ned. His first cause of wonder was the well of reserve strength that suddenly manifested itself in the hour of need. He had not dreamed but that he was at the edge of collapse from the long day's toil; his brain had been dull with fatigue, and he was almost too tired to build his fire, yet he found himself a tower of strength in caring for the exhausted girl. It was as if his own fatigue had mysteriously vanished when he became aware of hers.

With scarcely a word he lifted her to the cot, covered her with a blanket, and in spite of her protests, went speedily about the work of cooking her supper. It was a strange thing what pleasure it gave him to see the warm glow of the life stream flow back into her blanched cheeks, and her deep, blue eyes fill again with light. Heretofore this twilight hour, at the end of a bitter day, had been the worst hour of all; but to-night it was the best. He hadn't dreamed that so much pleasure could be gained simply by serving others. In addition to some of the simple staples that he found among the cabin's supplies, he served her, as a great surprise, the plump, white breast of a ptarmigan that he had found in one of his ermine traps; and it was somehow a deep delight to see her little, white teeth stripping the flesh from the bone. He warmed her up with hot coffee; then sat beside her while the night deepened at the window.

They had a quiet hour of talk before he drew the blankets about her shoulders and left her to drift away in sleep. He was unexplainably exultant; light-hearted for all this drear waste that surrounded him. This little hut of logs was home, to-night. The cold could not come in; the wind would clamor at the roof in vain.

He did her work for her to-night. He skinned the smaller animals she had brought in, then fleshed and stretched all the pelts she had taken. After preparing his own skins, he made a hard bed for himself on the floor of the hut.

It was with real regret that they took different ways in the dawn. Ned's last office was to prepare kindling for her use on her next visit to the cabin four days hence—hardly realizing that he was learning a little trick of the woodsman's trade that would stand him in good stead in many a dreadful twilight to come. Only the veriest tenderfoot plans on cutting his kindling when he finishes his day's toil. The tried woodsman, traveling wilderness trails, does such work in the morning, before fatigue lays hold of him. The thing goes farther: even when he does not expect to pass that way again he is careful to leave the kindling pile for the next comer. Like all the traditions of the North, it is founded on necessity: the few seconds thus saved in striking the flame have more than once, at the end of a bitter day, saved the flame of a sturdy life. This is the hour when seconds count. The hands are sometimes too cold to hold the knife: the tired spirit despairs at this labor of cutting fuel. It is very easy, then, to lie still and rest and let the cold take its toll.

The trails of these two trappers often crossed, in the weeks to come. They kept close track of each other's schedules, and they soon worked out a system whereby they could meet at the Forks cabin at almost every circuit. They arranged it wholly without embarrassment, each of them appreciating the other's need for companionship. By running a few traps toward the interior from the forks, Bess made an excuse to take five days to her route; and for once Doomsdorf seemed to fail to see her real motive. Perhaps he thought she was merely trying to increase her catch, thus hoping to avoid the penalties he had threatened.

Ned found to his amazement that they had many common interests. They were drawn together not only by their toil, and by their mutual fear of Doomsdorf's lash; but they also shared a deep and growing interest in the wilderness about them. The wild life was an absorbing study in itself. They taught each other little tricks of the trapper's trade, narrated the minor adventures of their daily toil; they were of mutual service in a hundred different ways. No longer did Ned go about his work in the flimsy clothes of the city. Out of the pelts he had dried she helped to make him garments and moccasins as warm and serviceable as her own, supplied through an unexpected burst of generosity on Doomsdorf's part soon after their arrival on the island. They brought their hardest problems to the Forks cabin and solved them together.

As the winter advanced upon them, they found an increasing need of mutual help. The very problem of living began to demand their best coöperation. The winter was more rigorous than they had ever dreamed in their most despairing moments, so that coöperation was no longer a matter of pleasure, but the stark issue of life itself. The spirit, alone and friendless, yielded quickly in such times as these.

It got to be a mystery with them after while, why they hadn't given up long since, instead of playing this dreadful, nightmare game to its ultimate end of horror and death. Why were they such fools as to keep up the hopeless fight, day after day through the intense cold, bending their backs to the killing labor, when at any moment they might find rest and peace? They did not have to look far. Freedom was just at their feet. Just to fall, to lie still; and the frost would creep swiftly enough into their veins. Sleep would come soon, the delusion of warmth, and then Doomsdorf's lash could never threaten them again. But they found no answer to the question. It was as if a power beyond themselves was holding them up. It was as if there was a debt to pay before they could find rest.

Day after day the snow sifted down, ever laying a deeper covering over the island, bending down the limbs of the strong trees, obscuring all things under this cold infinity of white. The traps had to be laboriously dug out and reset, again and again. These were the days when the old “sourdough” on the mainland remained within his cabin, merely venturing to the door after fuel; but Ned and Bess knew no such mercy. Their fate was to struggle on through those ever-deepening drifts until they died. Driven by a cruel master they dared not rest even a day. Walking was no longer possible without snowshoes; and even these sank deep in the soft drifts, the webs filling with snow, so that to walk a mile was the most bitter, heart-breaking labor. Yet their fate was to plow on, one day upon an other,—strange, dim figures in the gray, whirling flakes—the full, bitter distances between their cabins. To try to lay out meant death, certain and very soon. Moreover they could not even move with their old leisure. The days were constantly shorter, just a ray of light between great curtains of darkness; and only by mushing at the fastest possible walking pace were they able to make it through.

When the skies cleared, an undreamed degree of cold took possession of the land. Seemingly every trickle of moving water was already frozen hard, the sea sheltered by the island chain was an infinity of ice, snow-swept as was the rest of the weary landscape, but now the breath froze on the beard, and the eyelids one upon another. The fingers froze in the instant that the fur gloves were re moved, and the hottest fires could hardly warm the cabins. And on these clear, bitter nights the Northern Lights were an ineffable glory in the sky.

A strange atmosphere of unreality began to cloud their familiar world. They found it increasingly hard to believe in their own consciousnesses; to convince themselves they were still struggling onward instead of lying lifeless in the snow. It was all dim like a dream,—snow and silence and emptiness, and the Northern Lights lambent in the sky. And for a time this was the only mercy that remained. Their perceptions were blunted: they were hardly aware of the messages of pain and torture that the nerves brought to the brain. And then, as ever, there came a certain measure of readjustment.

Their bodies built up to endure even such hardship as this. The fact that the snow at last packed was a factor too: they were able to skim over the white crust at a pace even faster than the best time they had made in early fall. They mastered the trapper's craft, learning how to skin a beaver with the fewest number of strokes, and in such a manner that the minimum amount of painstaking fleshing was required; and how to bait and set the traps in the fastest possible time. They learned their own country, and thus the best, easiest, and quickest routes from cabin to cabin.

The result was that at last the companionship between Bess and Ned, forgotten in the drear horror of the early winter months, was revived. Again they had pleasant hours about the stove at the Forks cabin, sometimes working at pelts, sometimes even enjoying the unheard-of luxury of a few minutes of idleness. While before they had come in almost too tired to be aware of each other's existence, now they were fresh enough to exchange a few, simple friendly words—even, on rare occasions, to enjoy a laugh together over some little disaster of the trail. The time came when they knew each other extremely well. In their hours of talk they plumbed each other's most secret views and philosophies, and helped to solve each other's spiritual problems.

Very naturally, and scarcely aware of the fact themselves, they had come to be the best of companions. As Ned once said, when a night of particular beauty stirred his imagination and loosened his stern lips, they had been “through hell” together; and the finest, most enduring companionship was only to have been expected. But it went farther than a quiet sort of satisfaction in each other's presence. Each had got to know approximately what the other would do in any given case; and that meant that they afforded mutual security. They had mutual trust and confidence, which was no little satisfaction on this island of peril. Blunted and dulled before, their whole consciousness now seemed to sharpen and waken; they not only regarded each other with greater confidence: their whole outlook had undergone significant change. During the first few months of early winter they had moved over their terrible trails like mechanical machines, doing all they had to do by instinct, whether eating, sleeping, or working; self-consciousness had been almost forgotten, self-identity nearly lost. But now they were themselves again, looking forward keenly to their little meetings, their interests ever reaching farther, the first beginnings of a new poise and self-confidence upon them. They had stood the gaff! They had come through.

Ned's hours with Lenore, however, gave him less satisfaction than they had at first. She somehow failed to understand what he had been through. He had found out what real hardship meant, and he couldn't help but resent, considering her own comparative comfort, her attitude of self-pity. Always she wept for deliverance from the island, never letting Ned forget that his own folly had brought her hither; always expecting solicitude instead of giving it; always willing to receive all the help that Ned could give her, but never willing to sacrifice one whit of her own comfort to ease his lot. Because he had done man's work, and stood up under it, he found himself expecting more and more from her,—and failing to receive it. Her lack of sportsmanship was particularly distressing to him at a time when sobbing and complaints could only tear down his own hard-fought-for spirit to endure. Most of all he resented her attitude toward Bess. She had no sympathy for what the girl had been through, even refusing to listen to Ned's tales of her. And she seemed to resent all of Ned's kindnesses to her.

Slowly, by the school of hardship and conquest over hardship, Ned Cornet was winning a new self-mastery, a new self-confidence to take the place of the self-conceit that had brought him to disaster. But the first real moment of wakening was also one of peril,—on the trapping trail one clear afternoon toward the bitter close of January.

He had been quietly following that portion of his trap line that followed the timber belt between the Twelve-Mile cabin and Forks cabin, and the blazed trail had led him into the depths of a heavy thicket of young spruce. He had never felt more secure. The midwinter silence lay over the land; the cold and fearful beauty of a snow-swept wilderness had hold of his spirit; the specter of terror and death that haunted these wintry wastes was no where manifest to his sight. The only hint of danger that the Red Gods afforded him did not half penetrate his consciousness and did not in the least call him from his pleasant fancies. It was only a glimpse of green where the snow had been shaken from a compact little group of sapling spruce just beside one of his sets. Likely the wind had caught the little trees just right; perhaps some unfortunate little fur-bearer, a marten perhaps, or a fisher, had sprung back and forth among the little trees in an effort to free himself from the trap. He walked up quietly, located the tree to which the trap chain was attached, bent and started to draw the trap from the small, dense thicket whence some creature had dragged it. He was only casually interested in what manner of poor, frozen creature would be revealed between the steel jaws. The beauty of the day had wholly taken his mind from his work.

One moment, and the forest was asleep about him; the little trees looked sadly burdened with their loads of snow. The next, and the man was hurled to the ground by a savage, snarling thing that leaped from the covert like the snow demon it was; and white, gleaming fangs were flashing toward his throat.