But there were compensations. Two men cannot eat out of the same
pot--figuratively speaking--sleep huddled close together for the warmth
that is in their bodies, hear no voices but their own, exert a common
effort to a common end day after day, until the days become weeks and
the weeks marshal themselves into calendar months--no two men born of
woman can sustain this enforced intimacy over a long period without
acquiring a positive attitude toward each other. They achieve a
contemptuous tolerance, or they achieve a rare and lasting friendship.
It was the fortune of Tommy Ashe and Wesley Thompson to cultivate the
latter. They arrived at it by degrees, in many forty-below-zero camps
along the Peace, in the shadow of those towering mountains where the
Peace cuts through the backbone of North America. It grew out of mutual
respect, a wordless sense of understanding, a conviction that each did
his best to play the game fair and square.
So that, as they worked westward and gave over their toboggan on the
waters of a stream far beyond the Rockies, when Spring began to touch
the North with her magic wand they grew merry, galvanized by the spirit
of adventure. They could laugh, and sometimes they could sing. And they
planned largely, with the sanguine air of youth. On the edges--not in
the depths--of that wild and rugged land where manifold natural
resources lay untouched, it seemed as if a man had but to try hard
enough in order to succeed. They had conquered an ominous stretch of
wilderness. They would conquer with equal facility whatever barriers
they found between them and fortune.
The sweep of Spring's progress across the land found them west of the
Coast Range by May, in a wild and forbidding region where three major
streams--the Skeena, the Stikine, and the Naas--take their rise. For
many days their advance was through grim canyons, over precipitous
slopes, across glaciers, bearing always westward, until the maps with
which Tommy Ashe was equipped showed them they were descending the
Stikine. Here they rested in a country full of game animals and birds
and fish, until the height of the spring torrents had passed. During
this time they fashioned a canoe out of a cedar tree, big enough to
carry them and the dogs which had served so faithfully as pack animals
over that last mountainous stretch. The Stikine was swift and
forbidding, but navigable. Thus at last, in the first days of the salmon
run, they came out upon tidewater, down to Wrangel by the sea.
There was in Thompson's mind no more thought of burned bridges, no
heartache and empty longing, only an eagerness of anticipation. He had
come a long way, in a double sense. He had learned something of the
essential satisfaction of striving. A tough trail had served to toughen
the mental and moral as well as the physical fiber of him. He did not
know what lay ahead, but whatever did so lie would never dismay him
again as things had done in the past, in that too-recent vivid past.