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.
But there were compensations. Two men cannot eat out of the same pot—figuratively speaking—sleep huddled close together for the warmth that is in their bodies, hear no voices but their own, exert a common effort to a common end day after day, until the days become weeks and the weeks marshal themselves into calendar months—no two men born of woman can sustain this enforced intimacy over a long period without acquiring a positive attitude toward each other. They achieve a contemptuous tolerance, or they achieve a rare and lasting friendship. It was the fortune of Tommy Ashe and Wesley Thompson to cultivate the latter. They arrived at it by degrees, in many forty-below-zero camps along the Peace, in the shadow of those towering mountains where the Peace cuts through the backbone of North America. It grew out of mutual respect, a wordless sense of understanding, a conviction that each did his best to play the game fair and square.
So that, as they worked westward and gave over their toboggan on the waters of a stream far beyond the Rockies, when Spring began to touch the North with her magic wand they grew merry, galvanized by the spirit of adventure. They could laugh, and sometimes they could sing. And they planned largely, with the sanguine air of youth. On the edges—not in the depths—of that wild and rugged land where manifold natural resources lay untouched, it seemed as if a man had but to try hard enough in order to succeed. They had conquered an ominous stretch of wilderness. They would conquer with equal facility whatever barriers they found between them and fortune.
The sweep of Spring's progress across the land found them west of the Coast Range by May, in a wild and forbidding region where three major streams—the Skeena, the Stikine, and the Naas—take their rise. For many days their advance was through grim canyons, over precipitous slopes, across glaciers, bearing always westward, until the maps with which Tommy Ashe was equipped showed them they were descending the Stikine. Here they rested in a country full of game animals and birds and fish, until the height of the spring torrents had passed. During this time they fashioned a canoe out of a cedar tree, big enough to carry them and the dogs which had served so faithfully as pack animals over that last mountainous stretch. The Stikine was swift and forbidding, but navigable. Thus at last, in the first days of the salmon run, they came out upon tidewater, down to Wrangel by the sea.
There was in Thompson's mind no more thought of burned bridges, no heartache and empty longing, only an eagerness of anticipation. He had come a long way, in a double sense. He had learned something of the essential satisfaction of striving. A tough trail had served to toughen the mental and moral as well as the physical fiber of him. He did not know what lay ahead, but whatever did so lie would never dismay him again as things had done in the past, in that too-recent vivid past.
He was quite sure of this. His mood was tinctured with recklessness when he summed it up in words. A man must stand on his own feet!
He would never forget that sentence. It was burned into his memory. He was beginning to understand what Sophie Carr meant by it. Looking backward he could see that he never had stood on his own feet like a man. Always he had required props. And they had been forthcoming from the time the prim spinster aunts took his training in hand until he came to Lone Moose self-consciously, rather flauntingly, waving the banner of righteousness. Thompson could smile wryly at himself now. He could see the unreckonable element of chance functioning largely in a man's life.
And in the meantime he went about Wrangel looking for a job!