CHAPTER III.

HOW THEY LOST THE TRAIL.

The slow days pass, but the guide does not return. Geoffrey’s sporting explorations have resulted only in a rare bird, hardly a mouthful for one of the four starving men, though they divide the appetising morsel with rigid justice, Lucius dissecting it with his clasp-knife almost as carefully as if it were a subject.

‘To think that I should live to dine on a section of wood-partridge without any bread-sauce!’ exclaimed Geoffrey dolefully. ‘Do you know, when I put the small beast in my bag I was sorely tempted to eat him, feathers and all! Indeed, I think we make a mistake in plucking our game. The feathers would at least be filling. It is the sense of a vacuum from which one suffers most severely; after all it can’t matter much what a man puts inside him, so long as he fills the cavity. Do you remember that experimental Frenchman who suggested that a hungry peasantry should eat grass? The suggestion was hardly popular, and the mob stuffed the poor wretch’s mouth with a handful of his favourite pabulum, when they hung him to a convenient lamp-post in ’93. But I really think the notion was sensible. If there were a rood of pasture uncovered by the perpetual snow I should imitate Nebuchadnezzar, and go to grass!’

Vain lamentations! Vainer still those long arguments by the pine-log fire, in which, with map and compass, they travel over again the journey which has been so disastrous—try back, and find where it was they lost time—how they let slip a day here, half a week there, until the expedition, which should have ended with last September, occupied a period they had never dreamed of, and left them in the bleak bitter winter: their trail lost, alone in a trackless forest, the snow rising higher around them day by day, until even the steep bank upon which they have built their log-hut stands but a few feet above the universal level.

From first to last the journey has been attended by misfortune as well as mistake. They had set forth on this perilous enterprise fondly hoping they could combine pleasure for themselves, with profit to their fellow-creatures, and by this wild adventure open up a track for future emigrants—a high road in the days to come from the shores of the Atlantic to the Pacific—a path by which adventurers from the old world should travel across the Rocky Mountains to the gold-fields of the new world. They had started with high hopes—or Lucius had at least cherished this dream above all thought of personal enjoyment—hopes of being reckoned among the golden band of adventurers whose daring has enlarged man’s dominion over that wide world God gave him for his heritage—hopes of seeing their names recorded on that grand muster-roll which begins with Hercules, and ends with Livingstone. They had started from Fort Edmonton with three horses, two guides, and a fair outfit; but they had left that point too late in the year, as the guardians of the fort warned them. They were entreated to postpone their attempt till the following summer, but they had already spent one winter in camp between Carlton and Edmonton, and the two young men were resolutely set against farther delay. Absalom Schanck, much more phlegmatic, would have willingly wintered at the fort, where there was good entertainment, and where he could have smoked his pipe and looked out of window at the pine-tops and the snow from one week’s end to another, resigned to circumstances, and patiently awaiting remittances from England. But to Lucius Davoren and Geoffrey Hossack the idea of such loss of time was unendurable. They had both seen as much as they cared to see of the trapper’s life during the past winter. Both were eager to push on to fresh woods and pastures new, Geoffrey moved by the predatory instincts of the sportsman, Lucius fevered by the less selfish and more ambitious desire to discover that grand highway which he had dreamed of, between the two great oceans. The star which guided his pilgrimage was the lodestar of the discoverer. No idle fancy, no caprice of the moment, could have tempted him aside from the settled purpose of his journey. But a mountain-sheep—the bighorn—or a wild goat, seen high up on some crag against the clear cold sky, was magnet enough to draw Geoffrey twenty miles out of his course.

Of the two guides, one deserted before they had crossed the range, making off quietly with one of their horses—the best, by the way—and leaving them, after a long day and night of wonderment, to the melancholy conviction that they had been cheated. They retraced their way for one day’s journey, sent their other guide, an Indian, back some distance in search of the deserter, but with no result. This cost them between three and four days. The man had doubtless gone quietly back to Edmonton. To follow him farther would be altogether to abandon their expedition for this year. The days they had already lost were precious as rubies.

‘_En avant!_’ exclaimed Geoffrey.

‘Excelsior!’ cried Lucius.

The German was quiescent. ‘I zink you leat me to my deaths,’ he said; ‘but man must die one time. Gismet, as the Durks say. They are wise beobles, ze Durks.’

The Indian promised to remain faithful, ay, even to death; of which fatal issue these savages think somewhat lightly; life for them mostly signifying hardship and privation, brightened only by rare libations of rum. He was promoted from a secondary position to the front rank, and was now their sole guide. With their cavalcade thus shrunken they pushed bravely on, crossed the mountains by the Yellow Head Pass, looked down from among snow-clad pinnacles upon the Athabasca river, rushing madly between its steep banks, and reached Jasper House, a station of the Hudson’s Bay Company, which they found void of all human life, a mere shell or empty simulacrum; in the distance a cheering object to look upon, promising welcome and shelter; and giving neither.

For Hossack, that mighty mountain range, those snow-clad peaks, towering skyward, had an irresistible attraction. He had done a good deal of Alpine climbing in his long vacations, had scaled peaks which few have ever succeeded in surmounting, and had made his name a household word among the Swiss guides, but such a range as this was new to him. Here there was a larger splendour, an infinite beauty. The world which he had looked down upon from Mont Blanc—lakes, valleys, and villages dwarfed by the distance—was a mere tea-board landscape, a toy-shop panorama, compared with this. He drew in his breath and gazed in a dumb rapture,

‘Or like stout Cortez, when, with eagle eyes, He stared at the Pacific.’

Here, again, they lost considerable time; for even Davoren’s stronger mind was beguiled by the glory of that splendid scene. He consented to a week’s halt on the margin of the Athabasca, climbed the mountain-steeps with his friend, chased the bighorn with footstep light and daring as the chamois-hunter’s; and found himself sometimes, after the keen pleasures of the hunt, with his moccasins in rags, and his naked feet cut and bleeding, a fact of which he had been supremely unconscious so long as the chase lasted. Sometimes, after descending to the lower earth, laden with their quarry, the hunters looked upward and saw the precipices they had trodden, the narrow cornice of rock along which they had run in pursuit of their prey—saw, and shuddered. Had they been really within a hair’s-breadth of death?

These were the brightest days of their journey. Their stores were yet ample, and seemed inexhaustible. They feasted on fresh meat nightly; yet, with a laudable prudence, smoked and dried some portion of their prey. In the indulgence of their sporting propensities they squandered a good deal of ammunition. They smoked half-a-dozen pipes of tobacco daily. In a word, they enjoyed the present, with a culpable shortsightedness as to the future.

This delay turned the balance against them. While they loitered, autumn stole on with footstep almost impalpable, in that region of evergreen.

The first sharp frost of early October awakened Lucius to a sense of their folly. He gave the word for the march forward, refusing to listen to Geoffrey’s entreaty for one day more—one more wild hunt among those mighty crags between earth and sky.

The sea-captain and Kekek-ooarsis, their Indian guide, had been meritoriously employed during this delay in constructing a raft for the passage of the Athabasca, at this point a wide lake whose peaceful waters spread themselves amid an amphitheatre of mountains.

While they were getting ready for the passage of the river they were surprised by a party of half-breeds—friendly, but starving. Anxious as they were to husband their resources, humanity compelled them to furnish these hapless wanderers with a meal. In return for this hospitality, the natives gave them some good advice, urging them on no account to trust themselves to the current of the river—a mode of transit which seemed easy and tempting—as it abounded in dangerous rapids. They afforded farther information as to the trail on ahead, and these sons of the old and new world parted, well pleased with one another.

Soon after this began their time of trial and hardship. They had to cross the river many times in their journey—sometimes on rafts, sometimes fording the stream—and often in imminent peril of an abrupt ending of their troubles by drowning. They crossed pleasant oases of green prairie, verdant valleys all abloom with wild flowers, gentian and tiger lilies, cineraria, blue borage—the last-lingering traces of summer’s footfall in the sheltered nooks. Sometimes they came upon patches where the forest-trees were blackened by fire, or had fallen among the ashes of the underwood. Sometimes they had to cut their way through the wood, and made slow and painful progress. Sometimes they lost the trail, and only regained it after a day’s wasted labour. One of their horses died—the other was reduced to a mere skeleton—so rare had now become the glimpses of pasture. They looked at this spectral equine with sad prophetic eyes, not knowing how long it might be before they would be reduced to the painful necessity of cooking and eating him; and with a doleful foreboding that, when famine brought them to that strait, the faithful steed would be found to consist solely of bone and hide.

So they tramped on laboriously and with a dogged patience till they lost the trail once more; and this time even the Indian’s sagacity proved utterly at fault, and all their efforts to regain it were vain. They found themselves in a trackless ring of forest, to them as darksome a circle as the lowest deep in Dante’s Inferno, and here beheld the first snow-storm fall white upon the black pine-tops. Here, in one of their vain wanderings in search of the lost track, they came upon a dead Indian, seated stark and ghastly at the foot of a giant pine, draped in his blanket, and bent as if still stooping over the ashes of the fire wherewith he had tried to keep the ebbing life warm in his wasted clay. This gruesome stranger was headless. Famine had wasted him to the very bone; his skin was mere parchment, stretched tightly over the gaunt skeleton; the whitening bones of his horse bestrewed the ground by his side. How he came in that awful condition, what had befallen the missing head, they knew not. Even conjecture was here at fault. But the spectacle struck them with indescribable horror. So too might they be found; the skeleton horse crouched dead at their feet, beside the ashes of the last fire at which their dim eyes had gazed in the final agonies of starvation. This incident made them desperate.

‘We are wasting our strength in a useless hunt for the lost track,’ said Lucius decisively. ‘We have neither the instinct nor the experience of the Indian. Let us make a log-hut here, and wait for the worst quietly, while Kekek-ooarsis searches for the path, or tries to work his way back to the fort to fetch help and food. He will make his way three times as fast when he is unencumbered by us and our incapacity. We may be able to ward off starvation meanwhile with the aid of Geoff’s guns. At the worst, we only face death. And since a man can but die once, it is after all only a question of whether we get full or short measure of the wine of life.

‘And come he slow or come he fast, It is but Death who comes at last.’

‘Brezisely,’ said the Hamburgher. ‘It is drue. A man can but die one time—Gismet. Yet ze wine of life is petter zan ze vater of death, in most beoble’s obinion.’

Kekek-ooarsis had been absent nearly five weeks at the time of the stranger’s appearance, and the length of his absence had variously affected the three men who waited with a gloomy resignation for his return, or the coming of that other stranger, Death. At times, when Geoffrey’s gun had not been useless, when they had eaten, and were inclined to take a somewhat cheerful view of their situation, they told each other that he had most likely recovered the lost track at a considerable distance from their hut, and had pushed on to the fort, to procure fresh horses and supplies. They calculated the time such a journey to and fro must take him, allowed a wide margin for accidental delays, and argued that it was not yet too late for the possibility of his return.

‘I hope he hasn’t cut and run like that other beggar,’ said Geoffrey. ‘It was rather a risky thing to trust him with our money to buy the horses and provender. Yet it was our only resource.’

‘I believe in his honesty,’ replied Davoren. ‘If he deserts us, Death will be the tempter who lures him away. These Indians have nobler qualities than you are inclined to credit them with. Do you remember that starving creature who came to our hut by the Saskatchewan one day while we were out hunting, and sat by our hearth, famishing amidst plenty, for twelve mortal hours, and did not touch a morsel till we returned and offered him food? I’ll forfeit my reputation as a judge of character, if Kekek-ooarsis tries to cheat us. That other fellow was a half-breed.’

‘The Greeks weren’t half-breeds,’ said Geoffrey, whose reading had of late years been chiefly confined to the Greek historians and the more popular of the French novelists, ‘yet they were the most treacherous ruffians going. I don’t pin my faith on your chivalrous Indian. However, there’s no use in contemplating the gloomiest side of the question. Let’s take a more lively view of it, and say that he’s frozen to death in the pass, with our money intact in his bosom, exactly where you sewed it into his shirt.’

Thus they speculated; the German venturing no opinion, but smoking the only obtainable substitute for tobacco in stolid silence. Indeed, when hard pressed by his companions, he admitted that he had never had any opinion. ‘Vat is ze goot ov obinions?’ he demanded. ‘Man is no petter vor zem, and it is zo much vasted lapour of prain. I do not know how to tink. Zomedimes I have ask my froints vat it is like, tinking. Zey gannot tell me. Zey tink zey tink, put zey to not tink.’