Burned Bridges - Page 77/167

They sat up till a most unseemly hour talking over the details of that

long trek. Tommy Ashe was warmed with the prospect, and some of his

enthusiasm fired Thompson, proved strangely infectious. The wanderlust,

which Wesley Thompson was only beginning to feel in vague stirrings, had

long since become the chief motif in Tommy's life. He did not unburden

himself at length. It was simply through stray references, offhand bits

of talk, as they checked up resources and distances, that Thompson

pieced out the four years of Ashe's wanderings across Canada--four years

of careless, happy-go-lucky drifting along streams and through virgin

forest, sometimes alone, sometimes with a partner; four years of

hunting, fishing, and camping all the way from Labrador to Lone Moose.

Tommy had worked hard at this fascinating game. He confessed that with

revenue enough to keep him going, to vary the wilderness with an

occasional month in some city, he could go on doing that sort of thing

with an infinite amount of pleasure.

But something had gone wrong with the source of the funds that came

quarterly. Tommy did not appear to regret that. But he realized its

significance. He would have to work. Having to work he meant to work as

he had played, with all his heart and to some purpose. He had an

ambitious idea of pressing Fortune to her lair. He was young and very

sanguine. His cheerful optimism was the best possible antidote for the

state of mind in which he found Thompson.

They went to bed at last. With breakfast behind them they went up to

Ashe's cabin and brought down to Thompson's a miscellaneous collection

of articles that Tommy had left behind when he went trapping. Tommy had

four good dogs in addition to the brown retriever. By adding Thompson's

pair and putting all their goods on one capacious toboggan they achieved

a first-class outfit.

In the North when a man sets out on a winter journey, or any sort of

journey, in fact, his preparations are speedily made. He loads his sled,

hitches his dogs, takes his rifle in hand, hooks his toes in his

snowshoes and goes his way.

This is precisely the course Tommy Ashe and Thompson followed. Having

decided to go, they went, and neither of them took it as a serious

matter that they were on the first leg of a twelve-hundred-mile jaunt in

the deep of winter across a primitive land.

To be exact in dates it was February the first when they touched at

Pachugan, where Tommy traded in his furs, and where they took on a

capacity load of grub. West of the lake head they bore across a low,

wooded delta and debouched upon Peace River's frozen surface.

After that it was plod-plod-plod, one day very much like another, cold

with coldness of the sub-Arctic, the river a white band through heavy

woods, nights that were crisp and still as death, the sky a vast dome

sprinkled with flickering stars, brilliant at times with the Northern

Lights, that strange glow that flashes and shimmers above the Pole, now

a banner of flame, again only a misty sheen. Sometimes it seemed an

unreality, that silence, that immensity of hushed forest, those vast

areas in which life was not a factor. When a blizzard whooped out of the

northern quarter, holding them close to the little tent and the tiny

sheet-iron stove, when they sat for hours with their hands clasped over

their knees, listening to the voice of the wilderness whispering

sibilantly in the swaying boughs, it seemed utterly impossible that

these frigid solitudes could ever know the kindliness of summer, that

those cold white spaces could ever be warm and sunny and bright with

flowers.