But it came about that Lenore and her little jealousies did not even find a place in Bess’s thought. She returned Ned’s gaze, her eyes lustrous as if with tears, and she understood wholly the prayer that was in his heart.
“Of course she may stay here,” she said. “We’ll make out somehow.”
XX
Doomsdorf’s trap lines lay in great circles, coinciding at various points in order to reduce the number of cabins needed to work them, and ultimately swinging back to the home cabin in the thicket beside the sea. They were very simple to follow, he explained—Bess’s line running up the river to the mouth of a great tributary that flowed from the south, the camp being known as the Eagle Creek cabin; thence up the tributary to its forks, known as the Forks cabin, up the left-hand forks to its mother springs, the Spring cabin, and then straight down the ridge to the home cabin, four days’ journey in all. She couldn’t miss any of the three huts, Doomsdorf explained, as all of them were located in the open barrens, on the banks of the creeks she was told to follow. Doomsdorf drew for her guidance a simple map that would remove all danger of going astray.
Ned’s route was slightly more complicated, yet nothing that the veriest greenhorn could not follow. It took him first to what Doomsdorf called his Twelve-Mile cabin at the very head of the little stream on which the home cabin was built, thence following a well-blazed trail along an extensive though narrow strip of timber, a favorable country for marten, to the top of the ridge, around the glacier, and down to the hut that Bess occupied the third night out, known as the Forks cabin; thence up the right-hand fork to its mother spring, the Thirty-Mile cabin; over the ridge and down to the sea, the Sea cabin; and thence, trapping salt-water mink and otter, to the home cabin, five days’ journey in all. “If you use your head, you can’t get off,” Doomsdorf explained. “If you don’t, no one will ever take the trouble to look you up.”
As if smiling upon their venture, nature gave them a clear dawn in which to start forth. The squaw and Bess started up from the river mouth together, the former in the rôle of teacher; Ned and Doomsdorf followed up the little, silvery creek that rippled past the home cabin. And for the first time since his landing on Hell Island Ned had a chance really to look about him.
It was the first time he had been out of sight of the cabin and thus away from the intangible change that the mere presence of man works on the wild. All at once, as the last vestige of the white roof was concealed behind the snow-laden branches of the spruce, he found himself in the very heart of the wilderness. It was as if he had passed from one world to another.
Even the air was different. It stirred and moved and throbbed in a way he couldn’t name, as if mighty, unnamable passions seemed about to be wakened. He caught a sense of a resistless power that could crush him to earth at a whim, of vast forces moving by fixed, invisible law; he felt that secret, wondering awe which to the woodsman means the nearing presence of the Red Gods. Only the mighty powers of nature were in dominion here: the lashing snows of winter, the bitter cold, the wind that wept by unheard by human ears. Ned was closer to the heart of nature, and thus to the heart of life, than he had ever been before.
He had no words to express the mood that came upon him. The wind that crept through the stunted spruce trees expressed it better than he; it was in the song that the wolf pack rings to sing on winter nights; in the weird complaint that the wild geese called down from the clouds. What little sound there was, murmuring branches and fallen aspen leaves, fresh on the snow, rustling faintly together and serving only to accentuate the depth of the silence, had this same, eerie motif,—nothing that could be put in words, nothing that ever came vividly into his consciousness, but which laid bare the very soul and spirit of life. Cold and hunger, an ancient persecution whose reason no man knew, a never-to-be-forgotten fear of a just but ruthless God!
This was the land untamed. There was not, at first, a blaze on a tree, the least sign that human beings had ever passed that way before. It was the land-that-used-to-be, unchanged seemingly since the dim beginnings of the world. Blessed by the climbing sun of spring, warm and gentle in the summer, moaning its old complaint when the fall winds swept through the branches, lashed by the storms of winter,—thus it had lain a thousand-thousand years. And now, a little way up the stream, there was more tangible sign that this was the kingdom of the wild. Instead of an unpeopled desert, it was shown to be teeming with life. They began to see the trails of the forest creatures in the snow.