"You're mistaken, Ranny," he said. "I'm not a socialist but a sociologist. There's a distinction, isn't there? I don't believe that my series of books will be at all complete without a study of socialism as it exists in its crudest form, and as it must exist up here in the North. My material for this last book will show what tremendous progress the civilization of two centuries on this continent has made over the lowest and wildest forms of human brotherhood. That's my idea, Ranny. I'm an optimist. I believe that every invention we make, that every step we take in the advancement of science, of mental and physical uplift, brings us just so much nearer to the Nirvana of universal love. This trip of mine among your wild people of the North will give me a good picture of what civilization has gained."
"What it has lost, you will say a little later," replied Ransom. "See here, Roscoe—has it ever occurred to you that brotherly love, as you call it—the real thing—ended when civilization began? Has it ever occurred to you that somewhere away back in the darkest ages your socialistic Nirvana may have existed, and that you sociologists might still find traces of it, if you would? Has the idea ever come to you that there has been a time when the world has been better than it is to-day, and better than it ever will be again? Will you, as a student of life, concede that the savage can teach you a lesson? Will any of your kind? No, for you are self-appointed civilizers, working according to a certain code."
Ransom's weather-tanned face had taken on a deeper flush, and there was a questioning look in Roscoe's eyes, as though he were striving to look through a veil of clouds to a picture just beyond his vision.
"If most of us believed as you believe," he said at last, "civilization would end. We would progress no farther."
"And this civilization," said Ransom, "can there not be too much of it? Was it any worse for God's first men to set forth and slay twenty thousand other men, than it is for civilization's sweat-shops to slay twenty thousand men, women, and children each year in the making of your cigars and the things you wear? Civilization means the uplifting of man, doesn't it, and when it ceases to uplift when it kills, robs, and disrupts in the name of progress; when the dollar-fight for commercial and industrial supremacy kills more people in a day than God's first people killed in a year; when not only people, but nations, are sparring for throat-grips, can we call it civilization any longer? This talk may all be bally rot, Roscoe. Ninety-nine out of every hundred people will think that it is. There are very few these days who stoop to the thought that the human soul is the greatest of all creations, and that it is the development of the soul, and not of engines and flying machines and warships, that measures progress as God meant progress to be. I am saying this because I want you to be honest when you go up among the savages, as you call them. You may find up there the last chapter in life, as it was largely intended that life should be in the beginning of things. And I want you to understand it, because in your books you possess a power which should be well directed. When I received your last letter I hunted up the best man I knew as guide and companion for you—old Rameses, down at the Mission. He is called Rameses because he looks like the old boy himself. You said you wanted to learn Cree, and he'll teach it to you. He will teach you a lot of other things, and when you look at him, especially at night beside the campfire, you will find something in his face which will recall what I have said, and make you think of the first people."
Roscoe, at thirty-two, had not lost his boy's enthusiasm in life, in spite of the fact that he had studied too deeply, and had seen too much, and had begun fighting for existence while still in bare feet. From the beginning it seemed as though some grim monster of fate had hovered about him, making his path as rough as it could, and striking him down whenever the opportunity came. His own tremendous energy and ambition had carried him to the top.
He worked himself through college, and became a success in his way. But at no time could he remember real happiness. It had almost come to him, he thought, a year before—in the form of a girl; but this promise had passed like the others because, of a sudden, he found that she had shattered the most precious of all his ideals. So he picked himself up, and, encouraged by his virile optimism, began looking forward again. Bad luck had so worked its hand in the moulding of him that he had come to live chiefly in anticipation, and though this bad luck had played battledore and shuttlecock with him, the things which he anticipated were pleasant and beautiful. He believed that the human race was growing better, and that each year was bringing his ideals just so much nearer to realization. More than once he had told himself that he was living two or three centuries too soon. Ransom, his old college chum, had been the first to suggest that he was living some thousands of years too late.
He thought of this a great deal during the first pleasant weeks of the autumn, which he and old Rameses spent up in the Lac la Ronge and Reindeer Lake country. During this time he devoted himself almost entirely to the study of Cree under Rameses' tutelage, and the more he learned of it the more he saw the truth of what Ransom had told him once upon a time, that the Cree language was the most beautiful in the world. At the upper end of the Reindeer they spent a week at a Cree village, and one day Roscoe stood unobserved and listened to the conversation of three young Cree women, who were weaving reed baskets. They talked so quickly that he could understand but little of what they said, but their low, soft voices were like music. He had learned French in Paris, and had heard Italian in Rome, but never in his life had he heard words or voices so beautiful as those which fell from the red, full lips of the Cree girls. He thought more seriously than ever of what Ransom had said about the first people, and the beginning of things.
Late in October they swung westward through the Sissipuk and Burntwood water ways to Nelson House, and at this point Rameses returned homeward. Roscoe struck north, with two new guides, and on the eighteenth of November the first of the two great storms which made the year of 1907 one of the most tragic in the history of the far Northern people overtook them on Split Lake, thirty miles from a Hudson's Bay post. It was two weeks later before they reached this post, and here Roscoe was given the first of several warnings.
"This has been the worst autumn we've had for years," said the factor to him. "The Indians haven't caught half enough fish to carry them through, and this storm has ruined the early-snow hunting in which they usually get enough meat to last them until spring. We're stinting ourselves on our own supplies now, and farther north the Company will soon be on famine rations if the cold doesn't let up—and it won't. They won't want an extra mouth up there, so you'd better turn back. It's going to be a starvation winter."