Partners of the Out-Trail

by Harold Bindloss

Men like Dearham learn such things, and by the half-instinctive faculties they develop Canadian traffic is carried on in winter storms. Telegraph linesmen in the bush and railroad hands on mountain sections use powers beyond the imagining of sheltered city men. They make good, giving all that can be demanded of flesh and blood; the wires work and Montreal-Vancouver expresses keep time in the snow.

One thing made Jim's task a little easier. The wire was overhead and when he reached the break he would see the trailing end. The trees had been chopped back; there was nothing to help the current's leap to earth, and he would not be forced to cut and call up the next shack with his battery. He wanted to find a fallen post, but as he struggled forward the half-seen poles came back out of the icy mist in an unending row. He had been out two hours and had not reached the worst spot. The line had no doubt broken at Silver's Gulch.

Some time afterwards he stopped and leaned against a post. The woods broke off behind him and in front a gap, filled with waves of snow, opened up. He could not see across; indeed, for a few moments, he could hardly see at all, but the turmoil that came out of the dark hollow hinted at its depth. He heard the roar of tossing trees far below and his brain reproduced an accurate picture of the gulch that pierced the high tableland. It was wide just there, but narrowed farther on, and a river, fed by a glacier, flowed through the defile. The river was probably frozen, although it ran fast. The wires went down obliquely, and in one place there was a straight fall of a hundred feet. The rest of the rugged slope was very steep and one needed some nerve to follow the row of posts when the light was good.

Jim did not hesitate when he had got his breath. With a blizzard raging, his job would not bear thinking about. He let go the post and slipped down some distance. When he stopped he got up badly shaken and crawled down cautiously, trying to keep the line in sight, but it was not a logical sense of duty that urged him on; he only knew he must not be beaten. He fought instinctively, because this was a region where to give ground in the battle generally means to die.

He reached a bend of the line where a post stood on a broken pitch that was almost a precipice. Twenty or thirty yards below it became a precipice and Jim met the full force of the wind as he crept round the corner. Then he saw a trailing wire, and, a little farther on, a broken post that had slipped down some distance. Crouching in the snow behind a rock for a few minutes, he thought hard. Although the post was short and not very heavy, he could not drag it back while the wire was attached. The latter must be loosed, and fixed again when the post was in its place, but it would be enough if the line was lifted a foot or two from the ground. Proper repairs could be made afterwards; the important thing was the Government messages should not be held up. For all that, it would be hard to reach the spot.

He crawled down and stopped beside the post. The snow was blinding, the wind buffeted him savagely, and since he was near the top of the precipice it was risky to stand up. His fur mittens embarrassed him, but he could not take them off, because when the thermometer falls below zero one cannot touch steel tools with unprotected hands. After some trouble, Jim loosed the wire and then saw the broken ends would not meet. However, since the line curved, a post could be cut in order to shorten the distance, and he crawled back to the spot where he had left his ax. Had he not been used to the snowy wilds, he could not have found the tool.

He cut the post and, with numbed and clumsy hands, joined the wire, but it must now be raised from the ground. It was impossible to get the fallen post on end and had he been able to do so powder would have been needed to make a hole. He could, however, support the post on a rock, and he floundered up and down in the snow, looking for a suitable spot. When he found a place, it was some way from the post, which was too heavy to move, and he went cautiously down hill for the other. Although this was lighter, he did not see how he could drag it back to the level he had left, and he sat down behind a rock and thought.

His coat and cap were heavy with frozen snow that the wind had driven into the fur; in spite of his efforts, he was numbed, and the gale raged furiously. The snow blew past the rock in clouds that looked like waves of fog; he had been exposed to the icy blast for three or four hours and could not keep up the struggle long. The warmth was leaving his body fast. Yet he did not think much about the risk. His business was to mend the line and his acquiescence was to some extent mechanical. To begin with, he must get the post up the hill and he braced himself for the effort.

He could just lift the butt and, getting it on his shoulder, faced the climb, staggering forward a few steps while the thin end of the post dragged in the snow, and then stopping. It was tremendous labor, and he knew he would need all the strength he had left to reach the shack, but in the meantime this did not count. Getting home was a problem that must be solved after the line was mended.

At length he reached the spot he had fixed upon, fastened the wire to the insulator, and lifted the top of the post a few feet. The job was done, but his body was exhausted and his brain was dull. He had made good and was conscious of a vague satisfaction. He could not, however, indulge feelings like this: he must now nerve himself for the effort to get home.