“I guess I know just as much about them as you,” said Barrett, cheerily. “We’re taking chances on the grub, aren’t we? If we find the Lost Babiche before the game moves, we’ll be alright, though our own supplies won’t take us there. Once there, Bob, we’re pretty sure to find friendly Indians when we link up with the Silver Fork—which we do seventy miles down the P’tite Babiche if your grandpa’s map’s correct. Well there are a good many ‘if’s’ in the programme, but don’t you worry. We’ll get through or out, somehow. There’s always fish. I’ve a feeling that this country can’t go back on a Lemaire!”
They went on to a pleasant camp that night on a sandy islet overgrown with dwarf willow, and a wild-duck supper. The current of these new lakes went west with such increasing strength that Lemaire thought they were feeling the “pull” of some big river into which the system drained; and if so, it could be no river but the lost Babiche. They slept, all a-tingle with the fever of discovery and re-made maps in their dreams.
Behind them many miles, a wandering smoke arose from the ashes of their last camp. The old Indian, about whom they had almost forgotten, had gained on them while they packed their supplies over the hills. Now he was close upon them again.
The life of that old savage seemed thin and wavering as the smoke of the fire he made. All night he sat in the ashes, motionless as a stone. Only once, just before the fierce dawn, he rose to his feet with an inarticulate cry, stirred to some instinctive excitement. For in a moment the vast, chill dusk was filled with a musical thrill, a tremendous clamour and rush of life, as thousand by thousand after their kinds, teal and widgeon, mallard and sheldrake, lifted from the reeds and fled before the coming cold. As the old man dimly watched, two delicate things fell and touched his face; one was a feather, the second was a flake of snow.
In those few delicate flakes, Lemaire and Barrett seemed to feel for the first time the ever-present hostility of nature; with such a brief, exquisite touch were they first made aware of the powers against which they strove. The new waterways seemed to stretch interminably. Each time they cleared one of the deep-cut channels which linked lake with lake as regularly as a thread links beads, they looked ahead with the same question. Each time they saw the same expanse of gray water, low islets, barren shores; the country passed them changing and unchanging as a dream. They seemed to be moving in a dream, conscious of nothing but the pressure of the current on their paddles.
Then came the mist.
It shut them into a circle ten feet wide, a pearl-white prison. Outside the circle were shadows, wandering voices, trees as men walking. For two days they felt their way westward through this fog; two nights they shivered over a damp-wood fire, hearing nothing but water beading and dripping everywhere with a sound of grief. It strangely broke Lemaire’s steel nerve. On the second night he said, restlessly, “We must turn back to-morrow.”
“Bob!”
He flung out a tanned hand passionately. “I know. . . . But can’t you feel it? Things have turned against us. These things.” He pointed at the veiled sky, the milky water. “I daren’t go on. If we don’t find the river to-morrow, we’ll go back. And then. . . . the land will have done for me what it never did for my grandfather.”
“What, Bob, old fellow?”