And death would find them quickly enough if they failed to find human habitations. For all Knutsen’s prowess, for all that he was so obviously a man of his hands, Ned couldn’t see any possibility of sustaining life on one of the barren, wind-swept deserts for more than a few days at most. They had no guns to procure meat from the wild: their little stores of food would not last long. The cold itself, though not now severe, would likely master them quickly. Even if they could find fuel, they had no axe to cut it up for a fire. In all probability, they couldn’t even build a fire in the snow and the sleet.
The stabbing pain in his arms was ever harder to bear. He was paying the price for his long pampering of his muscles. The time soon came when he had to change his stroke, dipping the oars at a cheating angle. Even if it were a matter of life and death to Lenore he couldn’t hold up. He couldn’t stand the pace. Knutsen, however, still rowed untiringly.
Soon the island began to take shape, revealing itself as of medium size in comparison with many of the islands of Bering Sea, yet seemingly large enough to support a kingdom. The gray line they had seen first revealed itself as a low range of mountains, bare and wind-swept, extending the full length of the island. What timber there was—meager growths of Sitka spruce and quivering aspen—appeared only on some of the south slopes of the hills and in scattered patches on the valley floor.
In the gray light of dawn the whole expanse was one of unutterable desolation. Even the rapture that they had felt at deliverance from the sea was some way stifled and dulled in the brooding despair that seemed to be its very spirit. They had passed many bleak, windy islands on the journey; but none but what were gardens compared to this. Ned tried to rouse himself from a strange apathy, a sudden, infinite hopelessness that fell like a shadow over him.
Likely enough it was just a mood with him, nothing innate in the island itself. Probably his own fatigue was playing tricks on his imagination. Yet the solid earth seemed no longer familiar. It was as if he had passed beyond his familiar world, known to his five senses and firm beneath his feet, and had come to an eerie, twilight land beyond the horizon. It was so still, lying so bleak and gray in the midst of these endless waters, seemingly so eternally isolated from all he had known and seen. The physical characteristics of the island enhanced, if anything, its mysterious atmosphere. The mossy barrens that comprised most of the island floor, the little, scattered clumps of timber, the deep valleys through which the shining streams ran to the sea, the rugged, shapeless hills beyond, each real in itself, combined to convey an image of unreality. Over it all lay the snow. The whole land was swept with it.
It was evidently the kingdom of the wild. It was the home of caribou and bear, fox and wolverine rather than men. And the dreadful probability was ever more manifest that the island contained not a single hearth, a single Indian igloo in which they might find shelter.
The place seemed to be utterly uninhabited by human beings. The white shore was nearing now, the craft had reached the mouth of a large harbor formed by the emptying waters of a small river; and as yet the voyagers could not make out a single roof, a single canoe on the shore. Knutsen peered with straining eyes.
“It looks bad,” he said tonelessly. “If there was a village here it ought to be located at the mouth of that river. It’s the logical place for a camp. They always stay near the salmon.”
Straining, Ned suddenly saw what seemed to him a manifestation of human inhabitants. There were clearly pronounced tracks, showing dark against the otherwise unbroken snow, leading from the sea to a patch of heavy forest a quarter of a mile back on the island. He pointed to them, his eye kindling with renewed hope.
But Knutsen shook his head. “I can’t tell from here. They might be animal tracks.”