“Sell! Sell!” Marian repeated, almost savagely. It seemed to her that there could be no selling the herd. There was only a limited market for reindeer meat. Miners here and there bought it. The mining cities bought it, but of late the increase to one hundred thousand reindeer in Alaska had overloaded the market. A little meat could be shipped to the States, there to be served at great club luncheons and in palatial hotels, but the demand was not large.
“Sell?” she questioned, “how can we sell?”
Little she knew how soon a possible answer to that question would come. Not knowing, she visioned herself following the herd year after year, while all those beautiful, wonderful months she had had a taste of, and now dreamed of by day and night, faded from her thoughts.
She had spent one year under the shadows of a great university. Marvelous new thoughts had come to her that year. Friendships had been made, such friendships as she in her northern wilds had never dreamed of. The stately towers of the university even now appeared to loom before her, and again she seemed to hear the melodious chimes of the bells.
“Oh!” she cried, “I must go back. I must! I must!”
And yet Marian was not unhappy. For the present she would not be any other place than where she was. It was a charming life, this wandering life of the reindeer herder. During the short summer, and even into the frosts of fall and winter, they lived in tents, and like nomads of the desert, wandered from place to place, always seeking the freshest water, the greenest grass, the tallest willow bushes. But when winter truly came swooping down upon them, they went to a spot chosen months before, the center of rich feeding grounds where the ground beneath the snow was green-white with “reindeer moss.” Here they made a more permanent camp. After that there remained but the task of defending the herd from wolves and other marauders, and of driving the herd to camp each day, that they might not wander too far away.
As for Patsy, she had fairly revelled in it all. Reared in a city apartment where a chirping sparrow gave the only touch of nature, she had come to this wilderness with a great thirst for knowledge of the out-of-doors. Each day brought some new revelation to her. The snow buntings, ptarmigans and ravens; the foxes, caribou and reindeer; even the occasional prowling wolves, all were her teachers. From them she learned many secrets of wild nature.
Of course there had been long, shut-in days, when the wind swept the tundra, and the snow, appearing to rest nowhere, whirled on and on. Such days were lonely ones. Letters were weeks in coming and arrived but seldom. All these things gave the energetic city lass some blue days, but even then she never complained.
Her health was greatly improved. Gone was the nervous twitch of eyelids that told of too many hours spent pouring over books. The summer freckles had been replaced by ruddy brown, such as only Arctic winds and an occasional freeze can impart. As for her muscles, they were like iron bands. Never in the longest day’s tramp did she complain of weariness. With the quick adaptability of a bright and cheerful girl, she had become a part of the wild world which surrounded her. The expression of her lips, too, was somehow changed. Firmness and determination were still written there, but certain lines had been added; lines of patience that said louder than words: “I have learned one great lesson; that one may run uphill, but that mountains must be climbed slowly, patiently, circle by circle, till the summit is reached.”
They were in winter camp now. As Marian thought of it she smiled. At no other spot in all Alaska was there another such camp as hers. Marian, as you know if you have read our other book, “The Blue Envelope,” had, some two years before, spent the short summer months of the Arctic in Siberia, across from Alaska. Much against her own wishes, she had spent a part of the winter there. Someone has said “there is no great loss without some small gain”; and while Marian had endured hardships and known moments of peril in Siberia, from the strange and interesting tribes there she had learned some lessons of real value regarding winter camps in the Arctic. Upon making her own camp she had put this knowledge into practice.