Mr. Thompson gradually became aware of a change in the season. The
calendar lost a good deal of its significance up there, partly because
he had no calendar and partly because one day was so much a duplicate of
another that the flitting of time escaped his notice. But he became
conscious that the days grew shorter, the nights a shade more cool, and
that the atmosphere was taking on that hazy, mellow stillness which
makes Indian Summer a period of rare beauty in the North. He took
serious stock of elapsed time then, and found to his surprise that it
was September the fifteenth.
He had not accomplished much. The walls of his church stood about the
level of his head. It grew increasingly difficult for him alone to hoist
the logs into place. The door and window spaces were out of square.
Without help he did not see how he was going to rectify these small
errors and get the roof on. Even after it should be roofed, the cracks
chinked and daubed with mud, the doors and windows in place--what then?
He would still lack hearers for the message which he daily grew a little
more doubtful of his ability to deliver. A native streak of stubbornness
kept him studying the language along with his daily tussle with the axe
and saw. But the rate of his progress was such that he pessimistically
calculated that it would take him at least two years before he could
preach with any degree of understanding in the Athabascan tongue.
So far he had never gone the length of candidly asking himself whether
by then it would be a task he could put his heart into, if he were even
fitted for such a work, or if it were a useful and worthy task if he
were gifted with a fitness for it. He had been taught that preaching the
gospel was a divinely appointed function. He had not questioned that.
But he had now a lively sense of difficulties hitherto unreckoned, and
an ill-stifled doubt of the good that might accrue. His blank ignorance
of the salient points of human contact, of why men work and play, why
they love and fight and marry and bend all their energies along certain
given lines until they grow old and gray and in the end cease to be,
only served to bewilder him. His association with Tommy Ashe and with
Carr and Carr's daughter--especially with Carr's daughter--further
accentuated the questioning uncertainty of his mind.
But that was all--merely an uncertainty which he tried to dissipate by
prayer and stern repression of smoldering doubts. At the same time while
he decried and resented their outspoken valuation of material
considerations he found himself constantly subject to those material
factors of daily living.
The first of these was food. When Mr. Thompson outfitted himself for
that spiritual invasion of Lone Moose he brought in four months'
supplies. He discovered now that his supply of certain articles was not
so adequate as he had been told it would be. Also he had learned from
Carr and Lachlan that if a man wintered at Lone Moose it was well to
bring in a winter's grub before the freeze-up--the canoe being a far
easier mode of transport than a dog-team and sled.