The nose of her vessel was securely resting on the sticky mud of the bank. She had turned about. And now she sat waiting, peering out through the foliage as might some hunted silver fox, whose pelt was one of the chief objects of her trade. She gave no sign, she made no sound. She had no intention of revealing her presence. But she would see for herself the thing she must shun, the thing whose presence in her home she must always deny.
It was a long waiting, but it mattered nothing. The daylight was almost unending now, and anyway time had small enough bearing on the simple affairs of her life. She had time for the indulgence of every whim, and the youth in her prompted a full measure of such indulgence.
A happy excitement thrilled her. Everything that lifted her out of the humdrum routine of her life on the farm became an exhilarating excitement. She was completely happy in her life. She was happy in her support of the mother woman labouring in her home for her many offspring, she was happy in her association with the Indian, Usak, whose untiring labours had built up the great reindeer farm of which he had assured her she was mistress. But her mind was groping amongst a world of girlish dreams, yearning and full of unspoken, unadmitted desires. A subtle restlessness was at work in her, and it found expression in the impulse which had become so irresistible. All her life had been bounded by narrow limits of association. Her only human associations had always been those of her far-off home, and the trading post with its factor, and those men of the fur trail who foregathered about its staunch walls. Here, for the first time, was something new. And more than all it was something that was prohibited.
The two men were gazing out at the churning waters storming over the shoals, and the outlook was threatening. They were standing on the low bank, trampling underfoot the carpet of flowers which grew in profusion down to the very edge of the river. They were surveying the junction of the two rivers where the Caribou broke its way into the flood of the Hekor, and the endless battle of conflicting streams was being fought out. The cauldron of boiling rapids extended for nearly two miles.
Wilder raised a sunburnt hand and crushed the blood glutted bodies of half a hundred mosquitoes on the back of his powerful neck.
“It’s portage, sure, Chilcoot,” he said, with that finality which denoted a mind made up. “I don’t see a passage anywhere fit to take the big boats. I’d say the stream’s deep this side under the bank, but we can’t chance things.”
Chilcoot Massy chewed on for a moment in deep contemplation. He was a silent creature, squat, powerful and grey-headed, with the hard-beaten face of a pugilist. He was a product of the northern gold trail whose experience went far back to the first rush over the Skagway in ’98, and looked it all in the rough buckskin and cord clothing in which he was clad. He was Bill Wilder’s chief lieutenant; a man whose force and courage was unabated for all his years, and whose restless spirit denied him the comfort and leisure which the ample wealth he had achieved in association with his friend and one-time employer, entitled him to.
“It certainly looks that way,” he agreed. Then he demurred. “You never can tell on these rivers,” he said. “We’d have done a heap better breaking down our outfit, an’ takin’ on a bigger bunch of lighter canoes. Maybe we’ll run into this sort of stuff right away up the river as we get nearer the headwaters.”
Wilder shook his head.