Somehow, unwittingly, I turned a gradual quarter circle to the right in the drifts, and was then travelling along the low, undulating divide instead of across it. Laboriously but confidently I kept on through the darkness and the fog, unconscious of my error, until, after three hours, I found myself at the foot of a grade that I had thought was the slope down into the Sulphur valley. I soon found my mistake. It must have been some large cup-shaped depression on the divide, its bottom strewn with a fearsome tangle of fallen trees carried down by a snow or landslide. For two testing hours I fought my way through that piled up brush and snow. When I got clear I felt myself on an up-grade.
It was a long climb out of that hateful valley and I knew now that I was lost. To try to retrace my steps would have been suicide. I had given up all hope of reaching Sulphur in time for the Tree and was growing a trifle anxious. It was terribly cold and dark. I had been working extremely hard for hours and I was getting hungry. I didn't dare to stand still or rest. My moccasin thong had come undone and I had to take off my mitts to fix it. So sharp was the frost that my fingers grew almost too stiff to do the work and I nearly failed to tie the lace. They were white and numb when I thrust them into my fur gauntlets, beating them against my chest as I went on. My whole body sensed the chill and threat of that momentary stop. It told me that if I were forced to take my last chance for life and try to build a fire, I would almost surely fail; to find dry wood, to prepare it, to light it, and wait nursing it into a flame sufficient to warm me would be a succession of almost hopeless chances, too desperate to take now unless there were no other way.
My climb brought me at last out above the frost-fog, and I thanked God I could see His stars and get my bearings. Far away to right and left in the darkness I knew the valleys of Gold Run and Sulphur lay, but between me and them stretched impossible miles of rough country. Puzzled a moment my anxious eyes caught the flicker of a light, low down in the north, hardly to be distinguished from the stars on the sky-line. This was indeed my "star of hope." It meant warmth, and warmth was life to me. I fixed its location and with new heart headed for it.
For six hours I travelled straight away like a hunted moose. I was young, lean and fit as a wolf. I was tired but not at all exhausted. In wind and limb I was good for miles yet. But I was becoming exceedingly hungry, and felt the clutching, icy fingers of the frost getting through my clothes, and I knew there was no time to waste. Hunger and ninety-five degrees of frost on the trail combining against you with darkness as their ally, will soon club you into unconsciousness.
However the game isn't lost or won until the referee blows his whistle. I was determined to fight it right out to the finish. The light was my goal and I forgot all else. I must get to it even though I might have to crawl at last with frozen hands and feet. In the hollows I lost sight of it, picking it up again on higher ground, until, when I knew I hadn't much time left me, it glimmered clear, down hill, not a hundred yards away. I'll tell you the lights in Paradise will not look so beautiful to me as did the Jo-Jo Roadhouse bonfire that night, for they had a big fire outside under an iron tank melting snow for water and it was the flame of this I had seen.
My fumbling at the latch roused Swanson, the owner, from his sleep. He opened the door and pulled me in and I was safe. I had been beaten in my endeavour to get to Sulphur in time for the Tree, but I was victor in a more serious contest. I had won a game against heavy odds in which the stakes were life, or death, or maiming.
They told me later at Sulphur, that at half-past eight the crowd at the Tree got uneasy, and by nine o'clock the concert was declared off and a well-equipped search-party set out with dog-teams. They went the round-about but well-trodden trail down to the mouth of Gold Run, and up that creek, until they found my solitary tracks turning off to the divide. They sent their dogs back to the Gold Run cabin with one of the party, and followed my trail all night on snowshoes, making the Jo-Jo late next morning an hour after I had left on Swanson's shoes for Sulphur.
I arrived at that camp by an easy route early in the afternoon. I had made their Tree a failure, I had broken my word, I had disobeyed Police orders, but I didn't get a scolding even, from anybody.