I have been easy of acquaintance, but of my few friendships that with Sailor Jesse of Caribou was perhaps most intimate.
We sat together on the river bank under the golden mountains, where groves of yellow pines, like throngs of angels, swayed to the organ peal of a triumphant wind. We watched the brave river go merrily to her drowning. So merrily went my wife, full conscious of great death.
I told Jesse about that red imp of pain, which danced and glowed like fire within her shoulder. To consult a doctor, I must risk a visit to settlements, where the authorities would arrest my tribe, herding them to imprisonment on their reservation. And that involved my own fate as a deserter from the mounted police, accused of bigamy with Sarde's wife.
Most wonderfully my friend's words flattened the rough difficulties, made my journey short and eased the way. On the coast, he told me, Indians went free and unquestioned like the white men. Food was abundant both by land and water. He would show me where I could make a base camp for my tribe within one day's journey of a cottage hospital.
So Jesse led us by a portage across the coast range, and through the abysmal chasm of Bute Inlet to a cove in Valdez Island. There the Douglas pines towered three hundred feet into the sunshine, and through their cathedral aisles ranged herds of elk. Sheer from the feet of the trees went the fathomless blue of a deep channel, and, far beneath, the waving swaying groves of a seaweed forest faded away into the nether darkness.
My wife would not allow me to take her to the cottage hospital, lest seeing her untidiness in blood and pain, I cease to love. "If Iesse sees me," she said, "it doesn't matter, and if I die it will be so easy to find this camp. I shall think of your waiting, guarded by spirit trees."
She went with Jesse, trusting him, and contented, and when my friend returned alone, on his way homeward, all the news looked good. There had been an operation for cancer, but Rain was doing well, and would be ready to leave the hospital in a month. For Jesse, a month had thirty days or so, but for me it numbered thirty years. I set my tribe to work praying by watch and watch for Rain's recovery, then fearing senile decay if I remained, I prepared a one-man outfit with thirty days' provisions, and set off in my loaded canoe to be near my wife at Comox.
Although I doubt if God believes in churches, the Catholic faith in which I had been reared provides good medicine. So I made confession to a priest, and having received his medicine, which was good, secured his help as an interpreter. He arranged with the hospital that I should have news of my wife, and he wired for me to Staff-Sergeant Buckie, N.W.M.P., bidding my friend come because I was in trouble. When Buckie answered that he had applied for furlough, I was content at my camp outside the village with fasting and prayer and the daily bulletins. My hair changed from black to silver-gray, clear proof that God's hand was upon me. And then, one morning, as I came up from bathing, I found Rain waiting, seated by the fire.
There had been a shower, but now, as the sunshine swept great fields of color across the Gulf of Georgia at our feet, God's birds, like little angels, rocked the woods with song.
My wife sat by the embers putting on little twigs. "Your fire," she whispered to me, "was almost out."