ILLUSTRATIONS
CHAPTER I
DISCOVERY
We must have been rowing for an hour across that seeming mile-wide stretch of water.
The air is so clear in the North that one new to it is lost in the crowding of great heights and spaces. Distant peaks had risen over the lower mountains of the shore astern. Steep spruce-clad slopes confronted us. All around was the wilderness, a no-man’s-land of mountains or of cragged islands, and southward the wide, the limitless, Pacific Ocean.
A calm, blue summer’s day,—and on we rowed upon our search. Somewhere there must stand awaiting us, as we had pictured it, a little forgotten cabin, one that some prospector or fisherman had built; the cabin, the grove, the sheltered beach, the spring or stream of fresh, cold water,—we could have drawn it even to the view that it must overlook, the sea, and mountains, and the glorious West. We came to this new land, a boy and a man, entirely on a dreamer’s search; having had vision of a Northern Paradise, we came to find it.
With less faith it might have seemed to us a hopeless thing exploring the unknown for what you’ve only dreamed was there. Doubt never crossed our minds. To sail uncharted waters and follow virgin shores—what a life for men! As the new coast unfolds itself the imagination leaps into full vision of the human drama that there is immanent. The grandeur of the ocean cliff is terrible with threat of shipwreck. To that high ledge the wave may lift you; there, where that storm-dwarfed spruce has found a hold for half a century, you perhaps could cling. A hundred times a day you think of death or of escaping it by might and courage. Then at the first softening of the coast toward a cove or inlet you imagine all the mild beauties of a safe harbor, the quiet water and the beach to land upon, the house-site, a homestead of your own, cleared land, and pastures that look seaward.