What Necessity Knows

by L. Dougall

When he got past the unbroken snow of the farm lands and the blueberry flats, the white surface was broken by the tops of brushwood. He did not take the line of the straight corduroy road; it was more free and exciting to make a meandering track wherever the snow lay sheer over a chain of frozen pools that intersected the thickets. There was no perceptible heat in the rays the sun poured down, but the light was so great that where the delicate skeletons of the young trees were massed together it was a relief to let the eye rest upon them.

That same element of pleasure, relief, was found also in the restful deadness of the wooded sides of the hills when he came near them. Grey there was of deciduous trees in the basin of the river, and dull green of spruce firs that grew up elsewhere. Intense light has the effect of lack of light, taking colour from the landscape. Even the green of the fir trees, as they stood in full light on the hill summits, was faded in comparison with the blue beyond.

This was while he was in the open plain; but when he walked into the forest, passing into the gap in the hills, all was changed. The snow, lightly shadowed by the branches overhead, was more quiet to the sight, and where his path lay near fir trees, the snow, where fell their heavy shade, looked so dead and cold and grey that it recalled thoughts of night-time, or of storm, or of other gloomy things; and this thought of gloom, which the dense shadow brought, had fascination, because it was such a wondrous contrast to the rest of the happy valley, in which the sunbeams, now aslant, were giving a golden tinge to the icy facets of crags, to high-perched circling drifts, to the basin of unbroken snow, to the brown of maple trunks, and to the rich verdure of the very firs which cast the shadow.

It was after four o'clock in the afternoon when he stopped his steady tramp, arrested by the sight of the first living things he had seen—a flock of birds upon a wild vine that, half snow-covered, hung out the remnant of its frozen berries in a cleft of the hill. The birds did not fly at his approach, and, going nearer and nearer on the silent snow, he at last stopped, taking in greedily the sight of their pretty, fluttering, life. They were rather large birds, large as the missel thrush; they had thick curved beaks and were somewhat heavy in form; but the plumage of the males was like the rose-tint of dawn or evening when it falls lightly upon some grey cloud. They uttered no note, but, busy with their feast, fluttered and hopped with soft sound of wings.

In lieu of gun or net, Trenholme broke a branch from a tree beside him, and climbed nearer to the birds in order to strike one down if possible. To his surprise, as he advanced deftly with the weapon, the little creatures only looked at him with bright-eyed interest, and made no attempt to save themselves. The conviction forced itself upon him with a certain awe that these birds had never seen a man before. His arm dropped beside him; something of that feeling which comes to the explorer when he thinks that he sets his foot where man has never trod came to him now as he leaned against the snow-bank. The birds, it is true, had fluttered beyond his arm's length, but they had no thought of leaving their food. Twice his arm twitched with involuntary impulse to raise the stick and strike the nearest bird, and twice the impulse failed him, till he dropped the stick.

The slight crust which usually forms on snow-banks had broken with the weight of his figure as he leaned against it, and he lay full length against the soft slope, enjoying rest upon so downy a couch, until the birds forgot him, and then he put out his hand and grasped the nearest, hardly more to its own surprise than to his. The bird feigned dead, as frightened birds will, and when he was cheated into thinking it dead, it got away, and it was only by a very quick movement that he caught it again. He put it in a hanging pocket of his coat, and waited till he could catch a companion to fill the opposite pocket.

Thus weighted, he continued his journey. It gave him the cheerful feeling that a boy has when choice marbles are in his pocket. Neither birds nor marbles under such circumstances have absolute use, but then there is always the pleasant time ahead when it will be suitable to take them out and look at them. The man did not finger his birds as a boy might have done his marbles, but he did not forget them, and every now and then he lifted the flaps of the, baggy pockets to refill them with air.

He was tramping fast now down the trough of the little valley, under trees that, though leafless, were thick enough to shut out the surrounding landscape. The pencils of the evening sunlight, it is true, found their way all over the rounded snow-ground, but the sunset was hidden by the branches about him, and nothing but the snow and the tree trunks was forced upon his eye, except now and then a bit of blue seen through the branches—a blue that had lost much depth of colour with the decline of day, and come nearer earth—a pale cold blue that showed exquisite tenderness of contrast as seen through the dove-coloured grey of maple boughs.

Where the valley dipped under water and the lake in the midst of the hills had its shore, Trenholme came out from under the trees. The sun had set. The plain of the ice and the snowclad hills looked blue with cold—unutterably cold, and dead as lightless snow looks when the eye has grown accustomed to see it animated with light. He could not see where, beneath the snow, the land ended and the ice began; but it mattered little. He walked out on the white plain scanning the south-eastern hill-slope for the house toward which he intended to bend his steps. He was well out on the lake before he saw far enough round the first cliff to come in sight of the log house and its clearing, and no sooner did he see it than he heard his approach, although he was yet so far away, heralded by the barking of a dog. Before he had gone much farther a man came forth with a dog to meet him.

The two men had seen one another before, in the days when the neighbourhood had turned out in the fruitless search for Cameron's daughter and for Cameron himself. At that time a fevered eye and haggard face had been the signs that Bates was taking his misfortune to heart; now Trenholme looked, half expecting to see the same tokens developed by solitude into some demonstration of manner; but this was not the case. His flesh had certainly wasted, and his eye had the excitement of expectation in it as he met his visitor; but the man was the same man still, with the stiff, unexpressive manner which was the expression of his pride.