CHAPTER I.

‘WHERE THE SUN IS SILENT.’

Winter round them: not a winter in city streets, lamplit and glowing, or on a fair English countryside, dotted with cottage-roofs, humble village homes, sending up their incense of blue-gray smoke to the hearth goddess; not the winter of civilisation, with all means and appliances at hand to loosen the grip of the frost-fiend: but winter in its bleakest aspect, amid trackless forests, where the trapper walks alone; winter in a solitude so drear that the sound of a human voice seems more strange and awful than the prevailing silence; winter in a pine-forest in British North America, westward of the Rocky Mountains. It is December, the bleakest, dreariest month in the long winter; for spring is still far off.

Three men sit crouching over the wood-fire in a roughly-built log-hut in the middle of a forest, which seems to stretch away indefinitely into infinite space. The men have trodden that silent region for many a day, and have found no outlet on either side, only here and there a frozen lake, to whose margin, ere the waters were changed to ice, the forest denizens came down to gorge themselves with the small fish that abound there. They are travellers who have penetrated this dismal region for pleasure; yet each moved by a different desire. The first, Lucius Davoren, surgeon, has been impelled by that deep-rooted thirst of knowledge which in some minds is a passion. He wants to know what this strange wild territory is like—this unfamiliar land between Fort Garry and Victoria, across the Rocky Mountains—and if there lies not here a fair road for the English emigrant. He has even cherished the hope of some day pushing his way to the northward, up to the ice-bound shores of the polar sea. He looks upon this trapper-expedition as a mere experimental business, an education for grander things, the explorer’s preparatory school.

So much for Lucius Davoren, surgeon without a practice. Mark him as he sits in his dusky corner by the fire. The hut boasts a couple of windows, but they are only of elk-skin, through which the winter light steals dimly. Mark the strongly-defined profile, the broad forehead, the clear gray eyes. The well-cut mouth and resolute chin are hidden by that bushy untrimmed beard, which stiffens with his frozen breath when he ventures outside the hut; but the broad square forehead, the Saxon type of brow, and clear penetrating eyes, are in themselves all-sufficient indications of the man’s character. Here are firmness and patience, or, in one word, the noblest attribute of the human mind—constancy.

On the opposite side of that rude hearth sits Geoffrey Hossack, three years ago an undergraduate at Balliol, great at hammer-throwing and the long jump, doubtful as to divinity exam., and with vague ideas trending towards travel and adventure in the Far West as the easiest solution of _that_ difficulty. Young, handsome, ardent, fickle, strong as a lion, gentle as a sucking dove, Geoffrey has been the delight and glory of the band in its sunnier days; he is the one spot of sunlight in the picture now, when the horizon has darkened to so deep a gloom.

The last of the trio is Absalom Schanck, a native of Hamburg, small and plump, with a perennial plumpness which has not suffered even from a diet of mouldy pemmican, and rare meals of buffalo or moose flesh, which has survived intervals of semi-starvation, blank dismal days when there was absolutely nothing for these explorers to eat.

At such trying periods Absalom is wont to wax plaintive, but it is not of turtle or venison he dreams; no vision of callipash or callipee, no mocking simulacrum of a lordly Aberdeen salmon or an aldermanic turbot, no mirage picture of sirloin or Christmas turkey, torments his soul; but his feverish mouth waters for the putrid cabbage and rancid pork of his fatherland; and the sharpest torture which fancy can create for him is the tempting suggestion of a certain boiled sausage which his soul loveth.

He has joined the expedition with half-defined ideas upon the subject of a new company of dealers in skins, to be established beyond the precincts of Hudson’s Bay; and not a little influenced by a genuine love of exploration, and a lurking notion that he has in him the stuff that makes a Van Diemen.

From first to last it is, and has been, essentially an amateur expedition. No contribution from the government of any nation has aided these wanderers. They have come, as Geoffrey Hossack forcibly expresses the fact, ‘on their own hook.’ Geoffrey suggests that they should found a city, by and by, after the manner of classical adventurers: whence should arise in remote future ages some new Empire of the West.

‘Hossack’s Gate would be rather a good name for it,’ he says, between two puffs of his meerschaum; ‘and our descendants would doubtless be known as the Hossackides, and the Davorenides, and do their very best to annihilate one another, you know, Lucius.’

‘We Chermans have giv more names to blaizes than you Englishers,’ chimes in Mr. Schanck with dignity. ‘It is our dalend to disgover.’

‘I wish you’d disgover something to eat, then, my friend Absalom,’ replies the Oxonian irreverently; ‘that mouthful of pemmican Lucius doled out to us just now has only served as a whet for my appetite. Like the half-dozen Ostend oysters they give one as the overture to a French dinner.’

‘Ah, they are goot the oysders of Osdend,’ says Mr. Schanck with a sigh, ‘and zo are ze muzzles of Blankenberk. I dreamt ze ozer night I vas in heafen eading muzzles sdewed in _vin de madère_.’

‘Don’t,’ cries Geoffrey emphatically; ‘if we begin to talk about eating, we shall go mad, or eat each other. How nice you would be, Schanck, stuffed with chestnuts, and roasted, like a Norfolk turkey dressed French fashion! It’s rather a pity that one’s friends are reported to be indigestible; but I believe that’s merely a fable, designed as a deterring influence. The Maories cannibalised from the beginning of time; fed in and in, as well as bred in and in. One nice old man, a chieftain of Rakiraki, kept a register of his own consumption of prisoners, by means of a row of stones, which, when reckoned up after the old gentleman’s demise, amounted to eight hundred and seventy-two: and yet these Maories were a healthy race enough when civilisation looked them up.’

Lucius Davoren takes no heed of this frivolous talk. He is lying on the floor of the log-hut, with a large chart spread under him, studying it intensely, and sticking pins here and there as he pores over it. He has ideas of his own, fixed and definite, which neither of his companions shares in the smallest degree. Hossack has come to these wild regions with an Englishman’s unalloyed love of adventure, as well as for a quiet escape from the trusting relatives who would have urged him to go up for Divinity. Schanck has been beguiled hither by the fond expectation of finding himself in a paradise of tame polar bears and silver foxes, who would lie down at his feet, and mutely beseech him to convert them into carriage-rugs. They are waiting for the return of their guide, an Indian, who has gone to hunt for the lost trail, and to make his way back to a far distant fort in quest of provisions. If he should find the journey impossible, or fall dead upon the way, their last hope must perish with the failure of his mission, their one only chance of succour must die with his death.

Very shrunken are the stores which Lucius Davoren guards with jealous care. He doles out each man’s meagre portion day by day with a Spartan severity, and a measurement so just that even hunger cannot dispute his administration; the tobacco, that sweet solacer of weary hours, begins to shrink in the barrel, and Geoffrey Hossack’s lips linger lovingly over the final puffs of his short black-muzzled meerschaum, with a doleful looking forward to the broad abyss of empty hours which must be bridged over before he refills the bowl. Unless the guide returns with supplies there is hardly any hope that these reckless adventurers will ever reach the broad blue waters of the Pacific, and accomplish the end of that adventurous scheme which brought them to these barren regions. Unless help comes to them in this way, or in some fortuitous fashion, they are doomed to perish. They have considered this fact among themselves many times, sitting huddled together under the low roof of their log-hut, by the feeble glimmer of their lantern.

Of the three wanderers Absalom Schanck is the only experienced traveller. He is a naturalised Englishman, and a captain in the merchant navy; having traded prosperously for some years as the owner of a ship—a sea-carrier in a small way—he had sold his vessel, and built himself a water-side villa at Battersea, half Hamburgian, half nautical in design; a cross between a house in Hamburg and half-a-dozen ships’ cabins packed neatly together; everything planned with as strict an economy of space as if the dainty little habitation were destined to put to sea as soon as she was finished. As many shelves and drawers and hatches in the kitchen as in a steward’s cabin; stairs winding up the heart of the house, like a companion-ladder; a flat roof, from which Mr. Schanck can see the sunset beyond the westward-lying swamps of Fulham, and which he fondly calls the admiral’s poop.

But even this comfortable habitation has palled upon the mind of the professional rover. Dull are those suburban flats to the eye that for twenty years has ranged over the vast and various ocean. Absalom has found the consolation of pipe and case-bottle inadequate; and with speculative ideas of the vaguest nature, has joined Geoffrey Hossack’s expedition to the Far West.