He was working that part of the line from his Twelve-Mile cabin over the ridge toward the Forks cabin,—his old rendezvous with Bess. He was somewhat late in crossing the range to-day. He had taken several of the larger fur-bearers and had been obliged to skin them laboriously, first thawing them out over a fire in the snow, so that midafternoon found him just emerging from the thick copse where he had killed the white wolf. The blazed trail took him around the shoulder of the ridge, clear to the edge of a little, deeply seamed glacier such as crowns so many of the larger hills in the far North.
Few were the wild creatures that traversed this icy desolation, so his trap line had been laid out around the glacier, following the blazed trail in the scrub timber. But to-day the long way round was particularly grievous to his spirit. More than a mile could be saved by leaving the timber and climbing across the ice, and only a few sets, none of which had ever proved especially productive, would be missed. In his first few weeks the danger of going astray had kept him close to his line, but he was not obliged to take it into consideration now. He knew his country end to end.
Without an instant’s hesitation he turned from the trail straight over the snowy summit toward the cabin. The cut-off would save him the annoyance of making camp after dark. And since he had climbed it once before, he scarcely felt the need of extra caution.
The crossing, however, was not quite the same as on the previous occasion. Before the ice had been covered, completely across, with a heavy snowfall, no harder to walk on than the open barrens. He soon found now that the snow prevailed only to the summit of the glacier, and the descent beyond the summit had been swept clean by the winds.
Below him stretched a half-mile of glare ice, ivory white like the fangs of some fabulous beast-of-prey. Here and there it was gashed with crevices,—those deep glacier chasms into which a stone falls in silence. For a moment Ned regarded it with considerable displeasure:
He was not equipped for ice scaling. Perhaps it was best not to try to go on. But as he waited, the long way down and around seemed to grow in his imagination. It was that deadly hour of late afternoon when the founts of energy run low and the thought-mechanism is dulled by fatigue;—and some way, he felt his powers of resistance slipping away from him. He forget, for the moment, the Fear that is the very soul of wisdom.
He decided to take a chance. He removed his snowshoes and ventured carefully out upon the ice.
It was easier than it looked. His moccasins clung very well. Steadily gaining confidence, he walked at a faster pace. The slope was not much on this side, the glacier ending in an abrupt cliff many hundred feet in height, so he felt little need of especial precaution. It was, in fact, the easiest walking that he had had since his arrival upon the island, so he decided not to turn off clear until he reached the high ground just to one side of the ice cliff. He crawled down a series of shelves, picked his way about a jagged promontory, and fetched up at last at the edge of a dark crevice scarcely fifty feet from the edge of the snow.
The crevice was not much over five feet wide at this point, and looking along, he saw that a hundred yards to his right it ended in a snowbank. But there was no need of following it down. He could leap it at a standing jump: with a running start he could bound ten feet beyond.
He was tired, eager to get to camp,—and this was the zero hour. He drew back three paces, preparatory to making the leap.