“I think I’ll spend next winter at Fond du Lac,” he told the inspector. “If there’s any mail for me you can send it there if you have a chance, and if I’m not at Fond du Lac it can be returned to Churchill.”
He said Fond du Lac because Deane’s grave lay between Churchill and the old Hudson’s Bay Company’s post over in the country of the Athabasca. The Barrens were the one thing that called to him now— the one thing to which he dared respond. He would keep his promise to Isobel and visit Scottie’s grave. At least he tried to make himself believe that he was keeping a promise. But deep in him there was an undercurrent of feeling which he could not explain. It was as if there were a spirit with him at times, walking at his side, and hovering about his campfire at nights, and when he gave himself up to the right mood he felt that it was the presence of Deane. He believed in strong friendship, but he had never believed in the love of man for man. He had not thought that such a thing could exist, except, perhaps, between father and son. With him, in all the castles he had built and the dreams he had dreamed, the alpha and omega of love had remained with woman. For the first time he knew what it meant to love a man— the memory of a man.
Something held him from telling the secret of his mission at Churchill even to Pelliter. The evening before he left he had smuggled an ax into the edge of the forest, and the second day he found use for this. He came to a straight-grained, thick birch, eighteen inches in diameter, and he put up his tent fifty paces from it. Before he rolled himself in his blankets that night he had cut down the tree. The next day he chopped off the butt, and before another nightfall had hewn out a slab two inches thick, a foot wide, and three feet long. When he took up the trail into the north and west again the following morning he left the ax behind.
The fourth night he worked with his hunting-knife and his belt-ax, thinning down the slab and making it smooth. The fifth and the sixth nights he passed in the same way, and he ended the sixth night by heating the end of a small iron rod in the fire and burning the first three letters of Deane’s epitaph on the slab. For a time he was puzzled, wondering whether he should use the name Scottie or David. He decided on David.
He did not travel fast, for to him spring was the most beautiful of all seasons in the wilderness. It was underfoot and overhead now. The snow-floods were singing between the ridges and gathering in the hollows. The poplar buds were swollen almost to the bursting point, and the bakneesh vines were as red as blood with the glow of new life. Seventeen days after he left Churchill he came to the edge of the big Barren. For two days he swung westward, and early in the forenoon of the third looked out over the gray waste, dotted with moving caribou, over which he and Pelliter had raced ahead of the Eskimos with little Isobel. He went to the cabin first and entered. It was evident that no one had been there since he had left, On the bunk where Deane had died he found one of baby Isobel’s little mittens. He had wondered where she had lost it, and had made her a new one of lynx-skin on the way down to Couchée’s cabin. The tiny bed that he had made for her on the floor was as she had last slept in it, and in the part of a blanket that he had used as a pillow was still the imprint of her head. On the wall hung a pair of old trousers that Deane had worn. Billy looked at these things, standing silently, with his pack at his feet. There was something in the cabin that closed in about him and choked him, and he struggled to overcome it by whistling. His lips seemed thick. At last he turned and went to the grave.
The foxes had been there, and had dug a little about the sapling cross. There was no other change. During the remainder of the forenoon Billy cut down a heavier sapling and sunk the butt of it three feet into the half-frozen earth at the head of Deane’s grave. Then, with spikes he had brought with him, he nailed on the slab. He believed that no one would ever know what the words on that slab meant— no one except himself and the spirit of Scottie Deane. With the end of the heated rod he had burned into the wood: