The numerous lakes bordering close on the heavily wooded, mountainous coast of British Columbia have two characteristic features. They lie in granite pockets with steep-to, rocky shores. Or they spread in low basins shrouded in dense forest, and the margins of such lakes are a marshy jungle. In either case they are difficult of approach. One must clamber over jagged rocks, or work up through crabapple, devil's club, and sedgy grass.
The Granite Pool on Valdez was one exception. This nameless lake proved another. Rod and Mary came to it through a heavy stand of cedar, massive old trees which had killed all the lesser growth in their centuries of possession. No sapling grew there, or bush or fern or vine. The level ground was carpeted with moss, which alone could thrive in that sunless place. Over this soft footing Rod and his wife walked by the little creek, flowing with faint murmurs in its bed of worn pebbles, till they stepped suddenly out of that semi-gloom into the brightness of open water rippling in the sun.
A low, gravelly beach at their feet; wooded points jutting into the lake; an island lifting a green mound of trees a little distance offshore; the lake itself bending away out of sight behind the base of a great mountain five miles distant,—this they saw.
"You never know what you're going to find back in these hills." Rod sat down on the gravel. "Let's sit and look. It's worth a look."
"If we just had a boat up here," Mary observed, after a little.
"We'll have one," Rod answered promptly. "I have an ax. There are plenty of cedars. I can make a dugout of some sort in three or four days. Let's move camp up here. There'll be trout umpty-inches long in here, and I would like to see what's behind that mountain. We'll certainly explore this."
He made good his word, in sweat and strain. It was not a light task to shoulder-pack their food, bedding and tent over that pathless two miles. Nor was the shaping of a rude canoe from a cedar log and the hollowing of it by ax and fire so easy and simple as it seemed. But they accomplished these things. And having done so, they viewed their works with sinful pride, blessing the wilderness for what it bestowed upon them.
They meant to stay two or three weeks. Their food was reckoned on that basis. But they had been liberal in their estimate of supplies. There were trout in lake and stream. The blue grouse hooted on every hillside, and when they wanted meat they hunted these toothsome birds. Three weeks lengthened to four, to five—six. It became an amiable contest, a matter of achievement, to see how long they could live off the wilderness. They were completely happy there. It was as if some invisible barrier stood between them and the world of their fellows, where griefs and pains and irritations, hopes and fears and joys and ambitions ran their course. They did not know what went on beyond the rampart of their seclusion. And they did not care. They were too absorbed in what each day might bring forth as it passed. They experienced deep, ecstatic satisfactions in the simplest things. Rod began to work on his book again, in the intervals of hunting, fishing, exploring. He would lift his head, stirred out of concentration on imaginary things, at the sound of Mary singing as she moved about certain tasks. And he would smile. It was good; it was what he wanted. Peace to dream, to catch and transfix incident, character, a colorful background for heroic undertakings, as they mysteriously took form in his brain. To love and be loved; to get something more out of life than just a leisurely existence; to create something of worth above the measure of money.
He was aware that this was just an interlude. They would have to go back to the business of living along more conventional lines. They were both too much the normal product of society even to wish complete withdrawal from their kind. That would only be an evasion. But it was an experience they found to their liking. They promised themselves to repeat it often.
"We're barbarians at heart," Mary said once. "Our so-called culture is only skin-deep. Otherwise we couldn't sit over a camp fire and be content. Nor lie in the sun on a mossy rock and feel that blissful sense of complete well-being. People with instincts like those should survive more or less complacently almost anything but loss of freedom. What do shops and streetcars, cities and frontiers mean to us here?" She waved a hand at the ring of mountains, the enclosing forest. "People handicap themselves when they grow too civilized."