It soon declared itself; the dogs were steering for the fort, and not for the mission. Tarungeau might be an indifferent church member, but had the whole college of cardinals been lodged at Chipewyan they must have rejoiced that it was not Tarungeau going to mass, and that it was the winter packet coming to the fort.
What reading we had on that Sunday afternoon! News from the far-off busy world; letters from the far-off quiet home; tidings of great men passed away from the earth; glad news and sorry news, borne through months of toil 1500 miles over the winter waste.
And now came a short busy time at the fort. A redistribution of the packet had to be made. On to the north went a train of dogs for the distant Yukon; on to the west went a train of dogs for the head of the Peace River. In three days more I made ready to resume my journey up the Peace River. Once more the sleds were packed, once more the Untiring Cerf-vola took his place in the leading harness, and the word “march” was given.
This time I was to be alone. My good friend, whose unvarying kindness had made an acquaintanceship of a few weeks ripen into a friendship destined I trust to endure for many years, was no longer to be my companion.
He came, in company with another officer, some miles of the way, to see me off; and then at the Quatre Fourche we parted, he to return to his lonely fort, I to follow across the wide-spreading Lake Mamoway the long trail to the setting sun.
If the life of the wanderer possesses many moments of keen enjoyment, so also has it its times of intense loneliness; times when no excitement is near to raise the spirits, no toil to render thought impossible; nothing but a dreary, hopeless prospect of labour, which takes day after day some little portion from that realm of space lying before him, only to cast it to augment that other dim land of separation which lies behind him.
Honest Joe Gargery never with his blacksmith hand nailed a sadder truth upon the wheel of time, than when he defined life to be made up of “partings welded together.” But in civilization generally when we part we either look forward to meeting again at some not remote period, or we have so many varied occupations, or so many friends around us, that if the partings are welded together, so also are the meetings.
In the lone spaces it is different. The endless landscape, the monotony of slow travel, the dim vision of what lies before, seen only in the light of that other dim prospect lying behind; lakes, rivers, plains, forests, all hushed in the savage sleep of winter;—these things bring to the wanderer’s mind a sense of loneliness almost as vast as the waste which lies around him.
On the evening of the 12th of March I camped alone in the wilderness. Far as eye could reach, on every side, there lay nothing but hard, drifted snow, and from its surface a few scant willows raised their dry leafless saplings. True, three or four men were busy scraping the deep snow from the lee side of some low willow bushes, but they were alien in every thought and feeling; and we were separated by a gulf impossible to bridge: so that I was virtually alone. I will not say on whose side the fault lay, and possibly the admission may only prove a congeniality of feeling between myself and my train; but, for all that, I felt a far stronger tie of companionship with the dogs that drew my load, than for the men with whom I now found myself in company.
They were by no means wild; far from it, they were eminently tame. One of them was a scoundrel of a very low type, as some of his actions will hereafter show. In him the wild animal had been long since destroyed, the tame brute had taken its place.