The Man from the Bitter Roots

by Caroline Lockhart

It was folly to go out penniless—unarmed; he had learned that lesson in the East and his condition then had been affluence compared to this. He was doing the one thing that it was possible for him to do in the circumstances—to get money enough to go outside.

“Slim” had brought a collection of traps down the river from Meadows, and Bruce had set these out. So far he had been rather lucky and the pile of skins in the corner was growing—lynx, cougar, marten, mink—but it still was not high enough.

If Bruce had been less sensitive, more world-hardened, his failure would not have seemed such a crushing, unbearable thing, but alone in the killing monotony he brooded over the money he had sunk for other people until it seemed like a colossal disgrace for which there was no excuse and that he could never live down. In his bitter condemnation of himself for his inexperience, his ill-judged magnanimity, he felt as though his was an isolated case—that no human being ever had made such mistakes before.

But it was thoughts of Helen that always gave his misery its crowning touch. She pitied him, no doubt, because, she was kind, but in her heart he felt she must despise him for a weakling—a braggart who could not make good his boasts. She needed him, too,—he was sure of it—and lack of money made him as helpless to aid her as though he were serving a jail sentence. When, in the night, his mind began running along this line he could no longer stay in his bunk; and not once, but many times, he got up and dressed and went outside, stumbling around in the brush, over the rocks—anything to change his thoughts.

He tried his utmost to put her out of his mind, yet as he plodded on his snow-shoes, along his fifteen-mile trap line, either actively or subconsciously his thoughts were of her. He could no longer imagine himself feeling anything more than a mild interest in any other woman. He loved her with the same concentration of affection that he had loved his mother.

Bruce had formed the habit of wondering what she would think of this and that—of imagining how she would look—what she would say—and so all through the summer she had been associated with the work. He had anticipated the time when he should be showing her the rapids with the moonlight shining on the foam, the pink and amber sunsets behind the umbrella tree, and when the wind blew among the pines of listening with her to the sounds that were like Hawaiian music in the distance.

Now, try as he would, he could not rid himself of the habit, and, as he pushed his way among the dark underbrush of creeks, he was always thinking that she, too, would love that “woodsy” smell; that she, too, would find delight in the frozen waterfalls and the awesome stillness of the snow-laden pines.

But just so often as he allowed his imagination rein, just so often he came back to earth doubly heavy-hearted, for the chance that she would ever share his pleasure in these things seemed to grow more remote as the days went by.

Bruce had built himself a shelter at the end of his trap-line that consisted merely of poles and pine boughs leaned against a rim-rock. Under this poor protection, wrapped in a blanket, with his feet toward the fire at the entrance and his back against the wall, he spent many a wretched night. Sometimes he dozed a little, but mostly wide-eyed, he counted the endless hours waiting for the dawn.

During the summer when things had continually gone wrong Bruce had found some comfort in recounting the difficulties which his hero of the Calumet and Hecla had gone through in the initial stages of the development of that great mine. But that time had passed, for, while Alexander Agassiz had had his struggles, Bruce told himself with a shadowy smile, he never had been up against a deal like this! there was no record that he ever had had to lie out under a rim-rock when the thermometer stood twenty and twenty-five below.