Two on the Trail: A Story of Canada Snows

by E. E. Cowper

Da had entire confidence in her, and who shall say he had not a right to, considering all that he saw and knew about her!

She was fifteen; a head and shoulders taller than himself, and apparently as strong as their father. Her dark red hair was short as his own. That is to say, as short as hair can be where people have no shops and do their own hair-cutting. Her eyes were greenish grey and sharp as the keen, still eyes of the grey lynx that got trapped once in a way in the snares set for mink and martens.

David admired her hair and eyes with all his heart, chiefly because she was the only member of their small family like that--he and his father having darkish eyes and hair. Nell was supposed to have taken after a Scottish ancestress, with a vigorous character, not after the fair little mother with yellow hair and blue eyes; and when people start off like that in an independent manner they usually take a line of their own all through.

In fact, Nell Lindsay was a girl to be trusted; dependable and clever, which was a very good thing, because she needed every bit of it in the present crisis.

She and her young brother were alone in the log house--or shack--more than a hundred miles from any settlement. The two nearest were Abbitibbi House on the lake, away to the eastward, and Brunswick House, north on Moose River. Possibly the distance was equal, and Nell calculated it at a hundred and fifty miles either way.

That is nothing much in a country of railways, or even of good roads, but it is a long way over trackless waste, pathless forest, and snow--without guide, without help from human company.

When Nell did not answer David's persistent questions any longer, it was because she was thinking about the one hundred and fifty miles--and more--that lay between the shack and friends. It was friends she wanted. There were men nearer than that, but Nell was not sure they were friends, and therein lay the whole trouble, you see.

Over all that wilderness of forest and waste, river and lake, there lived trappers who had marked out certain districts as their own particular trapping grounds. Some were Indians, some white men who had taken up this life for the freedom and profit of making money by selling pelts--that is skins--to the traders who bought them up for the big Companies.

It was an understood thing that the trappers did not poach on each other's grounds. If they tried they ran the risk of being shot by the rightful owner. They were rough men, and followed rough laws of their own making.

The traders came round in early spring and bought up the fur. Or perhaps the trappers took great bundles of pelts away to the trading posts, got their money and spent it enjoying themselves to make up for the hardships of winter. But Andrew Lindsay was never one of these. He bought his flour, tea, bacon, and tobacco from the traders, sold his pelts and kept his money, so that after a bit it came to be common talk that he had saved a lot and hidden it in, or near, the log house. He was not the sort of man to imagine that people might think this. He loved the wild lands for the beauty and grandeur, and hated the work of an office and the close life in towns. This feeling had driven him north from San Francisco when he was first married. Here he had been in the Dominion, winter and summer, ever since, but he had not lost sight of the importance of education for his boy, and the money was saving up for that. David was to be an engineer. The years of work had paid very well and Nell knew her father's plan. Also she knew about the money, and that this was perhaps the last winter they would spend in the shack among the woods on the steep hills that ran for over a thousand miles from the northern frontier of Ontario to the Watchish Mountains in North-East Territory. The girl was content either way. Whatever her father decided was right, she thought. The winter was coming to an end very soon--it was the last week in March--and he had gone on his last round to look at traps on the more distant runways. The last, because fur gets thin and poor, and loses its thick beauty when the terrible cold of winter is giving before spring.