The Timber Pirate

This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler
BY CHARLES CHRISTOPHER JENKINS
McCLELLAND AND STEWART PUBLISHERS : : TORONTO
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
THE TIMBER PIRATE. II
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
TO MY WIFE
Night’s sable curtain was soon to fall on the short-lived drama of a Winter day in the Laurentians. The departing sub-arctic sun, in its last pale glory, sent up from the omnipresent whiteness myriads of glistening beams that stabbed the eyes like leaping darts of fire. Of sounds there was oppressive absence. Not even a vagrant breeze sighed in the tree-tops; but at irregular intervals the intense stillness was smitten by the lugubrious “Spon-n-n-n-g!” of some aged tree splitting open to the heart where freezing moisture expanded in its crevices. All life and warmth seemed utterly exterminated in the pre-twilight calm save for the distant Monarch of Day slowly receding from his stark white world of desolation.
Yet even in these desolate wastes Man moved and had his being; for on the trail that wound down from the heights to the northwest there was the ribbonlike tracing of a dog sled and beside it the oval imprints of snowshoes. At a small cleared area in the scrub timber, just above where the trail dipped into a mighty, spruce-bearded ravine, the sled marks and the snowshoe patterns ceased.
On this spot, by a camp fire in the snow, hunched an elderly white man wrapped to his throat in blankets, beard and eyebrows thickly frosted from the vapour of his breath. His face, the wasted face of one who had endured intense physical suffering, was bereft of tangible expression; his eyes fixed dully on the slow-leaping, soundless flames from which there ascended into the zero-freighted air a wispy, hairlike strand of smoke. Roundabout him were scattered canvas packsacks, rolls of bright coloured woollen blankets, fire-blackened pots and pans, two light chopping axes and a short-barrelled repeating rifle. Nearby, on the trail, a spent and footsore string of sled dogs lay flattened in the snow. Noses stretched to the fire, eyes closed and limbs inert, they might be mistaken for dead and frozen things but for the occasional faint heave of their flanks as their trained lungs drew sparingly of the biting ozone.