The great deer was quieting down. His sense of the indignity of the forked carryall resting on his high withers seemed to be passing. His wild jumps and slashing forefeet were less violent, and his snortings of fear and anger were replaced by meaningless shakings of the graceful head on which his annual re-growth of antlers was only just beginning to display itself. Finally, under the skilful handling of the breakers, good-temper prevailed, and the beautiful creature was induced to move forward dragging the boulder-weighted poles with their ends resting on the ground.
“Him good buck,” Usak said approvingly, as the men led the now docile creature round the circle of the breaking track.
“Yes.”
The Kid had nothing to add. Truth to tell for once she had little interest in the work the result of which represented the livelihood, the whole fortunes of them all. Her thoughts were far away, somewhere miles along the broad course of the Hekor River. She was thinking of her previous day’s adventure, and her pretty eyes reflected her thoughts. Somehow her mood had lost its buoyancy. Somehow the years of happy life on this far-off northern homestead seemed to have dropped away behind her. Something had broken the spell of it. Something had robbed it of half its simple, happy associations.
Gazing upon the mild-eyed creature now gracefully pacing the well-worn track under the careful guidance of the dark-skinned men of the North, she was thinking of a pair of clear-gazing, fearless honest eyes which had looked into hers with a man’s kindly smile for something more weak and tender than himself, for something that stirred his sense of chivalry to its deepest. She understood nothing of his emotions, and little enough of her own. She only remembered the smile and the kindness, and the man whose outfit she had unfalteringly guided up the open channel of the river where it skirted the deadly rapids. And somehow, her adventure marked an epoch in her life which had completely broken the hitherto monotonous continuity of it.
Bill Wilder. The man’s name was no less graven on her memory than was the recollection of his great stature and the lean face which had so re-assured her of the honesty and ability which old Ben Needham’s warning had denied him. She remembered the half hour she had squatted in company of these men, sharing in their rough, midday meal, and listening to, and taking part, in their talk. It had been a thrilling excitement, not one detail of which would she have missed for all the world. It had been a deliriously happy time. She remembered how the man called Mike had pressed her to say where she lived, and to tell them the name to which she was born, and she remembered the sharp fashion in which, at the first sign of reluctance on her part, remembering as she had Ben’s warning, Bill Wilder had told him to mind his business.
Then had come her little moment of triumph when she had passed the outfit up the open channel. How she had nursed it, and delivered her orders to the men behind. How she had taken Wilder himself a passenger in her pilot kyak, and left him wondering at her skill and knowledge. Then had come the parting with her new friends, when the man had told her in his quiet assured fashion that someday they would meet again when his work was done. Someday he would come back, perhaps in two years, and wait by the rapids till she appeared. And then on the impulse of the moment she had said there would be no need for him to wait by the rapids. All he had to do was to turn off into the mouth of the Caribou River and pass some ten miles up its course.
She was wondering and dreaming now. Her wonder was if the man would remember his promise, and her simply given invitation. And her dreaming was of a steady pair of grey eyes that haunted her no matter where she gazed and robbed her of all interest in the things which had never before failed to hold her deepest concern.
“We mak fifty buck ready,” Usak went on, failing to realise the girl’s abstraction. “Fifty good dam buck. An’ I mak north an’ mak plenty big trade. Yes?” He shook his head, and his dark eyes, a shade more sunken with the passing of years, but lacking nothing of the passionate fire of his earlier days, took on a moody light. “Us mak no good plenty trade no more. No. I go east, ’way nor-east plenty far. All time more far as I go. What I mak? Fox? Yes. Beaver? Yes. Maybe I mak wolf bear. I mak small truck. No seal. No ivory. No anything good. Now I mak none. Not little bit. Him Euralian mak east. All time him go east, too. Him eat up all fur. Eskimo all much scare. Him go all time farther. So I not mak him.”
The man’s half angry protest impressed itself upon the girl. Her pre-occupied gaze came back to his dark, saturnine face. An ironical smile played for a moment in the blue of her eyes.