Isobel : a Romance of the Northern Trail - James Oliver Curwood (classic books for 10 year olds .TXT) 📗

world!"
A few days later Pelliter left on the last of the slush snows in an effort to reach Nelson House before the sledging was gone.
"I wish you'd go with me, Billy," he entreated for the hundredth time. "My girl 'd love to have you come, an' you know how I'd like it."
But Billy could not be moved.
"I'll come and see you some day-- when you've got the kid," he promised, trying to laugh, as he shook hands for the last time with his old comrade.
For three days after Pelliter's departure he remained at the post. On the morning of the fourth, with his pack on his back and without dogs, he struck off into the north and west.
"I think I'll spend next winter at Fond du Lac," he told the inspector. "If there's any mail for me you can send it there if you have a chance, and if I'm not at Fond du Lac it can be returned to Churchill."
He said Fond du Lac because Deane's grave lay between Churchill and the old Hudson's Bay Company's post over in the country of the Athabasca. The Barrens were the one thing that called to him now-- the one thing to which he dared respond. He would keep his promise to Isobel and visit Scottie's grave. At least he tried to make himself believe that he was keeping a promise. But deep in him there was an undercurrent of feeling which he could not explain. It was as if there were a spirit with him at times, walking at his side, and hovering about his campfire at nights, and when he gave himself up to the right mood he felt that it was the presence of Deane. He believed in strong friendship, but he had never believed in the love of man for man. He had not thought that such a thing could exist, except, perhaps, between father and son. With him, in all the castles he had built and the dreams he had dreamed, the alpha and omega of love had remained with woman. For the first time he knew what it meant to love a man-- the memory of a man.
Something held him from telling the secret of his mission at Churchill even to Pelliter. The evening before he left he had smuggled an ax into the edge of the forest, and the second day he found use for this. He came to a straight-grained, thick birch, eighteen inches in diameter, and he put up his tent fifty paces from it. Before he rolled himself in his blankets that night he had cut down the tree. The next day he chopped off the butt, and before another nightfall had hewn out a slab two inches thick, a foot wide, and three feet long. When he took up the trail into the north and west again the following morning he left the ax behind.
The fourth night he worked with his hunting-knife and his belt-ax, thinning down the slab and making it smooth. The fifth and the sixth nights he passed in the same way, and he ended the sixth night by heating the end of a small iron rod in the fire and burning the first three letters of Deane's epitaph on the slab. For a time he was puzzled, wondering whether he should use the name Scottie or David. He decided on David.
He did not travel fast, for to him spring was the most beautiful of all seasons in the wilderness. It was underfoot and overhead now. The snow-floods were singing between the ridges and gathering in the hollows. The poplar buds were swollen almost to the bursting point, and the bakneesh vines were as red as blood with the glow of new life. Seventeen days after he left Churchill he came to the edge of the big Barren. For two days he swung westward, and early in the forenoon of the third looked out over the gray waste, dotted with moving caribou, over which he and Pelliter had raced ahead of the Eskimos with little Isobel. He went to the cabin first and entered. It was evident that no one had been there since he had left, On the bunk where Deane had died he found one of baby Isobel's little mittens. He had wondered where she had lost it, and had made her a new one of lynx-skin on the way down to Couchée's cabin. The tiny bed that he had made for her on the floor was as she had last slept in it, and in the part of a blanket that he had used as a pillow was still the imprint of her head. On the wall hung a pair of old trousers that Deane had worn. Billy looked at these things, standing silently, with his pack at his feet. There was something in the cabin that closed in about him and choked him, and he struggled to overcome it by whistling. His lips seemed thick. At last he turned and went to the grave.
The foxes had been there, and had dug a little about the sapling cross. There was no other change. During the remainder of the forenoon Billy cut down a heavier sapling and sunk the butt of it three feet into the half-frozen earth at the head of Deane's grave. Then, with spikes he had brought with him, he nailed on the slab. He believed that no one would ever know what the words on that slab meant-- no one except himself and the spirit of Scottie Deane. With the end of the heated rod he had burned into the wood:
DAVID DEANE
Died Feb. 27, 1908
BELOVED OF ISOBEL AND THE ONE
WHO WISHES HE COULD TAKE
YOUR PLACE AND GIVE
YOU BACK TO
HER
W. M. April 15, 1908
He did not stop when it was time for dinner, but carried rocks from a ridge a couple of hundred yards away, and built a cairn four feet high around the sapling, so that storm or wild animals could not knock it down. Then he began a search in the warmest and sunniest parts of the forest, where the green tips of plant life were beginning to reveal themselves. He found snowflowers, redglow, and bakneesh, and dug up root after root, and at last, peeping out from between two rocks, he found the arrowlike tip of a blue flower. The bakneesh roots he planted about the cairn, and the blue flower he planted by itself at the head of the grave.
It was long past midday when he returned to the cabin, and once more he was oppressed by the appalling loneliness of it. It was not as he had thought it would be. Deane's spirit and companionship had seemed to be nearer to him beside his campfires and in the forest. He cooked a meal over the stove, but the snapping of the fire seemed strange and unnatural in the deserted room. Even the air he breathed was heavy with the oppression of death and broken hopes. He found it difficult to swallow the food he had cooked, though he had eaten nothing since morning. When he was done he looked at his watch. It was four o'clock. The northern sun had dropped behind the distant forests and was followed now by the thickening gloom of early evening. For a few moments Billy stood motionless outside the cabin. Behind him an owl hooted its lonely mating-song. Over his head a brush sparrow twittered. It was that hour, just between the end of day and the beginning of night, when the wilderness holds its breath and all is still. Billy clenched his hands and listened. He could not keep back the break that was in his breath. Something out there in the silence and the gathering darkness was calling him-- calling him away from the cabin, away from the grave, and the gray, dead waste of the Barren. He turned back into the cabin and put his things into the pack. He took the little mitten to keep with his other treasures, and then he went out and closed the door behind him. He passed close to the grave and for the last time gazed upon the spot where Deane lay buried.
"Good-by, old man," he whispered. Goodby--"
The owl hooted louder as he turned his face into the west. It made him shiver, and he hurried his steps into the unbroken wilderness that lay for hundreds of miles between him and the post at Fond du Lac.


XX
THE LETTER
Days and weeks and months of a loneliness which Billy had never known before followed after his pilgrimage to Deane's grave. It was more than loneliness. He had known loneliness, the heartbreak and the longing of it, in the black and silent chaos of the arctic night; he had almost gone mad of it, and he had seen Pelliter nearly die for a glimpse of the sun and the sound of a voice. But this was different. It was something that ate deeper at his soul each day and each night that he lived. He had believed that thought of Isobel and his memories of her would make him happier, even though he never saw her again. But in this he was mistaken. The wilderness does not lend to forgetfulness, and each day her voice seemed nearer and more real to him, and she became more and more insistently a part of his thoughts. Never an hour of the day passed that he did not ask himself where she was. He hoped that she and the baby Isobel had returned to the old home in Montreal, where they would surely find friends and be cared for. And yet the dread was upon him that she had remained in the wilderness, that her love for Deane would keep her there, and that she would find a woman's work at some post between the Height of Land and the Barrens. At times there possessed him an overwhelming desire to return to McTabb's cabin and find where they had gone. But he fought against this desire as a man fights against death. He knew that once he surrendered himself to the temptation to be near her again he would lose much that he had won in his struggle during the days of plague in Couchée's cabin.
So his feet carried him steadily westward, while the invisible hands tugged at him from behind. He did not go straight to Fond du Lac, but spent nearly three weeks with a trapper whom he ran across on the Pipestone River. It was June when he struck Fond du Lac, and he remained there a month. He had more than half expected to pass the winter there, but the factor at the post proved a disagreeable acquaintance, and he did not like the country. So early in July he set out deeper into the Athabasca country to the west, followed the northern shore of the big lake, and two months later came to Fort Chippewyan, near the mouth of the Slave River.
He struck Chippewyan at a fortunate time. A government geological and map-making party was just preparing to leave for the terra incognita between the Great Slave and the Great Bear, and the three men who had come up from Ottawa urged Billy to join them. He jumped at the opportunity, and remained with them until the party returned to the Mackenzie River by the way of Fort Providence five months later. He remained at Fort Providence until late spring, and then came down to Fort Wrigley, where he had several friends in the service. Fifteen months of wandering had had their effect upon him. He could no longer resist the call of the wanderlust. It urged him from place to place, and stronger and