“My father,” said Kob, “he fought in a war over there, somewheres. He’d got a wound, too.”
Garry did not talk of it again. But, sometimes when Kob was asleep, he pulled the bottle out from under his bunk, and read the message on it over and over. Once Kob woke in the night, and saw Garry standing over him.
“What’s your real name, Kob?” said Garry.
“Yawcob Schmidt, I guess. But are you crazy, Garry?”
“No,” said Garry. “Hush up! Sleep!”
“Well,” Garry told himself, “I’ll know in the spring. Maybe it ain’t anything, either.”
He settled down to the interminable monotony of wintering north—not his first experience. What to another and softer breed of men would have been a hardship and desolation unspeakable, he half-unconsciously enjoyed. It was in this environment in which all his qualities of body and soul, having freest range, came to their finest, stoic fruition. He loved the first storms out of the Arctic, heralded by their clanging clouds of wildfowl; the rare days of clear sun, when the sky was a turquoise, and the poudre played its magic with the hills; track of wolf and hare and caribou among the low birch scrub for his following. And the nights—above all, the nights—when the earth was a star glittering under the icy fires of the universe unveiled. All these things he had loved, without knowing. That winter he began to know.
One night, he went swinging home on snowshoes, carrying a string of fish frozen stiff as platters. He’d been fishing through the ice on a small lake, sitting in the buckle, as he had been taught by the natives of a yet farther north. It was so cold the air seared like heat, but he liked it. He liked such a murderous night, that he might battle with it; he liked to pit the heat of his generous blood against that cold; the courage of his generous heart against the loneliness more fatal than hunger; the strength of his limbs against those aching distances—and win. He had been satisfied with those noble, homely endurances. He was so no longer.
On the way he turned into John Akkamuk’s.
“You got the rest of that paper yet, John?”