Books: Isobel

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Three weeks after he had left Couchée's cabin he came into Fort
Churchill. A month had changed him so that the factor did not
recognize him at first. The inspector in charge stared at him twice,
and then cried, "My God, is it you, MacVeigh?" To Pelliter alone, who
was waiting for him, did Billy tell all that had happened down on the
Little Beaver. There were several letters waiting for him at
Churchill, and one of these told him that a silver property in which
he was interested over at Cobalt had turned out well and that his
share in the sale was something over ten thousand dollars. He used
this unexpected piece of good-fortune as an excuse to the inspector
when he refused to re-enlist. A week after his arrival at Churchill
Bucky Smith was dishonorably discharged from the Service. There were
several near them when Bucky came up to him with a smile on his face
and offered to shake hands.

"I don't bear you any ill-will, Billy," he said, loud enough for the
others to hear. "Only you've made a big mistake." And then, in words
for Billy's ears alone, he added: "Remember what I promised you! I'll
kill you for this if I have to hunt you round the world!"

A few days later Pelliter left on the last of the slush snows in an
effort to reach Nelson House before the sledging was gone.

"I wish you'd go with me, Billy," he entreated for the hundredth time.
"My girl 'd love to have you come, an' you know how I'd like it."

But Billy could not be moved.

"I'll come and see you some day-- when you've got the kid," he
promised, trying to laugh, as he shook hands for the last time with
his old comrade.

For three days after Pelliter's departure he remained at the post. On
the morning of the fourth, with his pack on his back and without dogs,
he struck off into the north and west.

"I think I'll spend next winter at Fond du Lac," he told the
inspector. "If there's any mail for me you can send it there if you
have a chance, and if I'm not at Fond du Lac it can be returned to
Churchill."

He said Fond du Lac because Deane's grave lay between Churchill and
the old Hudson's Bay Company's post over in the country of the
Athabasca. The Barrens were the one thing that called to him now-- the
one thing to which he dared respond. He would keep his promise to
Isobel and visit Scottie's grave. At least he tried to make himself
believe that he was keeping a promise. But deep in him there was an
undercurrent of feeling which he could not explain. It was as if there
were a spirit with him at times, walking at his side, and hovering
about his campfire at nights, and when he gave himself up to the right
mood he felt that it was the presence of Deane. He believed in strong
friendship, but he had never believed in the love of man for man. He
had not thought that such a thing could exist, except, perhaps,
between father and son. With him, in all the castles he had built and
the dreams he had dreamed, the alpha and omega of love had remained
with woman. For the first time he knew what it meant to love a man--
the memory of a man.

Something held him from telling the secret of his mission at Churchill
even to Pelliter. The evening before he left he had smuggled an ax
into the edge of the forest, and the second day he found use for this.
He came to a straight-grained, thick birch, eighteen inches in
diameter, and he put up his tent fifty paces from it. Before he rolled
himself in his blankets that night he had cut down the tree. The next
day he chopped off the butt, and before another nightfall had hewn out
a slab two inches thick, a foot wide, and three feet long. When he
took up the trail into the north and west again the following morning
he left the ax behind.

The fourth night he worked with his hunting-knife and his belt-ax,
thinning down the slab and making it smooth. The fifth and the sixth
nights he passed in the same way, and he ended the sixth night by
heating the end of a small iron rod in the fire and burning the first
three letters of Deane's epitaph on the slab. For a time he was
puzzled, wondering whether he should use the name Scottie or David. He
decided on David.

He did not travel fast, for to him spring was the most beautiful of
all seasons in the wilderness. It was underfoot and overhead now. The
snow-floods were singing between the ridges and gathering in the
hollows. The poplar buds were swollen almost to the bursting point,
and the bakneesh vines were as red as blood with the glow of new life.
Seventeen days after he left Churchill he came to the edge of the big
Barren. For two days he swung westward, and early in the forenoon of
the third looked out over the gray waste, dotted with moving caribou,
over which he and Pelliter had raced ahead of the Eskimos with little
Isobel. He went to the cabin first and entered. It was evident that no
one had been there since he had left, On the bunk where Deane had died
he found one of baby Isobel's little mittens. He had wondered where
she had lost it, and had made her a new one of lynx-skin on the way
down to Couchée's cabin. The tiny bed that he had made for her on the
floor was as she had last slept in it, and in the part of a blanket
that he had used as a pillow was still the imprint of her head. On the
wall hung a pair of old trousers that Deane had worn. Billy looked at
these things, standing silently, with his pack at his feet. There was
something in the cabin that closed in about him and choked him, and he
struggled to overcome it by whistling. His lips seemed thick. At last
he turned and went to the grave.

The foxes had been there, and had dug a little about the sapling
cross. There was no other change. During the remainder of the forenoon
Billy cut down a heavier sapling and sunk the butt of it three feet
into the half-frozen earth at the head of Deane's grave. Then, with
spikes he had brought with him, he nailed on the slab. He believed
that no one would ever know what the words on that slab meant-- no one
except himself and the spirit of Scottie Deane. With the end of the
heated rod he had burned into the wood:

DAVID DEANE

Died Feb. 27, 1908

BELOVED OF ISOBEL AND THE ONE

WHO WISHES HE COULD TAKE

YOUR PLACE AND GIVE

YOU BACK TO

HER

W. M. April 15, 1908

He did not stop when it was time for dinner, but carried rocks from a
ridge a couple of hundred yards away, and built a cairn four feet high
around the sapling, so that storm or wild animals could not knock it
down. Then he began a search in the warmest and sunniest parts of the
forest, where the green tips of plant life were beginning to reveal
themselves. He found snowflowers, redglow, and bakneesh, and dug up
root after root, and at last, peeping out from between two rocks, he
found the arrowlike tip of a blue flower. The bakneesh roots he
planted about the cairn, and the blue flower he planted by itself at
the head of the grave.

It was long past midday when he returned to the cabin, and once more
he was oppressed by the appalling loneliness of it. It was not as he
had thought it would be. Deane's spirit and companionship had seemed
to be nearer to him beside his campfires and in the forest. He cooked
a meal over the stove, but the snapping of the fire seemed strange and
unnatural in the deserted room. Even the air he breathed was heavy
with the oppression of death and broken hopes. He found it difficult
to swallow the food he had cooked, though he had eaten nothing since
morning. When he was done he looked at his watch. It was four o'clock.
The northern sun had dropped behind the distant forests and was
followed now by the thickening gloom of early evening. For a few
moments Billy stood motionless outside the cabin. Behind him an owl
hooted its lonely mating-song. Over his head a brush sparrow
twittered. It was that hour, just between the end of day and the
beginning of night, when the wilderness holds its breath and all is
still. Billy clenched his hands and listened. He could not keep back
the break that was in his breath. Something out there in the silence
and the gathering darkness was calling him-- calling him away from the
cabin, away from the grave, and the gray, dead waste of the Barren. He
turned back into the cabin and put his things into the pack. He took
the little mitten to keep with his other treasures, and then he went
out and closed the door behind him. He passed close to the grave and
for the last time gazed upon the spot where Deane lay buried.

"Good-by, old man," he whispered. Goodby--"

The owl hooted louder as he turned his face into the west. It made him
shiver, and he hurried his steps into the unbroken wilderness that lay
for hundreds of miles between him and the post at Fond du Lac.

XX

THE LETTER

Days and weeks and months of a loneliness which Billy had never known
before followed after his pilgrimage to Deane's grave. It was more
than loneliness. He had known loneliness, the heartbreak and the
longing of it, in the black and silent chaos of the arctic night; he
had almost gone mad of it, and he had seen Pelliter nearly die for a
glimpse of the sun and the sound of a voice. But this was different.
It was something that ate deeper at his soul each day and each night
that he lived. He had believed that thought of Isobel and his memories
of her would make him happier, even though he never saw her again. But
in this he was mistaken. The wilderness does not lend to
forgetfulness, and each day her voice seemed nearer and more real to
him, and she became more and more insistently a part of his thoughts.
Never an hour of the day passed that he did not ask himself where she
was. He hoped that she and the baby Isobel had returned to the old
home in Montreal, where they would surely find friends and be cared
for. And yet the dread was upon him that she had remained in the
wilderness, that her love for Deane would keep her there, and that she
would find a woman's work at some post between the Height of Land and
the Barrens. At times there possessed him an overwhelming desire to
return to McTabb's cabin and find where they had gone. But he fought
against this desire as a man fights against death. He knew that once
he surrendered himself to the temptation to be near her again he would
lose much that he had won in his struggle during the days of plague in
Couchée's cabin.

So his feet carried him steadily westward, while the invisible hands
tugged at him from behind. He did not go straight to Fond du Lac, but
spent nearly three weeks with a trapper whom he ran across on the
Pipestone River. It was June when he struck Fond du Lac, and he
remained there a month. He had more than half expected to pass the
winter there, but the factor at the post proved a disagreeable
acquaintance, and he did not like the country. So early in July he set
out deeper into the Athabasca country to the west, followed the
northern shore of the big lake, and two months later came to Fort
Chippewyan, near the mouth of the Slave River.

He struck Chippewyan at a fortunate time. A government geological and
map-making party was just preparing to leave for the terra incognita
between the Great Slave and the Great Bear, and the three men who had
come up from Ottawa urged Billy to join them. He jumped at the
opportunity, and remained with them until the party returned to the
Mackenzie River by the way of Fort Providence five months later. He
remained at Fort Providence until late spring, and then came down to
Fort Wrigley, where he had several friends in the service. Fifteen
months of wandering had had their effect upon him. He could no longer
resist the call of the wanderlust. It urged him from place to place,
and stronger and stronger grew in him the desire to return to his old
country along the shores of the big Bay far to the west. He had partly
planned to join the railroad builders on the new trans-continental in
the mountains of British Columbia, but in August, instead of finding
himself at Edmonton or Tête Jaune Cache, he was at Prince Albert,
three hundred and fifty miles to the east. From this point he struck
northward with a party of company men into the Lac La Ronge country,
and in October swung eastward alone through the Sissipuk and Burntwood
waterways to Nelson House. He continued northward after a week's rest,
and on the eighteenth of December the first of the two great storms
which made the winter of 1909-10 one of the most tragic in the history
of the far northern people overtook him thirty miles from York
Factory. It took him five days to reach the post, where he was held up
for several weeks. These were the first of those terrible weeks of
famine and intense cold during which more than fifteen hundred people
died in the north country. From the Barren Lands to the edge of the
southern watershed the earth lay under from four to six feet of snow,
and from the middle of December until late in January the temperature
did not rise above forty degrees below zero, and remained for the most
of the time between fifty and sixty. From all points in the wilderness
reports of starvation and death came to the company's posts. Trap
lines could not be followed because of the intense cold. Moose,
caribou, and even the furred animals had buried themselves under the
snow. Indians and half-breeds dragged themselves into the posts. Twice
at York Factory Billy saw mothers who brought dead babies in their
arms. One day a white trapper came in with his dogs and sledge, and on
the sledge, wrapped in a bearskin, was his wife, who had died fifty
miles back in the forest.

During these terrible weeks Billy found it impossible to keep Isobel
and the baby Isobel out of his mind night or day. The fear grew in him
that somewhere in the wilderness they were suffering as others were
suffering. So obsessed did he become with the thought that he had a
terrible dream one night, and in that dream baby Isobel's face
appeared to him, a deathlike mask, white and cold and thinned by
starvation. The vision decided him. He would go to Fort Churchill, and
if McTabb had not been driven in he would go to his cabin, over on the
Little Beaver, and learn what had become of Isobel and the little
girl. A few days later, on the twenty-seventh day of January, there
came a sudden rise in the temperature, and Billy prepared at once to
take advantage of the change. A half-breed, on his way to Churchill,
accompanied him, and they set out together the following morning. On
the twentieth of February they arrived at Fort Churchill.

Billy went immediately to detachment headquarters. There had been
several changes in two years, and there was only one of the old force
to shake hands with him. His first inquiry was about McTabb and Isobel
Deane. Neither was at Churchill, nor had been there since the arrival
of the new officer in charge. But there was mail for Billy-- three
letters. There had been half a dozen others, but they were now
following up his old trails somewhere out in the wilderness. These
three had been returned recently from Fond du Lac. One was from
Pelliter, the fourth he had written, he said, without an answer. The
"kid" had come-- a girl-- and he wondered if Billy was dead. The
second letter was from his Cobalt partner.

The third he turned over several times before he opened it. It did not
look much like a letter. It was torn and ragged at the edges, and was
so soiled and water-stained that the address on it was only partly
legible. It had been to Fond du Lac, and from there it had followed
him to Fort Chippewyan. He opened it and found that the writing inside
was scarcely more legible than the inscription on the envelope. The
last words were quite plain, and he gave a low cry when he found that
it was from Rookie McTabb.

He went close to a window and tried to make out what McTabb had
written. Here and there, where water had not obliterated the writing,
he could make out a line or a few words. Nearly all was gone but the
last paragraph, and when Billy came to this and read the first words
of it his heart seemed all at once to die within him, and he could not
see. Word by word he made out the rest after that, and when he was
done he turned his stony face to the white whirl of the storm outside
the window, his lips as dry as though he had passed through a fever.

A part of that last paragraph was unintelligible, but enough was left
to tell him what had happened in the cabin down on the Little Beaver.

McTabb had written:

"We thought she was getting well... took sick again.... did
everything... could. But it didn't do any good,... died just five
weeks to a day after you left. We buried her just behind the cabin.
God... that kid... You don't know how I got to love her, Billy....
give her up..."

McTabb had written a dozen lines after that, but all of them were a
water-stained and unintelligible blur.

Billy crushed the letter in his hand. The new inspector wondered what
terrible news he had received as he walked out into the blinding chaos
of the storm.

XXI

THE FIGHTING SPARK

For ten minutes Billy buried himself blindly in the storm. He scarcely
knew which direction he took, but at last he found himself in the
shelter of the forest, and he was whispering Isobel's name over and
over again to himself.

"Dead-- dead--" he moaned. "She is dead-- dead--"

And then there rushed upon him, crushing back his deeper grief, a
thought of the baby Isobel. She was still with McTabb down on the
Little Beaver. In the blur of the storm he read again what he could
make out of Rookie's letter. Something in that last paragraph struck
him with a deadly fear. "God... that kid... You, don't know how I got
to love her, Billy,... give her up..."

What did it mean? What had McTabb told him in that part of the letter
that was gone?

The reaction came as he put the letter back into his pocket. He walked
swiftly back to the inspector's office.

"I'm going down to the Little Beaver. I'm going to start to-day," he
said. "Who is there in Churchill that I can get to go with me?"

Two hours later Billy was ready to start, with an Indian as a
companion. Dogs could not be had for love or money, and they set out
on snowshoes with two weeks' supply of provisions, striking south and
west. The remainder of that day and the next they traveled with but
little rest. Each hour that passed added to Billy's mad impatience to
reach McTabb's cabin.

With the morning of the third day began the second of those two
terrible storms which swept over the northland in that winter of
famine and death. In spite of the Indian's advice to build a permanent
camp until the temperature rose again Billy insisted on pushing ahead.
The fifth night, in the wild Barren country west of the Etawney, his
Indian failed to keep up the fire, and when Billy investigated he
found him half dead with a strange sickness. He made the Indian's
balsam shelter snow and wind proof, cut wood, and waited. The
temperature continued to fall, and the cold became intense. Each day
the provisions grew less, and at last the time came when Billy knew
that he was standing face to face with the Great Peril. He went
farther and farther from camp in his search for game. Even the brush
sparrows and snow-hawks were gone. Once the thought came to him that
be might take what food was left and accept the little chance that
remained of saving himself. But the idea never got farther than a
first thought. On the twelfth day the Indian died. It was a terrible
day. There was food for another twenty-four hours.

Billy packed it, together with his blankets and a few pieces of
tinware. He wondered if the Indian had died of a contagious disease.
Anyway, he made up his mind to put out the warning for others if they
came that way, and over the dead Indian's balsam shelter he planted a
sapling, and at the end of the sapling he fastened a strip of red
cotton cloth-- the plague signal of the north.

Than he struck out through the deep snows and the twisting storm,
knowing that there was no more than one chance in a thousand ahead of
him, and that the one chance was to keep the wind at his back.

At the end of his first day's struggle Billy built himself a camp in a
bit of scrub timber which was not much more than bush. He had observed
that the timber and that every tree and bush he had passed since noon
was stripped and dead on the side that faced the north. He cooked and
ate his last food the following day, and went on. The small timber
turned to scrub, and the scrub, in time, to vast snow wastes over
which the storm swept mercilessly. All this day he looked for game,
for a flutter of bird life; he chewed bark, and in the afternoon got a
mouthful of foxbite, which made his throat swell until he could
scarcely breathe. At night he made tea, but had nothing to eat. His
hunger was acute and painful. It was torture the next day-- the
third-- for the process of starvation is a rapid one in this country
where only the fittest survive on from four to five meals a day. He
camped, built a small bush-fire at night, and slept. He almost failed
to rouse himself on the morning that followed, and when he staggered
to his feet and felt the cutting sting of the storm still in his face
and heard the swishing wail of it over the Barren he knew that at last
the hour had come when he was standing face to face with the Almighty.

For some strange reason he was not frightened at the situation. He
found that even over the level spaces he could scarce drag his
snow-shoes, but this had ceased to alarm him as he had been alarmed at
first. He went on, hour after hour, weaker and weaker. Within himself
there was still life which reasoned that if death were to come it
could not come in a better way. It at least promised to be painless--
even pleasant. The sharp, stinging pains of hunger, like little
electrical knives piercing him, were gone; he no longer experienced a
sensation of intense cold; he almost felt that he could lie down in
the drifted snow and sleep peacefully. He knew what it would be-- a
sleep without end, with the arctic foxes to pick his bones afterward--
and so he resisted the temptation and forced himself onward. The storm
still swept straight west from Hudson's Bay, bringing with it endless
volleys of snow, round and hard as fine shot, snow that had at first
seemed to pierce his flesh and which swished past his feet as if
trying to trip him and tossed itself in windrows and mountains in his
path. If he could only find timber, shelter! That was what he worked
for now. When he had last looked at his watch it was nine o'clock in
the morning; now it was late in the afternoon. It might as well have
been night. The storm had long since half blinded him. He could not
see a dozen paces ahead. But the little life in him still reasoned
bravely. It was a heroic spark of life, a fighting spark, and hard to
put out. It told him that when he came to shelter he would at least
feel it, and that he must fight until the last. The pack on his back
held no significance and no weight for him. He might have traveled a
mile or ten miles an hour and he would not have sensed the difference.
Most men would have buried themselves in the snow and died in comfort,
dreaming the pleasant dreams that come as a sort of recompense to the
unfortunate who dies of starvation and cold. But the fighting spark
commanded Billy to die upon his feet if he died at all. It was this
spark which brought him at last to a bit of timber thick enough to
give him shelter from wind and snow. It burned a little more warmly
then. It flared up and gave him new vision. And then, for the first
time, he realized that it must be night. For a light was burning ahead
of him, and all else was gloom. His first thought was that it was a
campfire miles and miles away. Then it drew nearer, until he knew that
it was a light in a cabin window. He dragged himself toward it, and
when he came to the door he tried to shout. But no sound fell from his
swollen lips. It seemed an hour before he could twist his feet out of
his snow-shoes. Then he groped for a latch, pressed against the door,
and plunged in.

What he saw was like a picture suddenly revealed for an instant by a
flashlight. In the cabin there were four men. Two sat at a table
directly in front of him. One held a dice box poised in the air, and
had turned a rough, bearded face toward him. The other was a younger
man, and in this moment it struck Billy as strange that he should be
clutching a can of beans between his hands. A third man stared from
where he had been looking down upon the dice-play of the other two. As
Billy came in he was in the act of lowering a half-filled bottle from
his lips. The fourth man sat on the edge of a bunk, with a face so
white and thin that he might have been taken for a corpse if it had
not been for the dark glare in his sunken eyes. Billy smelled the odor
of whisky; he smelled food. He saw no sign of welcome in the faces
turned toward him, but he advanced upon them, mumbling incoherently.
And then the spark, the fighting spark in him, gave out, and he
crumpled down on the floor. He heard a voice which came to him from a
great distance, and which said, "Who the hell is this?" and then,
after what seemed to be a long time, he heard that same voice say,
"Pitch him back into the snow."

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