Emboldened by such thoughts, I roamed the woods for hours, and returned to my cabin determined to battle unflinchingly and to emerge triumphant.
It will be needless to dwell upon the days that followed. Although the moments crawled painfully, each week an epoch and each month an age, very little occurred that is worthy of record. Yet somehow I did manage to occupy the time—what other course had I, this side of suicide or madness? As in remembrance of a nightmare, I recall how sometimes I would toil all the daylight hours to make my cabin snug and secure; how at other times I would wander across the valley to the lake shown me by Karem, catching fish with an improvised line, even though I had first to break through the ice; how, again, I would idly follow the half-wild goat herds that browsed in remote corners of the valley; how I would roam the various trails until I had mapped them all in my mind, and had discovered the only outlet in the mountains about Sobul—a long, prodigiously deep, torrent-threaded ravine to the north, which opened into another deserted valley capped by desolate and serrated snowpeaks. The discovery of this valley served only to intensify my sense of captivity, for it brought me visions of mountain after mountain, range after range, bleak and unpopulated, which stretched away in frozen endless succession.
But the days when I could rove the mountains were days of comparative happiness. Too often the trails, blocked by the deep soft drifts or the ice-packs, were impassable for one so poorly equipped as I; and too often the blizzards raged. Besides, the daylight hours were but few, since the sun-excluding mountain masses made the dawn late and the evening early; and often the tedium seemed unendurable when I sat in my cabin at night, watching the flames that danced and crackled in the fireplace, and dreaming of Yasma and the spring, or of things still further away, and old friends and home. At times, scarcely able to bear the waiting, I would pace back and forth like a caged beast, back and forth, from the fire to the woodpile, and from the woodpile to the fire. At other times, more patient, I would amuse myself by trying to kindle some straw with bits of flint, or by returning to the ways of my boyhood and whittling sticks into all manner of grotesque designs. And occasionally, when the mood was upon me, I would strain my eyes by the flickering log blaze, confiding my diary to the notebook I had picked up in our old camp beyond the mountain. For the purposes of this diary, I had but one pencil, which gradually dwindled to a stub that I could hardly hold between two fingers—and with the end of the pencil, late in the winter, the diary also came to a close.
Although this record was written merely as a means of whiling away the hours and was not intended for other eyes, I find upon opening it again that it describes my plight more vividly than would be possible for me after the passage of years; and I am tempted to quote a typical memorandum.
As I peer at that curiously cramped and tortured handwriting, my eyes pause at the following:
"Monday, December 29th. Or it may be Tuesday the 30th, for I fear I have forgotten to mark one of the daily notches on the cabin walls, by which I keep track of the dates. All day I was forced to remain in my cabin, for the season's worst storm was raging. Only once did I leave shelter, and that was to get water. But the stream was frozen almost solid, and it was a task to pound my way through the ice with one of the crude native axes. Meanwhile the gale beat me in the face till my cheeks were raw; the snow came down in a mist of pellets that half blinded me; and a chill crept through my clothes till my very skin seemed bared to the ice-blast. I was fifteen minutes in thawing after I had crept back to the cabin. But even within the cabin there seemed no way to keep warm, for the wind rushed in through cracks that I could not quite fill; and the fire, though I heaped it with fuel, was feeble against the elemental fury outside.
"But the cold would be easier to bear than the loneliness. There is little to do, almost nothing to do; and I sit brooding on the cabin floor, or stand brooding near the fire; and life seems without aim or benefit. Strange thoughts keep creeping through my mind—visions of a limp form dangling on a rope from log rafters; or of a half-buried form that the snow has numbed to forgetfulness. But always there are other visions to chide and reproach; I remember a merry day in the woods, when two brown eyes laughed at me from beneath auburn curls; and I hear voices that call as if from the future, and see hands that take mine gently and restrain them from violence. Perhaps I am growing weak of mind and will, for my emotions flow like a child's; I would be ashamed to admit—though I confess it freely enough to the heedless paper—that more than once, in the long afternoon and the slow dismal twilight, the tears rolled down from my eyes.
"As I write these words, it is evening—only seven o'clock, my watch tells me, though I might believe it to be midnight. The blazes still flare in the fireplace, and I am stretched full-length on the floor, trying to see by the meager light. The storm has almost died down; only by fits and starts it mutters now, like a beast whose frenzy has spent itself. But other, more ominous sounds fill the air. From time to time I hear the barking of a jackal, now near, now far; while louder and more long-drawn and mournful, there comes at intervals the fierce deep wailing of a wolf, answered from the remote woods by other wolves, till all the world seems to resound with a demoniac chorus. Of all noises I have ever heard, this is to me the most terrorizing; and though safe within pine walls, I tremble where I lie by the fire, even as the cave-man may have done at that same soul-racking sound. I know, of course, how absurd this is; yet I have pictures of sly slinking feet that pad silently through the snow, and keen hairy muzzles that trail my footsteps even to this door, and long gleaming jaws that open. Only by forcing myself to write can I keep my mind from such thoughts; but, even so, I shudder whenever that dismal call comes howling, howling from the dark, as if with all the concentrated horror and ferocity in the universe!"