tree. And so the tale ran. Surprise Lake was a hoodoo; its
location was unremembered; and the gold still paved its undrained
bottom.
Two Cabins, no less mythical, was more definitely located. ‘Five
sleeps,’ up the McQuestion River from the Stewart, stood two ancient
cabins. So ancient were they that they must have been built before
ever the first known gold-hunter had entered the Yukon Basin.
Wandering moose-hunters, whom even Smoke had met and talked with,
claimed to have found the two cabins in the old days, but to have
sought vainly for the mine which those early adventurers must have
worked.
“I wish you was goin’ with me,” Shorty said wistfully, at parting.
“Just because you got the Indian bug ain’t no reason for to go
pokin’ into trouble. They’s no gettin’ away from it, that’s loco
country you’re bound for. The hoodoo’s sure on it, from the first
flip to the last call, judgin’ from all you an’ me has hearn tell
about it.”
“It’s all right, Shorty. I’ll make the round trip and be back in
Dawson in six weeks. The Yukon trail is packed, and the first
hundred miles or so of the Stewart ought to be packed. Old-timers
from Henderson have told me a number of outfits went up last fall
after the freeze-up. When I strike their trail I ought to hit her
up forty or fifty miles a day. I’m likely to be back inside a
month, once I get across.”
“Yes, once you get acrost. But it’s the gettin’ acrost that worries
me. Well, so long, Smoke. Keep your eyes open for that hoodoo,
that’s all. An’ don’t be ashamed to turn back if you don’t kill any
meat.”
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70
II.
A week later, Smoke found himself among the jumbled ranges south of
Indian River. On the divide from the Klondike he had abandoned the
sled and packed his wolf-dogs. The six big huskies each carried
fifty pounds, and on his own back was an equal burden. Through the
soft snow he led the way, packing it down under his snow-shoes, and
behind, in single file, toiled the dogs.
He loved the life, the deep arctic winter, the silent wilderness,
the unending snow-surface unpressed by the foot of any man. About
him towered icy peaks unnamed and uncharted. No hunter’s camp-
smoke, rising in the still air of the valleys, ever caught his eye.
He, alone, moved through the brooding quiet of the untravelled
wastes; nor was he oppressed by the solitude. He loved it all, the
day’s toil, the bickering wolf-dogs, the making of the camp in the
long twilight, the leaping stars overhead and the flaming pageant of
the aurora borealis.
Especially he loved his camp at the end of the day, and in it he saw
a picture which he ever yearned to paint and which he knew he would
never forget–a beaten place in the snow, where burned his fire; his
bed, a couple of rabbit-skin robes spread on fresh-chopped spruce-
boughs; his shelter, a stretched strip of canvas that caught and
threw back the heat of the fire; the blackened coffee-pot and pail
resting on a length of log, the moccasins propped on sticks to dry,
the snow-shoes up-ended in the snow; and across the fire the wolf-
dogs snuggling to it for the warmth, wistful and eager, furry and
frost-rimed, with bushy tails curled protectingly over their feet;
and all about, pressed backward but a space, the wall of encircling
darkness.
At such times San Francisco, The Billow, and O’Hara seemed very far
away, lost in a remote past, shadows of dreams that had never
happened. He found it hard to believe that he had known any other
life than this of the wild, and harder still was it for him to
reconcile himself to the fact that he had once dabbled and dawdled
in the Bohemian drift of city life. Alone, with no one to talk to,
he thought much, and deeply, and simply. He was appalled by the
wastage of his city years, by the cheapness, now, of the
philosophies of the schools and books, of the clever cynicism of the
studio and editorial room, of the cant of the business men in their
clubs. They knew neither food nor sleep, nor health; nor could they
ever possibly know the sting of real appetite, the goodly ache of
fatigue, nor the rush of mad strong blood that bit like wine through
all one’s body as work was done.
And all the time this fine, wise, Spartan North Land had been here,
and he had never known. What puzzled him was, that, with such
intrinsic fitness, he had never heard the slightest calling whisper,
had not himself gone forth to seek. But this, too, he solved in
time.
“Look here, Yellow-face, I’ve got it clear!”
The dog addressed lifted first one fore-foot and then the other with
SMOKE BELLEW
71
quick, appeasing movements, curled his bush of a tail about them
again, and laughed across the fire.
“Herbert Spencer was nearly forty before he caught the vision of his
greatest efficiency and desire. I’m none so slow. I didn’t have to
wait till I was thirty to catch mine. Right here is my efficiency
and desire. Almost, Yellow Face, do I wish I had been born a wolf-
boy and been brother all my days to you and yours.”
For days he wandered through a chaos of canyons and divides which
did not yield themselves to any rational topographical plan. It was
as if they had been flung there by some cosmic joker. In vain he
sought for a creek or feeder that flowed truly south toward the
McQuestion and the Stewart. Then came a mountain storm that blew a
blizzard across the riff-raff of high and shallow divides. Above
timber-line, fireless, for two days, he struggled blindly to find
lower levels. On the second day he came out upon the rim of an
enormous palisade. So thickly drove the snow that he could not see
the base of the wall, nor dared he attempt the descent. He rolled
himself in his robes and huddled the dogs about him in the depths of
a snow-drift, but did not permit himself to sleep.
In the morning, the storm spent, he crawled out to investigate. A
quarter of a mile beneath him, beyond all mistake, lay a frozen,
snow-covered lake. About it, on every side, rose jagged peaks. It
answered the description. Blindly, he had found Surprise Lake.
“Well-named,” he muttered, an hour later, as he came out upon its
margin. A clump of aged spruce was the only woods. On his way to
it, he stumbled upon three graves, snow-buried, but marked by hand-
hewn head-posts and undecipherable writing. On the edge of the
woods was a small ramshackle cabin. He pulled the latch and
entered. In a corner, on what had once been a bed of spruce-boughs,
still wrapped in mangy furs, that had rotted to fragments, lay a
skeleton. The last visitor to Surprise Lake, was Smoke’s
conclusion, as he picked up a lump of gold as large as his doubled
fist. Beside the lump was a pepper-can filled with nuggets of the
size of walnuts, rough-surfaced, showing no signs of wash.
So true had the tale run, that Smoke accepted without question that
the source of the gold was the lake’s bottom. Under many feet of
ice and inaccessible, there was nothing to be done, and at mid-day,
from the rim of the palisade, he took a farewell look back and down
at his find.
“It’s all right, Mr Lake,” he said. “You just keep right on staying
there. I’m coming back to drain you–if that hoodoo doesn’t catch
me. I don’t know how I got here, but I’ll know by the way I go
out.”
III.
In a little valley, beside a frozen stream and under beneficent
spruce trees, he built a fire four days later. Somewhere in that
white anarchy he left behind him, was Surprise Lake–somewhere, he
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72
knew not where; for a hundred hours of driftage and struggle through
blinding driving snow, had concealed his course from him, and he
knew not in what direction lay BEHIND. It was as if he had just
emerged from a nightmare. He was not sure that four days or a week
had passed. He had slept with the dogs, fought across a forgotten
number of shallow divides, followed the windings of weird canyons
that ended in pockets, and twice had managed to make a fire and thaw
out frozen moose-meat. And here he was, well-fed and well-camped.
The storm had passed, and it had turned clear and cold. The lay of
the land had again become rational. The creek he was on was natural
in appearance, and trended as it should toward the southwest. But
Surprise Lake was as lost to him as it had been to all its seekers