A strange atmosphere of unreality began to cloud their familiar world. They found it increasingly hard to believe in their own consciousnesses; to convince themselves they were still struggling onward instead of lying lifeless in the snow. It was all dim like a dream,—snow and silence and emptiness, and the Northern Lights lambent in the sky. And for a time this was the only mercy that remained. Their perceptions were blunted: they were hardly aware of the messages of pain and torture that the nerves brought to the brain. And then, as ever, there came a certain measure of readjustment.
Their bodies built up to endure even such hardship as this. The fact that the snow at last packed was a factor too: they were able to skim over the white crust at a pace even faster than the best time they had made in early fall. They mastered the trapper’s craft, learning how to skin a beaver with the fewest number of strokes, and in such a manner that the minimum amount of painstaking fleshing was required; and how to bait and set the traps in the fastest possible time. They learned their own country, and thus the best, easiest, and quickest routes from cabin to cabin.
The result was that at last the companionship between Bess and Ned, forgotten in the drear horror of the early winter months, was revived. Again they had pleasant hours about the stove at the Forks cabin, sometimes working at pelts, sometimes even enjoying the unheard-of luxury of a few minutes of idleness. While before they had come in almost too tired to be aware of each other’s existence, now they were fresh enough to exchange a few, simple friendly words—even, on rare occasions, to enjoy a laugh together over some little disaster of the trail. The time came when they knew each other extremely well. In their hours of talk they plumbed each other’s most secret views and philosophies, and helped to solve each other’s spiritual problems.
Very naturally, and scarcely aware of the fact themselves, they had come to be the best of companions. As Ned once said, when a night of particular beauty stirred his imagination and loosened his stern lips, they had been “through hell” together; and the finest, most enduring companionship was only to have been expected. But it went farther than a quiet sort of satisfaction in each other’s presence. Each had got to know approximately what the other would do in any given case; and that meant that they afforded mutual security. They had mutual trust and confidence, which was no little satisfaction on this island of peril. Blunted and dulled before, their whole consciousness now seemed to sharpen and waken; they not only regarded each other with greater confidence: their whole outlook had undergone significant change. During the first few months of early winter they had moved over their terrible trails like mechanical machines, doing all they had to do by instinct, whether eating, sleeping, or working; self-consciousness had been almost forgotten, self-identity nearly lost. But now they were themselves again, looking forward keenly to their little meetings, their interests ever reaching farther, the first beginnings of a new poise and self-confidence upon them. They had stood the gaff! They had come through.
Ned’s hours with Lenore, however, gave him less satisfaction than they had at first. She somehow failed to understand what he had been through. He had found out what real hardship meant, and he couldn’t help but resent, considering her own comparative comfort, her attitude of self-pity. Always she wept for deliverance from the island, never letting Ned forget that his own folly had brought her hither; always expecting solicitude instead of giving it; always willing to receive all the help that Ned could give her, but never willing to sacrifice one whit of her own comfort to ease his lot. Because he had done man’s work, and stood up under it, he found himself expecting more and more from her,—and failing to receive it. Her lack of sportsmanship was particularly distressing to him at a time when sobbing and complaints could only tear down his own hard-fought-for spirit to endure. Most of all he resented her attitude toward Bess. She had no sympathy for what the girl had been through, even refusing to listen to Ned’s tales of her. And she seemed to resent all of Ned’s kindnesses to her.
Slowly, by the school of hardship and conquest over hardship, Ned Cornet was winning a new self-mastery, a new self-confidence to take the place of the self-conceit that had brought him to disaster. But the first real moment of wakening was also one of peril,—on the trapping trail one clear afternoon toward the bitter close of January.
He had been quietly following that portion of his trap line that followed the timber belt between the Twelve-Mile cabin and Forks cabin, and the blazed trail had led him into the depths of a heavy thicket of young spruce. He had never felt more secure. The midwinter silence lay over the land; the cold and fearful beauty of a snow-swept wilderness had hold of his spirit; the specter of terror and death that haunted these wintry wastes was nowhere manifest to his sight. The only hint of danger that the Red Gods afforded him did not half penetrate his consciousness and did not in the least call him from his pleasant fancies. It was only a glimpse of green where the snow had been shaken from a compact little group of sapling spruce just beside one of his sets. Likely the wind had caught the little trees just right; perhaps some unfortunate little fur-bearer, a marten perhaps, or a fisher, had sprung back and forth among the little trees in an effort to free himself from the trap. He walked up quietly, located the tree to which the trap chain was attached, bent and started to draw the trap from the small, dense thicket whence some creature had dragged it. He was only casually interested in what manner of poor, frozen creature would be revealed between the steel jaws. The beauty of the day had wholly taken his mind from his work.
One moment, and the forest was asleep about him; the little trees looked sadly burdened with their loads of snow. The next, and the man was hurled to the ground by a savage, snarling thing that leaped from the covert like the snow demon it was; and white, gleaming fangs were flashing toward his throat.
XXII
Except for the impediment of the trap on the creature’s foot, there would have been but one blow to that battle in the snow. White fangs would have gone home where they were aimed, and all of Ned Cornet’s problems would have been simply and promptly solved. There would have been a few grotesque sounds, carrying out among the impassive trees,—such sounds as a savage hound utters over his bone, and perhaps, a strange motif carrying through, a few weird whisperings, ever growing fainter, from a torn throat that could no longer convey the full tones of speech; and perhaps certain further motion, perhaps a wild moment of odd, frenzied leaping back and forth, fangs flashing here and there over a form that still shivered as if with bitter cold. But these things would not have endured long: the sounds, like wakeful children, speedily hiding and losing themselves in the great curtains of silence and the wilderness itself swiftly returning to its slumber. Drifting snow dust, under the wind, would have soon paled and finally obliterated the crimson stain among the little trees.