Burned Bridges

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.