The Snowshoe Trail Part 12

She lowered the weapon and rested her nerves. Then she quietly lifted the gun again. And the fourth bullet knocked the can spinning from the log.

The man shouted his approval, and her flushed face showed what a real triumph it was to her. Few of her lifelong accomplishments she had valued more. Yet it caused no self-wonder; she only knew that she respected and prized the good opinion of this stalwart woodsman, and by this one little act she had proved to him the cool, strong quality of her nerves.

And it was no little triumph. She had really learned the basic concept of good shooting,--to throw the whole force of the nervous system into the second firing. It was the same precept that makes toward all achievement. The fact that she had grasped it so quickly was a guaranty of her own metal. She felt something of that satisfaction that strong men feel when they prove, for their own eyes alone, their self-worth.

It was the instinct that sends the self-indulgent business man, riding to his work in a limousine, into the depths of the dreadful wilderness to hunt, and that urges the tenderfoot to climb to the crest of the highest peaks.

It did not mean that she was a dead shot already. Months and years of practice are necessary to obtain full mastery of pistol or rifle. She had simply made a most creditable start. There would be plenty of misses thereafter; in fact, the next six shots she missed the can four times. She had to learn sight control, how to gauge distance and wind and the speed of moving objects; but she was on the straight road to success.

While Virginia cooked lunch, Bill cut young spruce trees and made a sled: and after the meal pushed out through the whirling snow to being in the remainder of the moose meat. It was the work of the whole afternoon to urge the sled up the ridge and then draw it home through the drifts. The snow mantle had deepened alarmingly during the night, and he came none too soon. It was only a matter of days, perhaps of hours, before the snow would be impa.s.sable except with snowshoes. Until at last the snowfall ceased and packed, traveling even with their aid would be a heart-breaking business.

Virginia was lonely and depressed all the time Bill was absent, and she had a moment of self-amazement at the rapidity with which she brightened up at his return. But it was a natural development: the snow-swept wilds were dreary indeed for a lonely soul. He was a fellow human being; that alone was relations.h.i.+p enough.

"You can call me Virginia, if you want to," she told him. "Last names are silly out here--Heaven knows we can't keep them up in these weeks to come. I've called you Bill ever since the night we crossed the river."

Bill looked his grat.i.tude, and she helped him prepare the meat. Some of it he hung just outside the cabin door; one of the great hams suspended in a spruce tree, fifty feet in front of the cabin. The skin was fleshed and hung up behind the stove to dry.

"It's going to furnish the web of our snowshoes," he explained.

That night their talk took a philosophical trend, and in the candlelight he told her some of his most secret views. She found that the North, the untamed land that had been his home, had colored all his ideas, yet she was amazed at his scientific knowledge of some subjects.

Far from the influence of any church, she was surprised to find that he was a religious man. In fact, she found that his religion went deeper than her own. She belonged to one of the Protestant churches of Christianity, attended church regularly, and the church had given her fine ideals and moral precepts; but religion itself was not a reality to her. It was not a deep urge, an inner and profound pa.s.sion as it was with him. She prayed in church, she had always prayed--half automatically--at bedtime; but actual, entreating prayer to a literal G.o.d had been outside her born of thought. In her sheltered life she had never felt the need of a literal G.o.d. The spirit of All Being was not close to her, as it was to him.

Bill had found his religion in the wilderness, and it was real. He had listened to the voices of the wind and the stir of the waters in the fretful lake; he had caught dim messages, yet profound enough to flood his heart with pa.s.sion, in the rustling of the leaves, the utter silence of the night, the unearthly beauty of the far ranges, stretching one upon another. His was an austere G.o.d, infinitely just and wise, but His great aims were far beyond the power of men's finite minds to grasp.

Most of all, his was a G.o.d of strength, of mighty pa.s.sions and moods, but aloof, watchful, secluded.

In this night, and the nights that followed, she absorbed--a little at a time--his most harboured ideas of life and nature. He did not speak freely, but she drew him out with sympathetic interest. But for all he knew life in the raw and the gloom of the spruce forest, his outlook had not been darkened. For all his long acquaintance with a stark and remorseless Nature, he remained an optimist.

None of his views surprised her as much as this. He knew the snows and the cold, this man; the persecution of the elements and the endless struggle and pain of life, yet he held no rancor. "It's all part of the game," he explained. "It's some sort of a test, a preparation--and there's some sort of a scheme, too big for human beings to see, behind it."

He believed in a hereafter. He thought that the very hards.h.i.+p of life made it necessary. Earthly existence could not be an end in itself, he thought: rather the tumult and stress shaped and strengthened the soul for some stress to come. "And some of us conquer and go on," he told her earnestly. "And some of us fall--and stop."

"But life isn't so hard," she answered. "I've never known hards.h.i.+p or trial. I know many men and girls that don't know what it means."

"So much to their loss. Virginia, those people will go out of life as soft, as unprepared, as when they came in. They will be as helpless as when they left their mother's wombs. They haven't been disciplined.

They haven't known pain and work and battle--and the strengthening they entail. They don't live a natural life. Nature meant for all creatures to struggle. Because of man's civilization they are having an artificial existence, and they pay for it in the end. Nature's way is one of hards.h.i.+p."

This man did not know a gentle, kindly Nature. She was no friend of his. He knew her as a siren, a murderess and a torturer, yet with great secret aims that no man could name or discern. Even the kindly summer moon lighted the way for hunting creatures to find and rend their prey.

The snow trapped the deer in the valleys where the wolf pack might find easy killing; the cold killed the young grouse in the shrubbery; the wind sang a song of death. He pointed out that all the wilderness voices expressed the pain of living,--the sobbing utterance of the coyotes, the song of the wolves in the winter snow, the wail of the geese in their southern migrations.

In these talks she was surprised to learn how full had been his reading.

All through her girlhood she had gone to private schools and had been tutored by high-paid intellectual aristocrats, yet she found this man better educated than herself. He had read philosophy and had browsed, at least, among all the literature of the past; he knew history and a certain measure of science, and most of all, the a.s.sociation of areas of his brain were highly developed so that he could see into the motives and hearts of things much more clearly than she.

In the nights he told her Nature lore, the ways of the living-creatures that he observed, and in the daytime he ill.u.s.trated his points from life. They would take little tramps together through the storm and snow, going slowly because of the depth of the drifts, and under his tutelage, the wild life began to reveal to her its most hidden secrets.

Sometimes she shot grouse with her pistol; once a great long-pinioned goose, resting on the sh.o.r.e of frozen Gray Lake, fell to her aim. She saw the animals in the marshes, the herds of caribou that are, above all creatures, natives and habitants of the snow-swept mountains, the little, lesser hunters such as marten and mink and otter. One night they heard the wolf pack chanting as they ran along the ridge.

Life was real up here. The superficialities with which she had dealt before were revealed in their true light. Of all the past material requisites, only three remained,--food and warmth and shelter. Others that she did not think she needed--protection, and strength and discipline--were shown as vitally necessary. Comrades.h.i.+p was needed, too, the touch of a helping hand in a moment of fear or danger; and love--the one thing she lacked now--was most necessary of all. It was not enough just to give love. For years she had poured her adoration upon Harold, lost it too, reciprocally; and this she might find strength for the war of life, even a tremulous joy in meeting and surmounting difficulties.

The snow fell almost incessantly and the tree limbs could hold no more.

The drifts deepened in the still aisles between trunk and trunk. When the clouds broke through and the stars were like great precious diamonds in the sky, the cold would drop down like a curse and a scourge, and the ice began to gather on Grizzly River.

On such nights the Northern Lights flashed and gleamed and danced in the sky and swept the forest world with mystery.

XII

Virginia found the days much happier than she had hoped. She took a real interest in caring for their little cabin, cooking the meals, even mending Bill's torn clothes. She had a natural fine sense of flavors, and out of the simple materials that they had in store she prepared meals that in Bill's opinion outcla.s.sed the finest efforts of a French chef. He would exult over them boyishly, and she found an unlooked-for joy in pleasing him. She had made delicious puddings out of rice and canned milk and raisins, she knew just the identical number of minutes it required to broil a moose porterhouse just to his taste, and she could fry a grouse to surpa.s.s the most succulent fried chicken ever served in a southern home. All these things pleased her and occupied the barren hours. She learned to sew on b.u.t.tons, wash her own clothes, and keep the cabin clean and neat as a hospital ward.

She liked the hours of sober talk in the evenings. Sometimes they would play through the records, and so well had Bill made his selections that she never tired of them. His preference tended toward melodies in the minor, wailing things that to him vaguely reflected the voices of the wild things and the plaintive utterances of the forest: she liked the soul-stirring, emotional melodies. They worked up a rare comrades.h.i.+p before the first week was done. She had never known a human being to whom she opened her thoughts more freely.

She had her lonesome hours, but not so many as she had expected. When time hung heavy on her hands she would take out one of the old magazines that Bill had brought up to read on the winter nights, and devour it from cover to cover. She had abundant health. The experience seemed to build her up, rather than injure her. Her muscles developed, she breathed deep of the cold, mountain air, and she had more energy than she could easily spend.

She fought away the tendency to grow careless in dress or appearance.

She kept her few clothes clean and mended, she dressed her hair as carefully as in her city house. Her skin was clear and soft, but she didn't know how the wilderness life was affecting her beauty. What Bill observed he did not tell her. Often the words were at his lips, but he repressed them. In the first place he was afraid of speaking too feelingly and giving away his heart's secret; in the second he had a ridiculous fear that such a personal remark might tend to destroy the fine balance of their relations.h.i.+p. She had no mirror, but soon she became used to going without one. But one day, on one of their tramps, she caught a perfect image of herself in a clear spring.

She had stopped to drink, but for a few seconds she only regarded herself with speechless delight. She had had her share of beauty before; now perfect health had brought its marvelous and indescribable charm. Her hair was burnished and s.h.i.+mmering with life, her skin clear and transparent, her throat had filled out, and her eyes were bright and clear as she had never seen them. She felt no further need of cosmetics. Her lips were red, and Nature had brought a glow to her cheeks that no human skill could equal.

"Good Heavens, Bill!" she cried. "Why didn't you tell me that I was getting prettier every day?"

"I didn't know you wanted me to," he replied. "But you are. I've been noticing it a long time."

"You're a cold, impersonal person!" But at once her talk tripped on to less dangerous subjects.

Their cabin life was redeemed by their frequent excursions into the wild. The study of Nature was constantly more absorbing to the girl.

Although the birds had all gone south--except such hardy fowl as the ptarmigan, that seemed to spend most of their time buried in the snow--there was still mammalian life in plenty in the forest. The little furred creatures still plied, nervous and scurrying as ever, their occupations; and the caribou still wandered now and then through their valley as they moved from ridge to ridge. The moose, however, had mostly pushed down to the lower levels.

The grizzlies had gone into hibernation, and their tracks were no longer to be seen in the snow; but the wolf pack still ran the ridges. And one day they had a miniature adventure that concerned the gray band.

They were climbing a ridge one wintry day, unappalled by the three feet or more of snow, when the girl suddenly touched his arm.

"First blood on caribou," she cried.

His eyes lighted, and he followed her gaze. Lately they had been having a friendly contest as to who would get the first glimpse of any living creature that they encountered in their tramps, and Bill was pleased to admit that he had been barely holding his own. The girl's eyes were practically as quick as his and better at long distances, and always there was high celebration when she saw the game first. But to-day they were fated for more exciting business.

The caribou were plunging as fast as they could through the snow. They came, in caribou fas.h.i.+on, in a long file, each stepping into the tracks of the other, and it was a good woodsman, coming along behind them, that could tell whether there were two or ten in the band. An old bull with sweeping horns led the file.

When going is at all easy, the caribou can travel at an incredible pace.

Even their swinging trot can carry them from range to range in a single day; but when they choose to run their fastest, they seem to have wings.

To-day, however, the soft snow impeded their speed. They seemed to be running freely enough, in great bounds, but Bill could tell that they were hard pressed. He would have liked to have taken one of the young cows to add to his larder, but they were too far to risk a shot. Then he seized the girl by the hand.

"Plow fast as you can up hill," he urged. "I think we'll see some action."

For he had guessed the impulse behind the wild race. They plunged through the snow as fast as they could, then sank almost out of sight in the drifts. And in a moment Bill pointed to a gray, shadowy band that came loping toward them out of the haze.

It was the wolf pack, and they were deep in the hunt. They were great, s.h.a.ggy creatures, lean and savage, and Virginia felt glad that this stalwart form was beside her. The wolves of the North, when the starvation time is on, are not always to be trusted. They looked ghostly and incredibly large through the flurries.

They came within a hundred yards, then their keen senses whispered a warning. Just for an instant they stood motionless in the snow, heads raised and fierce eyes grazing.

Bill raised his rifle. He took quick aim at the great leader, and the report rang far through the silences. But the entire pack sprang away as one.