Burned Bridges

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.