CHAPTER XII THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE

CHAPTER XII

THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE

"--paa dit Firmament Den klare Nordlyslampe taendt...."

Innocently thinking that they had seen Arctic travelling at its worst, and secretly looking upon themselves as highly accomplished trailmen, they had covered the forty-one miles from Holy Cross to Anvik in less than three days.

The Colonel made much of the pleasant and excellent man at the head of the Episcopal mission there, and the Boy haunted Benham's store, picking up a little Ingalik and the A. C. method of trading with the Indians, who, day and night, with a number of stranded Klondykers, congregated about the grateful warmth of the big iron stove.

The travellers themselves did some business with the A. C. agent, laying in supplies of fresh meat, and even augmenting their hitherto carefully restricted outfit, for they were going far beyond the reach of stores, or even of missions. Anvik was the last white settlement below Nulato; Nulato was said to be over two hundred miles to the northward.

And yet after all their further preparation and expense, each man kept saying in his heart, during those first days out from Anvik, that the journey would be easy enough but for their "comforts"--the burden on the sled. By all the rules of arithmetic, the daily subtraction of three meals from the store should have lightened the load. It seemed to have the opposite effect. By some process of evil enchantment every ounce grew to weigh a pound, every pound a hundredweight. The sled itself was bewitched. Recall how lightsomely it ran down the snowy slope, from the Big Chimney Cabin to the river trail, that morning they set forth. The Boy took its pretty impetuosity for a happy augury--the very sled was eager for the mighty undertaking.

But never in all that weary march did it manifest again any such modest alacrity. If, thereafter, in the long going "up river" there came an interval of downhill, the sled turned summersaults in the air, wound its forward or backward rope round willow scrub or alder, or else advanced precipitately with an evil, low-comedy air, bottom side up, to attack its master in the shins. It either held back with a power superhuman, or it lunged forward with a momentum that capsized its weary conductor. Its manners grew steadily worse as the travellers pushed farther and farther into the wilderness, beyond the exorcising power of Holy Cross, beyond the softening influences of Christian hospitality at Episcopal Anvik, even beyond Tischsocket, the last of the Indian villages for a hundred miles.

The two who had been scornful of the frailty of temper they had seen common in men's dealings up here in the North, began to realize that all other trials of brotherhood pale before the strain of life on the Arctic trail. Beyond any question, after a while something goes wrong with the nerves. The huge drafts on muscular endurance have, no doubt, something to do with it. They worked hard for fourteen, sometimes seventeen, hours at a stretch; they were ill-fed, suffering from exposure, intense cold, and a haunting uncertainty of the end of the undertaking. They were reasonable fellows as men go, with a respect for each other, but when hardship has got on the nerves, when you are suffering the agonies of snow-blindness, sore feet, and the pangs of hunger, you are not, to put it mildly, at your best as a member of the social order. They sometimes said things they were ashamed to remember, but both men grew carefuller at crucial moments, and the talkative one more silent as time went on.

By the rule of the day the hard shift before dinner usually fell to the Boy. It was the worst time in the twenty-four hours, and equally dreaded by both men. It was only the first night out from Anvik, after an unusually trying day, the Boy was tramping heavily ahead, bent like an old man before the cutting sleet, fettered like a criminal, hands behind back, rope-wound, stiff, straining at the burden of the slow and sullen sled. On a sudden he stopped, straightened his back, and remonstrated with the Colonel in unprintable terms, for putting off the halt later than ever they had yet, "after such a day."

"Can't make fire with green cotton-wood," was the Colonel's rejoiner.

"Then let's stop and rest, anyhow."

"Nuh! We know where that would land us. Men who stop to rest, go to sleep in the snow, and men who go to sleep in the snow on empty stomachs don't wake up."

They pushed on another mile. When the Colonel at last called the halt, the Boy sank down on the sled too exhausted to speak. But it had grown to be a practice with them not to trust themselves to talk at this hour. The Colonel would give the signal to stop, simply by ceasing to push the sled that the boy was wearily dragging. The Boy had invariably been feeling (just as the Colonel had before, during his shift in front) that the man behind wasn't helping all he might, whereupon followed a vague, consciously unreasonable, but wholly irresistible rage against the partner of his toil. But however much the man at the back was supposed to spare himself, the man in front had never yet failed to know when the impetus from behind was really removed.

The Boy sat now on the sled, silent, motionless, while the Colonel felled and chopped and brought the wood. Then the Boy dragged himself up, made the fire and the beef-tea. But still no word even after that reviving cup--the usual signal for a few remarks and more social relations to be established. Tonight no sound out of either. The Colonel changed his footgear and the melted snow in the pot began to boil noisily. But the Boy, who had again betaken himself to the sled, didn't budge. No man who really knows the trail would have dared, under the circumstances, to remind his pardner that it was now his business to get up and fry the bacon. But presently, without looking up, the hungry Colonel ventured:

"Get your dry things!"

"Feet aren't wet."

"Don't talk foolishness; here are your things." The Colonel flung in the Boy's direction the usual change, two pairs of heavy socks, the "German knitted" and "the felt."

"Not wet," repeated the Boy.

"You know you are."

"Could go through water in these mucklucks."

"I'm not saying the wet has come in from outside; but you know as well as I do a man sweats like a horse on the trail."

Still the Boy sat there, with his head sunk between his shoulders.

"First rule o' this country is to keep your feet dry, or else pneumonia, rheumatism--God knows what!"

"First rule o' this country is mind your own business, or else--God knows what!"

The Colonel looked at the Boy a moment, and then turned his back. The Boy glanced up conscience-stricken, but still only half alive, dulled by the weight of a crushing weariness. The Colonel presently bent over the fire and was about to lift off the turbulently boiling pot. The Boy sprang to his feet, ready to shout, "You do your work, and keep your hands off mine," but the Colonel turned just in time to say with unusual gentleness:

"If you _like_, I'll make supper to-night;" and the Boy, catching his breath, ran forward, swaying a little, half blind, but with a different look in his tired eyes.

"No, no, old man. It isn't as bad as that."

And again it was two friends who slept side by side in the snow.

The next morning the Colonel, who had been kept awake half the night by what he had been thinking was neuralgia in his eyes, woke late, hearing the Boy calling:

"I say, Kentucky, aren't you _ever_ goin' to get up?"

"Get up?" said the Colonel. "Why should I, when it's pitch-dark?"

"_What?_"

"Fire clean out, eh?" But he smelt the tea and bacon, and sat up bewildered, with a hand over his smarting eyes. The Boy went over and knelt down by him, looking at him curiously.

"Guess you're a little snow-blind, Colonel; but it won't last, you know."

"Blind!"

"No, no, only _snow_-blind. Big difference;" and he took out his rag of a handkerchief, got some water in a tin cup, and the eyes were bathed and bandaged.

"It won't last, you know. You'll just have to take it easy for a few days."

The Colonel groaned.

For the first time he seemed to lose heart. He sat during breakfast with bandaged eyes, and a droop of the shoulders, that seemed to say old age had come upon him in a single night. The day that followed was pretty dark to both men. The Boy had to do all the work, except the monotonous, blind, pushing from behind, in whatever direction the Boy dragged the sled.

Now, snow-blindness is not usually dangerous, but it is horribly painful while it lasts. Your eyes swell up and are stabbed continually by cutting pains; your head seems full of acute neuralgia, and often there is fever and other complications. The Colonel's was a bad case. But he was a giant for strength and "sound as a dollar," as the Boy reminded him, "except for this little bother with your eyes, and you're a whole heap better already."

At a very slow rate they plodded along.

They had got into a region where there was no timber; but, as they couldn't camp without a fire, they took an extra rest that day at four o'clock, and regaled themselves on some cold grub. Then they took up the line of march again. But they had been going only about half an hour when the Colonel suddenly, without warning, stopped pushing the sled, and stood stock-still on the trail. The Boy, feeling the removal of the pressure, looked round, went back to him, and found nothing in particular was the matter, but he just thought he wouldn't go any further.

"We can camp here."

"No, we can't," says the Boy; "there isn't a tree in sight."

But the Colonel seemed dazed. He thought he'd stop anyhow--"right where he was."

"Oh, no," says the Boy, a little frightened; "we'll camp the minute we come to wood." But the Colonel stood as if rooted. The Boy took his arm and led him on a few paces to the sled. "You needn't push hard, you know. Just keep your hand there so, without looking, you'll know where I'm going." This was very subtle of the Boy. For he knew the Colonel was blind as a bat and as sensitive as a woman. "We'll get through all right yet," he called back, as he stooped to take up the sledrope. "I bet on Kentucky."

Like a man walking in his sleep, the Colonel followed, now holding on to the sled and unconsciously pulling a little, and when the Boy, very nearly on his last legs, remonstrated, leaning against it, and so urging it a little forward.

Oh, but the wood was far to seek that night!

Concentrated on the two main things--to carry forward his almost intolerable load, and to go the shortest way to the nearest wood--the Boy, by-and-by, forgot to tell his tired nerves to take account of the unequal pressure from behind. If he felt it--well, the Colonel was a corker; if he didn't feel it--well, the Colonel was just about tuckered out. It was very late when at last the Boy raised a shout. Behind the cliff overhanging the river-bed that they were just rounding, there, spread out in the sparkling starlight, as far as he could see, a vast primeval forest. The Boy bettered his lagging pace.

"Ha! you haven't seen a wood like this since we left 'Frisco. It's all right now, Kentucky;" and he bent to his work with a will.

When he got to the edge of the wood, he flung down the rope and turned--to find himself alone.

"Colonel! Colonel! Where are you? _Colonel!_"

He stood in the silence, shivering with a sudden sense of desolation. He took his bearings, propped a fallen fir sapling aslant by the sled, and, forgetting he was ready to drop, he ran swiftly hack along the way he came. They had travelled all that afternoon and evening on the river ice, hard as iron, retaining no trace of footprint or of runner possible to verify even in daylight. The Yukon here was fully three miles wide. They had meant to hug the right bank, but snow and ice refashion the world and laugh at the trustful geography of men. A traveller on this trail is not always sure whether he is following the mighty Yukon or some slough equally mighty for a few miles, or whether, in the protracted twilight, he has not wandered off upon some frozen swamp.

On the Boy went in the ghostly starlight, running, stumbling, calling at regular intervals, his voice falling into a melancholy monotony that sounded foreign to himself. It occurred to him that were he the Colonel he wouldn't recognise it, and he began instead to call "Kentucky! Ken-tuck-kee!" sounding those fine barbaric syllables for the first time, most like, in that world of ice and silence.

He stood an instant after his voice died, and listened to the quiet. Yes, the people were right who said nothing was so hard to bear in this country of hardship--nothing ends by being so ghastly--as the silence. No bird stirs. The swift-flashing fish are sealed under ice, the wood creatures gone to their underground sleep. No whispering of the pointed firs, stiff, snowclotted; no swaying of the scant herbage sheathed in ice or muffled under winter's wide white blanket. No greater hush can reign in the interstellar spaces than in winter on the Yukon.

"Colonel!"

Silence--like a negation of all puny things, friendship, human life--

"Colonel!"

Silence. No wonder men went mad up here, when they didn't drown this silence in strong drink.

On and on he ran, till he felt sure he must have passed the Colonel, unless--yes, there were those air-holes in the river ice ... He felt choked and stopped to breathe. Should he go back? It was horrible to turn. It was like admitting that the man was not to be found--that this was the end.

"Colonel!"

He said to himself that he would go back, and build a fire for a signal, and return; but he ran on farther and farther away from the sled and from the forest. Was it growing faintly light? He looked up. Oh, yes; presently it would be brighter still. Those streamers of pale light dancing in the North; they would be green and scarlet and orange and purple, and the terrible white world would be illumined as by conflagration. He stopped again. That the Colonel should have dropped so far back as this, and the man in front not know--it was incredible. What was that? A shadow on the ice. A frozen hummock? No, a man. Was it really....? Glory hallelujah--it _was!_ But the shadow lay there ghastly still and the Boy's greeting died in his throat. He had found the Colonel, but he had found him delivered over to that treacherous sleep that seldom knows a waking. The Boy dropped down beside his friend, and wasn't far off crying. But it was a tonic to young nerves to see how, like one dead, the man lay there, for all the calling and tugging by the arm. The Boy rolled the body over, pulled open the things at the neck, and thrust his hand down, till he could feel the heart beating. He jumped up, got a handful of snow, and rubbed the man's face with it. At last a feeble protest--an effort to get away from the Boy's rude succour.

"Thank God! Colonel! Colonel! wake up!"

He shook him hard. But the big man only growled sullenly, and let his leaden weight drop back heavily on the ice. The Boy got hold of the neck of the Colonel's parki and pulled him frantically along the ice a few yards, and then realised that only the terror of the moment gave him the strength to do that much. To drag a man of the Colonel's weight all the way to the wood was stark impossibility. He couldn't get him eighty yards. If he left him and went for the sled and fuel, the man would be dead by the time he got back. If he stayed, they would both be frozen in a few hours. It was pretty horrible.

He felt faint and dizzy. It occurred to him that he would pray. He was an agnostic all right, but the Colonel was past praying for himself; and here was his friend--an agnostic--here he was on his knees. He hadn't prayed since he was a little chap down in the South. How did the prayers go? "Our Father"--he looked up at the reddening aurora--"Our Father, who art in heaven--" His eyes fell again on his friend. He leapt to his feet like a wild animal, and began to go at the Colonel with his fists. The blows rained thick on the chest of the prostrate man, but he was too well protected to feel more than the shock. But now they came battering down, under the ear--right, left, as the man turned blindly to avoid them--on the jaw, even on the suffering eyes, and that at last stung the sleeper into something like consciousness.

He struggled to his feet with a roar like a wounded bull, lunging heavily forward as the Boy eluded him, and he would have pounded the young fellow out of existence in no time had he stood his ground. That was exactly what the Boy didn't mean to do--he was always just a little way on in front; but as the Colonel's half-insane rage cooled, and he slowed down a bit, the Boy was at him again like some imp of Satan. Sound and lithe and quick-handed as he was, he was no match for the Colonel at his best. But the Colonel couldn't see well, and his brain was on fire. He'd kill that young devil, and then he'd lie down and sleep again.

Meanwhile Aurora mounted the high heavens; from a great corona in the zenith all the sky was hung with banners, and the snow was stained as if with blood. The Boy looked over his shoulder, and saw the huge figure of his friend, bearing down upon him, with his discoloured face rage-distorted, and murder in his tortured eyes. A moment's sense of the monstrous spectacle fell so poignant upon the Boy, that he felt dimly he must have been full half his life running this race with death, followed by a maniac bent on murder, in a world whose winter was strangely lit with the leaping fires of hell.

At last, on there in front, the cliff! Below it, the sharp bend in the river, and although he couldn't see it yet, behind the cliff the forest, and a little hand-sled bearing the means of life.

The Colonel was down again, but it wasn't safe to go near him just yet. The Boy ran on, unpacked the sled, and went, axe in hand, along the margin of the wood. Never before was a fire made so quickly. Then, with the flask, back to the Colonel, almost as sound asleep as before.

The Boy never could recall much about the hours that followed. There was nobody to help, so it must have been he who somehow got the Colonel to the fire, got him to swallow some food, plastered his wounded face over with the carbolic ointment, and got him into bed, for in the morning all this was seen to have been done.

They stayed in camp that day to "rest up," and the Boy shot a rabbit. The Colonel was coming round; the rest, or the ointment, or the tea-leaf poultice, had been good for snowblindness. The generous reserve of strength in his magnificent physique was quick to announce itself. He was still "frightfully bunged up," but "I think we'll push on to-morrow," he said that night, as he sat by the fire smoking before turning in.

"Right you are!" said the Boy, who was mending the sled-runner. Neither had referred to that encounter on the river-ice, that had ended in bringing the Colonel where there was succour. Nothing was said, then or for long after, in the way of deliberate recognition that the Boy had saved his life. It wasn't necessary; they understood each other.

But in the evening, after the Boy had finished mending the sled, it occurred to him he must also mend the Colonel before they went to bed. He got out the box of ointment and bespread the strips of torn handkerchief.

"Don't know as I need that to-night," says the Colonel. "Musn't waste ointment." But the Boy brought the bandages round to the Colonel's side of the fire. For an instant they looked at each other by the flickering light, and the Colonel laid his hand on the Boy's arm. His eyes looked worse for the moment, and began to water. He turned away brusquely, and knocked the ashes out of his pipe on a log.

"What in hell made you think of it?"

"Ask me an easy one," says the Boy. "But I know what the Jesuit Fathers would say."

"Jesuits and George Warren! Humph! precious little we'd agree about."

"You would about this. It flashed over me when I looked back and saw you peltin' after me."

"Small wonder I made for you! I'm not findin' fault, but what on earth put it into your head to go at me with your fists like that?"

"You'll never prove it by me. But when I saw you comin' at me like a mad bull, I thought to myself, thinks I, the Colonel and the Jesuits, they'd both of 'em say this was a direct answer to prayer."

“One work. Many languages. One reading experience.”