XII
At the very headquarters of Poor Man's Creek, where the stream had dwindled to a silver thread between mossy banks, Beatrice and Ben made their noon camp. They were full in the heart of the wild, by now, and had mounted to those high levels and park lands beloved by the caribou. They built a small fire beside the stream and drew water from the deep, clear pools that lay between cascade and cascade.
Ben Darby slowly became aware that this was one of the happiest hours of his life. He watched, with absorbed delight, the deft, sure motions of the girl as she fried the grouse and sliced bread, while Ben himself tended to the coffee. Already the two were on the friendliest terms, and since they were to be somewhere in the same region, the future offered the most pleasing vistas to both of them. When the horses were rested and Ben's pipe was out, they ventured on. Following a caribou trail, they ascended a majestic range of mountains—a trail too steep to ride and which the pack horses accomplished only with great difficulty—emerging onto a high plateau of open parks and small clumps of the darkest spruce. It was, of course, the most scenic part of the journey; and the inclination to talk died speedily from the lips.
They rode in silence, watching. Both of them were sure that words, no matter how beautiful and eloquent, could be only a sacrilege. The very tone of the high ranges is that of silence vast and eternal beyond scope of thought, and the only sounds that can fittingly shatter that mighty breathlessness are the great, calamitous phenomena of nature,—the thunder crashing in the sky and the avalanche on the slope. The forests they had just left were deeply silent, but the far hush had been alleviated by the soft noises of wild creatures stirring about their occupations; perhaps also by the feeling that the thickets were full of sound pitched just too high or just too low for human ears to hear; but even this relief was absent here. The high peaks stretched before them, one after another, until they faded into the horizon,—majestic, aloof, utterly and grandly silent.
The snow still lay deep over the plateau, packed to the consistency of ice, and the marmots had not yet emerged to welcome the spring with their shrill, joyous whistling. From their high place they could see the hills spread out below them,—fold after fold as of a great cloak, deeply green, seemingly infinite in expanse, broken only by the blue glint of the Agnes lakes, like two great twin sapphires hidden in the forest. But they couldn't make out a single roof top of Snowy Gulch. The forest had already claimed it utterly.
This was the caribou range; wherever they looked they saw the tracks of the noble animals in the snow. Later they caught a glimpse of the creatures themselves, a small herd of perhaps half a dozen swinging along the snow in their indescribable pacing gait. They were in fitting surroundings, their color inexpressibly vivid against the snow, and Ben's heart warmed and thumped in his breast at the sight.
But the trail descended at last into the great valley of the Yuga. Mile after mile, it seemed to them, they went down, leaving the snow, leaving the open glades, into the dark, still glens of spruce. At last they paused on the river bank.
Ben was somewhat amazed at the size of the stream when it emerged below the rapids. It was, at its present high stage, fully one hundred and fifty yards across, such a stream as would bear the traffic of commerce in any inhabited region. They turned down the moose trail that followed its bank.