THE CLOSE OF THE SEASON
For days the journey continued through the ever deepening gorge. The stern grey walls remained unbroken, except for occasional sentry trees which had survived the years of storm and flood. Carpets of Arctic lichen sometimes clothed their nakedness, and even wide wastes of noisome fungus. But these things had no power to depress Marcel and Keeko; the Indians, too, passed them all unheeded. They were concerned alone with the perils of the waters which were often almost overwhelming.
The journey northward was one continuous struggle by day, and the daylit night was passed in the profound slumbers of exhausted bodies, with the canoes beached on some low foreshore dank with an atmosphere of hideous decay.
For Keeko and the Indians it seemed as if the land was rising ever higher and higher, and the endless waterway was cutting its course deeper and deeper into the bowels of the earth. But there was no question. Marcel was piloting them to a hunting ground of his own, and this passage was the highway to it.
Only once did Keeko protest. It was a protest that was natural enough. But Marcel swept it aside without scruple.
"I call this 'Hell's Gate,'" he said, with a ready laugh. "Sounds rotten? But I always figger you need to pass through 'some' hell to make Paradise. We're in a mighty big country, and a-top of us are hundreds, and maybe thousands, of miles of forests that never heard tell of man. Wait. There's a break soon, just beyond the big rapids. That's where these darn old walls of rock fade right out, and make way for a lake that's like a sea."
It was his undisturbed confidence that broke the constant threat of imagination. This north country was Marcel's home. He knew no other. So they drove on, and on, to the goal that he had set.
The great rapids came at them as he had promised. And, in turn, they were passed on that narrow margin which is the line drawn between safety and destruction. Then came the mouth of the gorge, and the stretch of open river where it debouched upon the "lake that was like a sea."
For Keeko it was all like some wonderful dream with Marcel the magician who inspired it.
Two days later they had landed in a country whose relation to that which Keeko knew was only in the swarming flies and mosquitoes, and the keen air, which, even in the height of the open season, warned her of the terrors which must reign when the aurora lit the night of winter.