the manner of men who are much by themselves. “Only a fool would
travel at such a temperature. If it isn’t eighty below, it’s
because it’s seventy-nine.”
He pulled out his watch, and after some fumbling got it back into
the breast pocket of his thick woollen jacket. Then he surveyed
the heavens and ran his eye along the white sky-line to the south.
“Twelve o’clock,” he mumbled, “A clear sky, and no sun.”
He plodded on silently for ten minutes, and then, as though there
had been no lapse in his speech, he added:
“And no ground covered, and it’s too cold to travel.”
Suddenly he yelled “Whoa!” at the dogs, and stopped. He seemed in
a wild panic over his right hand, and proceeded to hammer it
furiously against the gee-pole.
“You – poor – devils!” he addressed the dogs, which had dropped
down heavily on the ice to rest. His was a broken, jerky
utterance, caused by the violence with which he hammered his numb
hand upon the wood. “What have you done anyway that a two-legged
other animal should come along, break you to harness, curb all your
natural proclivities, and make slave-beasts out of you?”
He rubbed his nose, not reflectively, but savagely, in order to
drive the blood into it, and urged the dogs to their work again.
He travelled on the frozen surface of a great river. Behind him it
stretched away in a mighty curve of many miles, losing itself in a
fantastic jumble of mountains, snow-covered and silent. Ahead of
him the river split into many channels to accommodate the freight
of islands it carried on its breast. These islands were silent and
white. No animals nor humming insects broke the silence. No birds
flew in the chill air. There was no sound of man, no mark of the
handiwork of man. The world slept, and it was like the sleep of
death.
John Messner seemed succumbing to the apathy of it all. The frost
was benumbing his spirit. He plodded on with bowed head,
unobservant, mechanically rubbing nose and cheeks, and batting his
steering hand against the gee-pole in the straight trail-stretches.
But the dogs were observant, and suddenly they stopped, turning
their heads and looking back at their master out of eyes that were
wistful and questioning. Their eyelashes were frosted white, as
were their muzzles, and they had all the seeming of decrepit old
age, what of the frost-rime and exhaustion.
LOVE OF LIFE AND OTHER STORIES
18
The man was about to urge them on, when he checked himself, roused
up with an effort, and looked around. The dogs had stopped beside
a water-hole, not a fissure, but a hole man-made, chopped
laboriously with an axe through three and a half feet of ice. A
thick skin of new ice showed that it had not been used for some
time. Messner glanced about him. The dogs were already pointing
the way, each wistful and hoary muzzle turned toward the dim snow-
path that left the main river trail and climbed the bank of the
island.
“All right, you sore-footed brutes,” he said. “I’ll investigate.
You’re not a bit more anxious to quit than I am.”
He climbed the bank and disappeared. The dogs did not lie down,
but on their feet eagerly waited his return. He came back to them,
took a hauling-rope from the front of the sled, and put it around
his shoulders. Then he GEE’D the dogs to the right and put them at
the bank on the run. It was a stiff pull, but their weariness fell
from them as they crouched low to the snow, whining with eagerness
and gladness as they struggled upward to the last ounce of effort
in their bodies. When a dog slipped or faltered, the one behind
nipped his hind quarters. The man shouted encouragement and
threats, and threw all his weight on the hauling-rope.
They cleared the bank with a rush, swung to the left, and dashed up
to a small log cabin. It was a deserted cabin of a single room,
eight feet by ten on the inside. Messner unharnessed the animals,
unloaded his sled and took possession. The last chance wayfarer
had left a supply of firewood. Messner set up his light sheet-iron
stove and starred a fire. He put five sun-cured salmon into the
oven to thaw out for the dogs, and from the water-hole filled his
coffee-pot and cooking-pail.
While waiting for the water to boil, he held his face over the
stove. The moisture from his breath had collected on his beard and
frozen into a great mass of ice, and this he proceeded to thaw out.
As it melted and dropped upon the stove it sizzled and rose about
him in steam. He helped the process with his fingers, working
loose small ice-chunks that fell rattling to the floor.
A wild outcry from the dogs without did not take him from his task.
He heard the wolfish snarling and yelping of strange dogs and the
sound of voices. A knock came on the door.
“Come in,” Messner called, in a voice muffled because at the
moment he was sucking loose a fragment of ice from its anchorage on
his upper lip.
The door opened, and, gazing out of his cloud of steam, he saw a
man and a woman pausing on the threshold.
“Come in,” he said peremptorily, “and shut the door!”
Peering through the steam, he could make out but little of their
personal appearance. The nose and cheek strap worn by the woman
and the trail-wrappings about her head allowed only a pair of black
LOVE OF LIFE AND OTHER STORIES
19
eyes to be seen. The man was dark-eyed and smooth-shaven all
except his mustache, which was so iced up as to hide his mouth.
“We just wanted to know if there is any other cabin around here,”
he said, at the same time glancing over the unfurnished state of
the room. “We thought this cabin was empty.”
“It isn’t my cabin,” Messner answered. “I just found it a few
minutes ago. Come right in and camp. Plenty of room, and you
won’t need your stove. There’s room for all.”
At the sound of his voice the woman peered at him with quick
curiousness.
“Get your things off,” her companion said to her. “I’ll unhitch
and get the water so we can start cooking.”
Messner took the thawed salmon outside and fed his dogs. He had to
guard them against the second team of dogs, and when he had
re‰ntered the cabin the other man had unpacked the sled and fetched
water. Messner’s pot was boiling. He threw in the coffee, settled
it with half a cup of cold water, and took the pot from the stove.
He thawed some sour-dough biscuits in the oven, at the same time
heating a pot of beans he had boiled the night before and that had
ridden frozen on the sled all morning.
Removing his utensils from the stove, so as to give the newcomers a
chance to cook, he proceeded to take his meal from the top of his
grub-box, himself sitting on his bed-roll. Between mouthfuls he
talked trail and dogs with the man, who, with head over the stove,
was thawing the ice from his mustache. There were two bunks in the
cabin, and into one of them, when he had cleared his lip, the
stranger tossed his bed-roll.
“We’ll sleep here,” he said, “unless you prefer this bunk. You’re
the first comer and you have first choice, you know.”
“That’s all right,” Messner answered. “One bunk’s just as good as
the other.”
He spread his own bedding in the second bunk, and sat down on the
edge. The stranger thrust a physician’s small travelling case
under his blankets at one end to serve for a pillow.
“Doctor?” Messner asked.
“Yes,” came the answer, “but I assure you I didn’t come into the
Klondike to practise.”
The woman busied herself with cooking, while the man sliced bacon
and fired the stove. The light in the cabin was dim, filtering
through in a small window made of onion-skin writing paper and
oiled with bacon grease, so that John Messner could not make out
very well what the woman looked like. Not that he tried. He
seemed to have no interest in her. But she glanced curiously from
time to time into the dark corner where he sat.
LOVE OF LIFE AND OTHER STORIES
20
“Oh, it’s a great life,” the doctor proclaimed enthusiastically,
pausing from sharpening his knife on the stovepipe. “What I like
about it is the struggle, the endeavor with one’s own hands, the
primitiveness of it, the realness.”
“The temperature is real enough,” Messner laughed.
“Do you know how cold it actually is?” the doctor demanded.
The other shook his head.
“Well, I’ll tell you. Seventy-four below zero by spirit
thermometer on the sled.”
“That’s one hundred and six below freezing point – too cold for