Burned Bridges

Then it seemed lonely beyond expression, brooding, sinister. It was

lonely still--but that was all. He was beginning to grasp the motif of

the wilderness, to understand in a measure that to those who adapted

themselves thereto it was a sanctuary. The sailor to his sea, the

woodsman to his woods, and the boulevardier to his beloved avenues!

Thompson did not cleave to the North as a woodsman might. But the

natural phenomena of unbroken silences, of vast soundlessness, of miles

upon miles of somber forest aisles did not oppress him now. What a man

understands he does not fear. The unknown, the potentially terrible

which spurs the imagination to horrifying vision, is what bears heavy on

a man's soul.

Thompson's preparation for the trail was simple. That lesson he had

learned from two months' close association with Joe Lamont. He had

acquired a sleeping bag of moosehide, soft tanned. This, his gun and

axe, the grub he got from the Pachugan store, he had lashed on the

toboggan and put his dogs in harness at daybreak. There would be little

enough day to light his steps. Dusk came at midafternoon.

When he had tied the last lashing he shook hands with MacLeod and set

out.

He traversed the sixty miles between Pachugan and Lone Moose in two

days, by traveling late the first night, under a brilliant moon. It gave

him a far vision of the lake shore, black point after black point

thrusting out into the immense white level of the lake. Upon that hard

smooth surface he could tuck the snowshoes under his lashings and trot

over the ice, his dogs at his heels, the frost-bound hush broken by the

tinkle of a little bell Joe Lamont had fastened on the lead dog's

collar. It rang sweetly, a gay note in that chill void.

That night he drew into a spruce grove, cleared a space for his fire and

bed, fed himself hot tea and a bannock, and the hindquarters of a rabbit

potted by his rifle on the way. He went to sleep with drowsy eyes

peeping at the cold stars from under the flap of his sleeping bag, at

the jagged silhouette of spruce tops cut sharp against the sky.

He drew up before the mission quarters in the gray of the next dusk, and

stood again after nigh three months at his own door. The clearing was a

white square, all its unlovely litter of fallen trees and half-burned

stumps hidden under the virgin snow. The cabin sat squat and

brown-walled amid this. On all sides the spruce stood dusky-green.

Beyond, over in Lone Moose meadow, Thompson, standing a moment before he

opened the door, heard voices faintly, the ringing blows of an axe. Some

one laughed.

The frost stirred him out of this momentary inaction. In a few minutes

he had a fire glowing in the stove, a lamp lighted, the chill driven

from that long deserted room. Except for that chill and a slight

closeness, the cabin was as he had left it. Outside, his two dogs

snarled and growled over their evening ration of dried fish, and when

they had consumed the last scrap curled hardily in the snow bank near

the cabin wall.