Track's End / Being the Narrative of Judson Pitcher's Strange Winter Spent There as Told by Himself and Edited by Hayden Carruth Including an Accurate Account of His Numerous Adventures, and the Facts Concerning His Several Surprising Escapes from Death Now First Printed in Full

by Hayden Carruth

It was so hot that I could not go behind Fitzsimmons’s, so I dragged my ladder across the drifts of the street and through between the hotel and Hawkey’s. When I came out in the rear of these I was startled to find a small blaze on the barn roof. I hurried to the barn with my ladder, got it in place, and then with pails of water from the well I managed to put it out. Once more it caught, and once the roof of the shed where Pike shot Allenham blazed up; but I dashed water on the fires and saved both buildings.

At last the stable fire began to die down. The current of air from the northeast had become stronger, and the column of smoke was swaying more and more to the southwest. Just as daylight began to appear in the east the last remaining timber of the stable fell, and, though there was a great cloud of 145 sparks and still much heat, I saw that unless a strong east wind should spring up there was no longer danger that the town would be consumed. By this time I was cold and stiff, my face scorched by the fire, and my clothes frozen with the water from the pailfuls I had carried. I went into the hotel.

Kaiser was so glad to see me that he reared up and put his forepaws on my shoulders. I was patting and praising him, when suddenly the question, What caused the fire? flashed into my mind. There had been no trace of Pike. From the windmill tower I had been unable to see any trail leading from the way he would come. There was no explanation except that it must have been caused by the same thing that had made me so much other trouble. Till it was broad daylight I paced up and down the office floor, unable to stop. For two days I thought of little else, and brooded on it till I was half sick.

It seems to me as I look back at it that every time I got fairly desperate through lonesomeness or pure fright I went and dug a snow tunnel. I was as bad as a mole 146 for tunnels; and I meant to tell about my system before this; but so many things keep popping into my mind, what with my memory and with the old hotel register and the letters to my mother lying spread out before me, that I have not once got around to mention any of them except the first, which connected the hotel and the bank, directly across the street. I was so taken up with this that soon after New-Year’s I decided to build some others.

I was keeping up at that time five fires (or smokes) besides the one in the hotel, to wit: one in the harness shop and one in Joyce’s, both at the north end of the street and opposite each other; one in the bank; one in Townsend’s store at the south end of the street on the west side, and one in the depot out across the square in front of the south end of the street. There was a chance for a good tunnel to all of these except to the depot; here the northwest wind had swept across the square and the ground in some places was almost bare.

But the street between the houses was filled up pretty much like a bread tin with a loaf, and starting from the north side of my first 147 tunnel I began another and ran it straight up the street to between the harness shop and Joyce’s, and here I ran side tunnels to each of these. The snow was rather low in front of Joyce’s at first, and was not enough above the sidewalk to give me room, but the sidewalk here was high, being made of plank, as were all the walks in town; so I went under it by getting down on my hands and knees, and, as the building had no underpinning, I went on under and up through a trap-door in the floor. I got a good many things to eat from Joyce’s, such as canned fruit and the like; but I always wrote down on a piece of paper nailed on the wall everything I got from any store, so that in the spring, if I were still alive, I could pay for it, or, if it were food, Sours could, since I was, of course, still working for him and it was his place to pay for my keep.

South from the first tunnel I next ran another and curved it into Townsend’s store. This was a fine, high tunnel; and it would have done your heart good to have seen Kaiser whisk about through all of them, filling the air with snow from waving his tail, just like a great feather duster, and oftentimes 148 barking at the top of his voice. “Be still, sir,” I would say to him; “you will disturb the neighbors,” at the which he would bark the louder. I often wondered what a stranger on top of the drifts would have thought to have heard the dog’s noise beneath his feet.

It always seemed warm and comfortable in the tunnels, if they were made of snow; this you noticed particularly on a blizzardy day, since, of course, no wind whatever got into them. Indeed, on a windy day I doubt not a snow tunnel would be warmer than a house without a fire. But though Kaiser delighted in the tunnels, Pawsy would have nothing to do with any of them at all except the one which led from the woodshed to the barn.

This I made last. I got into it from a shed window, which I cut down and fitted with a rough door. It went into the barn through a small door in the corner, which was in halves, like a grist-mill door. I opened only the lower half, and this tunnel I used mainly in bad weather. I had only just finished it the day before the fire. It was the day after the fire, when I was feverish for some way to get rid of my scare, that I decided to go to work 149 on my place of retreat in case the town was burned.

I had thought about building something of the kind for a long while, but could not seem to get it planned out in my mind just to suit me. The burning of the livery stable, of course, set me thinking harder than ever. The place had to be, of course, something that would not burn and some place that could not be found. The only thing that wouldn’t burn was the snow, but in case of fire I knew that it would melt for some distance from the buildings. I had just had an example of this. Besides, there had to be a way to get into it which could not be seen either before or after the fire, and this entrance must be from a building so that I would not have to expose myself in going to it. The place must also be where I could stay a few days if I had to. A dozen times I thought I had got the whole thing planned out, and once I wrote about it to my mother, but I always found that something was weak about the plan somewhere. But I now concluded that I had struck on the right thing at last.