THE LUCK OF THE KID
The brilliant June night was like a midsummer day. The deathless sun knew no rest for all the Arctic world was wrapt in slumber. The stillness of it all, the perfect quiet; it was a world of serene solitude, with only the sounds which came from unseen creatures, and the rustle of stirred vegetation caught on a gentle zephyr, to whisper of the life prevailing.
Marty Le Gros was back in his own home. He was at the little table which served him for such writing as his work as missionary entailed. It was a simple apartment characteristic of the habitation he had set up. The walls were plastered with a dun-coloured mud smoothed down but retaining all its crudeness which nothing could disguise. The room was of considerable extent. Its furnishing was no less primitive than its walls, but also no less robust. Every article was of his own design and manufacture, and that which it lacked in refinement it made up in substance. Chairs were rawhide-strung, square and solid. The table had legs of saplings, and a top that was made from packing cases obtained from Jim McLeod. The ceiling above his head was of cotton. So were the two windows which were flung open to admit air through the mosquito netting beyond them.
Yes, it was all very crude. Nevertheless it lost nothing of its sense of home. The floor was strewn with sun-dried furs, and there were shelves of well-read books. The man’s simple sleeping bunk was curtained off in one corner near by to the doorway which communicated with a lesser room where slept his motherless child. And there was still another doorway which led to a third room. It was the kitchen place where Usak and Pri-loo slept, and where the latter prepared such food as was needed.
There was no sound in the place but that of the man’s occasional movements and the scratching of the pen with which he was working. Felice was asleep in the next room in the cot which he and his dead wife had long since fashioned and adorned. Pri-loo, awaiting the return of her man from the reindeer farm, which was his work, had finally yielded her vigil and retired to her blankets in the kitchen. It was the calving season down at the farm, and as likely as not Usak would not return to her for many hours.
The missionary had applied himself to his task with that close concentration which betokened the urgency of his desire. He had been at work for over an hour. Now he sat with his great body hunched over the table, and, with poised pen, was at last regarding his completed work. The large sheet of paper stared back at his darkly brooding eyes, and the careful tracery on its surface spread from one end of it to the other. It was the drawing of a wide, winding river. And along its entire course was dotted every detail of natural formation which his keen memory supplied him with. Hills were carefully drawn. Woodland bluffs were marked with due regard to their extent. Everything that could serve to guide the explorer was there set out. Every title for each natural feature was inscribed, and one wide stretch of river foreshore was outlined in red ink and inscribed with the words “mouth of creek.”
It was complete. It was complete with that care and consideration which spoke of the tremendous anxiety lying behind the man’s purpose.
At last he abandoned his scrutiny and a deep sigh escaped him. Then he leisurely picked up his tobacco bag and began to fill his pipe. Leaning back in his chair his gaze sought the daylight beyond the window, and in a moment he became absorbed in profound, wakeful dreaming and his pipe remained forgotten.
He had reached another great crisis in his simple life. He knew it. He understood to the last detail the ominous significance of the thing he had just completed. His thought began by searching ahead, but swiftly it was caught and flung back into the deep channels of memory such as never fail to claim when the heart of man is deeply stirred.
A wide panorama of the past swept into his view. It began, as everything seemed to begin with him now, at that time when he and his young wife had taken their final decision to move northwards where their spiritual desires could find expression in the wilderness of untamed Nature. He remembered, how keenly he remembered, the surge of thrilling anticipation with which they had embarked on their mission. The bitter hardships they had had to endure, and the merciless labours that had been theirs to make even their simple lives possible here on the Hekor River, which followed so nearly the course of the Arctic Circle. He remembered the selfless kindness of Jim McLeod and his gentle wife. How they had helped him with everything that lay in their power. Yes, it was a happy memory which eased the strain of the thing besetting him now.