Rolf in the Woods

by Ernest Thompson Seton

Now they turned aside, followed a hollow until they reached a spruce grove, where they camped and took an observation, to learn that the compass and they held widely different views about the direction of travel. It was obviously useless to face the storm. They rubbed out their frozen features with dry snow and rested by the fire.

No good scout seeks for hardship; he avoids the unnecessary trial of strength and saves himself for the unavoidable. With zero weather about them and twenty-four hours to wait in the storm, the scouts set about making themselves thoroughly comfortable.

With their snowshoes they dug away the snow in a circle a dozen feet across, piling it up on the outside so as to make that as high as possible. When they were down to the ground, the wall of snow around them was five feet high. Now they went forth with the hatchets, cut many small spruces, and piled them against the living spruces about the camp till there was a dense mass of evergreen foliage ten feet high around them, open only at the top, where was a space five feet across. With abundance of dry spruce wood, a thick bed of balsam boughs, and plenty of blankets they were in what most woodmen consider comfort complete.

They had nothing to do now but wait. Quonab sat placidly smoking, Rolf was sewing a rent in his coat, the storm hissed, and the wind-driven ice needles rattled through the trees to vary the crackle of the fire with a “siss” as they fell on the embers. The low monotony of sound was lulling in its evenness, when a faint crunch of a foot on the snow was heard. Rolf reached for his gun, the fir tree screen was shaken a little, and a minute later there bounded in upon them the snow covered form of little dog Skookum, expressing his good-will by excessive sign talk in which every limb and member had a part. They had left him behind, indeed, but not with his consent, so the bargain was incomplete.

There was no need to ask now, What shall we do with him? Skookum had settled that, and why or how he never attempted to explain.

He was wise who made it law that “as was his share who went forth to battle, so shall his be that abode with the stuff,” for the hardest of all is the waiting. In the morning there was less doing in the elemental strife. There were even occasional periods of calm and at length it grew so light that surely the veil was breaking.

Quonab returned from a brief reconnoitre to say, “Ugh!—good going.”

The clouds were broken and flying, the sun came out at times, but the wind was high, the cold intense, and the snow still drifting. Poor Skookum had it harder than the men, for they wore snowshoes; but he kept his troubles to himself and bravely trudged along behind. Had he been capable of such reflection he might have said, “What delightful weather, it keeps the fleas so quiet.”

That day there was little to note but the intense cold, and again both men had their cheeks frost-bitten on the north side. A nook under an overhanging rock gave a good camp that night. Next day the bad weather resumed, but, anxious to push on they faced it, guided chiefly by the wind. It was northwest, and as long as they felt this fierce, burning cold mercilessly gnawing on their hapless tender right cheek bones, they knew they were keeping their proper main course.

They were glad indeed to rest at dusk and thaw their frozen faces. Next day at dawn they were off; at first it was calm, but the surging of the snow waves soon began again, and the air was filled with the spray of their lashing till it was hard to see fifty yards in any direction. They were making very bad time. The fourth day should have brought them to Ogdensburg, but they were still far off; how far they could only guess, for they had not come across a house or a settler.