Gold, Gold, in Cariboo! A Story of Adventure in British Columbia

by Clive Phillipps-Wolley

"A soldier and a gentleman! a soldier and a gentleman! Yes, but it came a bit too late, Mr. Edward Corbett. Hang it, I wish you had stayed behind instead of that fool, Roberts."

Of course the "whisky-jack" did not understand the other biped's language, but he was a bird of the world, and instinct told him that his companion in camp was dangerous; so, though the bacon-rind still lay there, he flitted off to a tree hard by, and spent the next half-hour in heaping abuse upon the colonel from a safe distance.

That "whisky-jack" grew to be a very wise bird, and in his old days used to tell many strange stories about human bipeds and the Balm-of-Gilead camp.

But there was half a mile of brush between Ned and their old camp, so he saw nothing of all this; and after the fresh morning air had roused him, and the exercise had set his blood going through his veins at its normal pace, he went unconcernedly on his way, talking to Steve as long as there was room enough for the two to walk side by side, and then gradually forging ahead, and setting that young Yankee a step which kept him extended, and made poor little Phon follow at a trot.

Though Ned and Steve had grown used to isolation upon the trail with ten laden beasts between the two, they made several attempts upon this particular morning to carry on a broken conversation, or lighten the road with snatches of song.

Perhaps it was that they were making unconscious efforts to drive away a feeling of depression, which sometimes comes over men's natures with as little warning as a storm over an April sky.

But their efforts were in vain; nature was too strong for them. In the great silence amid these funereal pines their voices seemed to fall at their own feet, and ere long the forest had mastered them, as it masters the Indians, and the birds, and the wild dumb beasts which wander about in its fastnesses. The only creature which retains its loquacity in a pine-forest is the squirrel, and he is always too busy to cultivate sentiment of any kind.

Cruickshank had warned them that the trail led uphill, and it undoubtedly did so. At first the three swung along over trails brown with the fallen pine needles of last year, soft to the foot and level to the tread, with great expanses of fruit bushes upon either side,—bushes that in another month or two would be laden with a repast spread only for the bear and the birds. Salmon-berry and rasp-berry, soap-berry and service-berry, and two or three different kinds of bilberry were there, as well as half a dozen others which neither Ned nor Steve knew by sight. But the season of berries was not yet, so they wetted their parched lips with their tongues and passed on with a sigh.

Then the road began to go uphill. They knew that by the way they kept tripping over the sticks and by the increased weight of their packs. By and by Steve thought they would come to a level place at the top, and there they would lie down for a while and rest. But that top never came, or at least the sun was going round to the south, and it had not come yet. And then the air began to grow more chill, and the trees to change. There were no more bushes, or but very few of them; and the trees, which were black dismal-looking balsams, were draped with beard-moss, the winter food of the cariboo, and there was snow in little patches at their feet. When the sun had gone round to the west the snow had grown more plentiful, and there were glades amongst the balsams, and at last Steve was glad, for they had got up to the top of the divide.

But he was wrong again, for again the trail rose, and this time through a belt of timber which the wind had laid upturned across their path. Heavens! how heavy the packs grew then, and how their limbs ached with stepping over log after log, bruising their shins against one and stumbling head-first over another. At first Steve growled at every spiked-bough which caught and held him, and groaned at every sharp stake which cut into the hollow of his foot. But anger in the woods soon gives place to a sullen stoicism. It is useless to quarrel with the unresponsive pines. The mountains and the great trees look down upon man's insignificance, and his feeble curse dies upon his lips, frozen by the terrible sphinx-like silence of a cold passionless nature.