Alone in the great silence. Without even the cry of desolation wrung from starving wolf, or the howl of depression which ever seems to haunt the heart of the coyote world. Alone with groping thought, with burning hope, and the undermining of doubt which the strongest cannot always shake off. Steve had taken the plunge which robbed him of human companionship.
It was the prompting of that spirit which borders so closely the line where earthly sanity passes. It was the spirit which finds its inspiration in the Great Purpose which drives on for the achievement of the human task on earth. The dreamer of dreams is born to translate his visions into reality, or to lie broken before the task. Steve was no visionary. He was something more, something greater. His was the stern heart of purpose selected for the translation of the dream of the dreamer who had fallen by the way.
Steve permitted himself no reflection upon the spiritual appeal of his purpose. These things might concern those of a wider, deeper intelligence. Or, perhaps, those whose weakness unfitted them for the battle of the strong. It was for him to claim issue in the battle he sought. And come life and victory, or death and defeat, he was prepared to accept the verdict without complaint.
The twinkling eyes of the heavens searched down upon the infinitesimal moving figure. Their cold smile was steely, perhaps with the irony the sight inspired. Their world was so coldly indifferent to human survival.
The snowless breasts of the valley rose up miles away to the north and south. And between their swelling contours lay a country of lesser hills and valleys, equally snowless, and whose heart was the flood of a great river.
Sterility had passed. Here were no barren hill-crests with a hundred weatherworn facets. Here were no fields of snow, driven by the fierce gales of the polar seas. Here were no glacial fields bound in an iron grip throughout the ages. The fires in the heart of Unaga were burning. Their warming was in the breath of the breeze. It was in the very earth, yielding its fruit with the freedom of the temperate world.
A wood-clad country of almost luxurious vegetation, there was in it a suggestion of the sub-tropical. But under the twilight of Arctic winter it had lost the happy hues of a sunlit season. True, the conifers retained their dull, dark foliage, but, for the rest, the bare branches were alive with a new-born cloak that possessed the whiteness of fresh-fallen snow. Even the lank grass under foot was similarly awakening.
The wonder of it all must have been amazing had Steve not been prepared for some such phenomenon. Was not this crazy valley the reality of that vision he had set before Marcel? It was the melting spring of temperate latitudes transposed to the confines of the Arctic Circle. It was a land of still, wonderful, voiceless life, whose air was sweet, and heavy laden with a subtle perfume.
He wondered, as he paced on under the burden of the pack his broad shoulders were supporting. His mind was a riot with questioning. What of the rest? Would the whole dream become reality? Why not? What of the day when the sun rose again from its long winter sleep?
For answer he gazed out ahead where a pillar of fire looked to be supporting the clouded heavens. The logic of it all was plain. There was no real question in his mind. With the returning light of the sun, and the steadily rising temperature, the ghostly foliage would promptly assume Nature's happy green and the world would ripen with the rapidity of a forcing house. Then——