Chapter Thirty Nine.
The last bivouac.
Shortening days and shortening distances in and out of the wild ravine, where the water ran trickling merrily along in the brief sunny hours, but froze hard again at night. Every halting-place was more difficult to reach than the last, and climbing up the slippery sides of the stream bed was as often the means of progression as the simple tramp.
The sledge grew more difficult to draw, though its weight was really less and less: but in a mechanical way all joined hands in getting it over masses of rock, or through cracks where at times it became wedged in fast. For it could not be left behind, loaded as it was with the links which held them to life.
And at last the brief day came to an end, when the shortest journey of all had been made, little more than a mile along the narrow rift with its often perpendicular sides, where the greater part of the way had been one constant climb over the rock-burdened bed of the stream, whose sources were somewhere in the icy region, apparently as far away as when they started on their journey.
They had halted in a narrow amphitheatre of rocks, on one side of which lay a shelf dotted with dwarf pines, thick, sturdy, and old, many having shed their last needles years before, and displaying nothing now but thin bare trunks and a few jagged, weather-worn boughs. Snow had fallen heavily in the mountains during the previous night, and the side of the amphitheatre at the back of the shelf to which they had dragged the sledge was glazed with ice, where the snow above had melted in the warm mid-day rays, and frozen again and again.
It was bitter winter all around as the short day began to close in; but there was plenty of wood, and they felt if they climbed higher next day it would be into the region of wiry heaths and moss.
Quite instinctively, axe in hand, each of the weary three made for the dead wood and began to cut and break down the brittle boughs.
“Ay, that’s right, my sons,” said Tregelly, with the ghost of a smile; “let’s have a good fire if it is to be the last.”