Читать книгу The Long Portage - Harold Bindloss - Страница 6

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Dawn was late the next morning; the light crept slowly through bitter rain, and when Lisle and his companions had breakfasted sumptuously for the first time during several days it was with reluctance that they broke camp. Indeed, Nasmyth would have suggested remaining under shelter only that he had come to accept Lisle’s decision as final and the latter was eager to push on. The blacktail deer would not last them long; the trout were getting shyer every day with the increasing cold; they were a long distance from the nearest settlement; while winter was rapidly coming on.

Nasmyth shouldered his load with the others, and they set out across a strip of gravel strewn with boulders. Here and there networks of stranded branches had to be floundered through, and the ragged ends rasped their dilapidated boots and bruised their legs. Then, where the bluff rose almost precipitously from the water, they crept along slippery ledges, or waded through the shallower pools, with the white rapid roaring down a few yards outshore of them. There were places where a slip would have meant destruction, but that was nothing unusual and time was too precious to spend in an attempt to climb the ridge which hemmed them in.

The pack-straps hurt Nasmyth’s shoulders—one of them had been rubbed raw by previous loads and it smarted painfully until he grew warm with exertion. He was soon wet through; in places the spray drove into his face so that he could hardly see; but he held on with dogged determination, trying to keep up with the others. With the exception of a few hunting trips, his life had been smooth, and now, dressed mostly in rags and aching in every limb, he smiled grimly as he remembered how he had hitherto taken his pleasure. When he had shot partridges, he had, as a rule, been driven to such stubble or turnip fields as lay at any distance from his residence, and he had usually been provided with a pony when he ascended the high moors in search of grouse. Money smoothed out many small difficulties in the older land, but it was powerless in the wilds of the new one, where one must depend on such things as native courage, brute strength, and the capacity for dogged endurance, which are common to all ranks of men. It was fortunate for Nasmyth that he possessed them, but that, as he was discovering, is not quite enough. They are great gifts in the raw, but, like most others, they need exercise and assiduous cultivation for their full development.

On reaching the head of the rapid, they went back for another load, and afterward Jake got into the canoe, while Lisle fixed the end of the tracking-line about his shoulders. Aided by the line, the packer swung the canoe across madly whirling eddies and in and out among foam-lapped rocks, and now and then drove her, half hidden by the leaping froth, up some tumultuous rush. At times Lisle, wading waist-deep and dragged almost off his feet, barely held her stationary—Nasmyth could see his chest heave and his face grow darkly flushed—but in another instant they were going on again. That a craft could be propelled up any part of the rapid would, Nasmyth thought, have appeared absolutely incredible to any one who had not seen it done.

At last, however, the task became too hard for them and after dragging her out they carried her, upside down, in turn. It was difficult for them to see where they were going, and the craft, made from a hollowed log, was by no means so well fitted for the work as the bark or canvas canoe of the more eastern wilds. She was comparatively heavy, and their heads and shoulders were inside of her. Once or twice the portager fell; and the fall is an awkward one, as it is impossible to break it with one’s hands, which are occupied in holding the canoe. Still, they made progress, and, launching again above the rapid, they reached a lake at noon, by hard paddling. Here they landed, and Nasmyth dropped down upon a boulder to look about him.

It was a cheerless prospect he saw through the haze of rain. Back into the distance ran a stretch of slate-gray water, flecked and seamed by the white tops of little splashing waves, for a nipping wind blew down the lake. On either side rose low hills, dotted here and there with somber and curiously rigid trees. They were not large, and though from a distance they looked much the same, Nasmyth recognized some as spruce and supposed the other ragged spires to be cedars. In one spot there were some that resembled English larch, and these were almost bare.

Then his companions began to discuss the best means of further progress. With a fresh breeze ahead, Jake advocated poling through the shallows near the beach; and Lisle, with a courtesy which Nasmyth had already noticed, turned toward him when he answered, as if his opinion might be valuable.

“The trouble is that the beach sweeps back off the straight. We’d drive her right up the middle to headwater with the paddle before we’d make two-thirds of the way poling alongshore.”

“It would be a good deal harder work, wouldn’t it?” Nasmyth ventured, and laughed when he saw Lisle’s faint amusement. “I suppose that doesn’t count. It’s not worth mentioning,” he added. “Since you’re anxious to get on, what’s the use of stopping for dinner? After the breakfast I had, I can hold out some time.”

“I want to get through as quickly as I can; that’s why I’m not going to rush you unless it’s necessary,” Lisle answered. “Try to get hold of the fact that a man needs food regularly to keep him in efficient going order.”

“Indisputable,” Nasmyth agreed. “But he can do without it and work for a while. We’ve proved it.”

“Not without paying,” Lisle pointed out. “You can draw upon your reserves, but it takes time and rest to make them good. We may need all ours badly before we’re through.”

There was a grim hint in his last words which Nasmyth found convincing, and when he had rested he helped to prepare the meal. It was a simple one—cold doughy cakes baked in a frying-pan, extraordinarily tough and stringy venison, with a pint-can each of strong green tea. Their sugar had long ago melted and the condensed milk was exhausted.

Afterward, they shoved the canoe out and paddled doggedly into the driving rain and the strong headwind. The spray from the splashing bows blew into their faces, and the broken water checked them badly. Nasmyth’s hands began to blister. To make it worse, there was a raw wound on one of them, the result of a similar day’s toil; and his knees chafed sore against the branches in the craft’s bottom. There was, however, no respite—the moment they slackened their exertions they would drift to lee—and he held on, keeping awkward stroke with Jake, while Lisle swung the balancing paddle astern.

They kept it up for several hours, and then, toward evening, the rain ceased and the clouds rolled aside. A wonderful yellow light shone behind the bordering hills, and the twisted, wind-battered cedars on their crests stood out against it in hard, fretted tracery. The wind dropped; the short, white waves smoothed down; the water, heaving gently, gleamed with a coppery glare, and the paddle blades seemed to splash up liquid fire. Then the shores closed in ahead, and, landing on a shingle beach, they made camp in the mouth of a gap among the hills. Supper was prepared and eaten, and afterward Jake took up his rifle.

“I saw some ducks in the next bay,” he explained.

He strolled out of camp, and Nasmyth smiled at Lisle.

“Except when he advised you to pole, that’s about all he has said to-day.”

This was correct. The packer was a taciturn inhabitant of the wilds who seldom indulged in an unnecessary remark. There was, however, no moroseness about him; the man was good-humored in his quiet way, and his usual ruminative calm was no deterrent from apparently tireless action. For the most part, he lived alone in the impressive stillness of the bush, where he had a few acres of partly cleared land which failed to provide him with a living. For that reason, he periodically left his tiny log house and packed for some survey expedition, or went down to work for a few months at a sawmill. Capable of most determined labor, wonderfully proficient with his hands, he asked no more from life than a little plain food and indifferent shelter. No luxury that civilization could offer would have tempted him to desert the wilds.

Lisle filled his pipe with leisurely content. He shared Jake’s love for the wilderness, and he found it strangely pleasant to rest in camp after a day’s persistent toil. Besides, he usually enjoyed his evening chat with Nasmyth, for, widely different as their training and mode of life had been, they had much in common. Then, too, there was something in the prospect spread out before them that impelled tranquillity. The clump of wet cedars among which they had camped distilled a clean, aromatic smell; and there was a freshness in the cool evening air that reinvigorated their tired bodies. Above the low hilltops the sky glimmered with saffron and transcendental green, and half the lake shone in ethereal splendor; the other half was dim and bordered with the sharply-cut shadows of the trees. Except for the lap of water upon the pebbles and the wild cry of a loon that rang like a peal of unearthly laughter out of a darkening bay, there was nothing to break the deep stillness of the waste.

Lisle pointed to the gap in the hills, which was filling with thin white mist.

“That’s the last big portage the Gladwynes made,” he remarked. “They came in by a creek to the west, and they were badly played out when they struck this divide; the struggle to get through broke them up.” He paused before he added: “What kind of men were they?”

“George wasn’t effusive; he was the kind of man you like better the longer you know him. If I were told that he ever did a mean thing, I wouldn’t believe it. His last action—sending the others on—was characteristic.”

“They didn’t want to go,” Lisle interposed quietly.

His companion nodded.

“I believe that’s true. I like to think so.”

There was something curious in his tone, which Lisle noticed.

“From the beginning,” Nasmyth went on, “George behaved very generously to Clarence.”

“It was Clarence that I meant to ask about more particularly.”

Nasmyth looked thoughtful, and when he answered, it struck Lisle that he was making an effort to give an unbiased opinion.

“Clarence,” he said, “is more likable when you first meet him than George used to be; a handsome man who knows how to say the right thing. Makes friends readily, but somehow he never keeps the best of them. He’s one of the people who seem able to get whatever they want without having to struggle for it and who rarely land in any difficulty.”

Again a grudging note became apparent, as though the speaker were trying to subdue faint suspicion or disapproval, and Lisle changed the subject.

“Had George Gladwyne any immediate relatives?”

“One sister, as like him as it’s possible for a woman to be. He wasn’t greatly given to society; I don’t think he’d ever have married. His death was a crushing blow to the girl—they were wonderfully attached to each other—but I’ve never seen a finer display of courage than hers when Clarence cabled the news.”

He broke off, as if he felt that he had been talking with too much freedom, and just then the report of a rifle came ringing across the water.

“That’s a duck’s head shot off. Jake doesn’t miss,” he said.

Lisle nodded. He could take a hint; and he had no doubt that Nasmyth was right regarding the shot, though it is not easy to decapitate a swimming duck with a rifle. He began to talk about the portage; and soon after Jake returned with a single duck they went to sleep.

It was clear and bright the next morning and they spent the day carrying their loads a few miles up the hollow which pierced the height of the divide. Part of it was a morass, fissured with little creeks running down from the hills whose tops rose at no great elevation above the opening. This was bad to traverse, but it was worse when they came to a muskeg where dwarf forest had once covered what was now a swamp. Most of the trees had fallen as the soil, from some change in the lake’s level, had grown too wet. They had partly rotted in the slough, and willows had afterward grown up among them.

Now and then the men laid down their loads and hewed a few of the still standing trunks, letting them fall to serve as rude bridges where the morass was almost impassable, but the real struggle began when they went back for the canoe. At first they managed to carry her on their shoulders, wading in the bog, but afterward she must be dragged through or over innumerable tangles of small fallen trunks and networks of rotten branches that had to be laboriously smashed. It was heroic labor—sometimes they spent an hour making sixty yards—and Lisle’s face grew anxious as well as determined. Game had been very scarce; the deer would not last them long; and disastrous results might follow a continuance of their present slow progress. When, utterly worn out, they made camp on slightly firmer ground toward four o’clock in the afternoon, Lisle strode off heavily toward the bordering hills, while Jake pushed on to prospect ahead. Nasmyth, who was quite unable to accompany either, prepared the supper and awaited their reports with some anxiety.

Lisle came back first and shook his head when Nasmyth asked if he had found a better route on higher ground.

“Not a slope we could haul along,” he reported. “That way’s impracticable.”

It was nearly dark when Jake came in.

“It’s not too bad ahead,” he informed them.

They were not greatly reassured, because Jake’s idea of what was really bad was alarming. Nasmyth glanced at his companion with a smile.

“Is it any better than this?” he asked.

“A little,” answered Jake. “An old trail runs in.”

“Gladwyne’s trail?” exclaimed Nasmyth. “The one we’re looking for?”

“Why, yes,” drawled Jake, as if it were scarcely worth mentioning. “I guess it is.”

Nasmyth turned to Lisle.

“I was lucky when I lighted on you as a companion for this trip. You have been right in your predictions all along, and now you’re only out in striking the trail a day before you expected.”

“I know the bush,” returned Lisle. “It’s been pretty easy so far—but, for several reasons, I wish the next week or two were over.”

Nasmyth looked troubled. One could have imagined that misgivings which did not concern his personal safety were creeping into his mind.

“So do I,” he confessed, and turning toward the fire he busied himself with Jake’s supper.

There was no change in the work the next morning, but in the afternoon it became evident that another party had made that portage ahead of them. The soil was a little drier and where the small trees grew more thickly they could see that a passage had been laboriously cleared. In the swampy hollows, which still occurred, trunks had here and there been flung into the ooze. This saved them some trouble and they made better progress, but both Lisle and Nasmyth became silent and grave as the signs of their predecessors’ march grew plainer. By nightfall they had reached the second camping-place, which told an eloquent story of struggle with fatigue and exhaustion. Lisle, stopping in the gathering dusk, glanced around the old camp site.

“A good place to pitch the tent, but I think I’d rather move on a little,” he said.

Nasmyth made a sign of comprehension.

“Yes,” he agreed. “I couldn’t sleep soundly here. Everything about us is too plain a reminder; I’ve no doubt you feel it as I do. A firm and trusted friend lay, famishing, beside that fire, in what extremity of weakness and suffering I dare not let myself think. It’s possible he cut those branches yonder.”

Lisle’s face expressed emotion sternly held in check.

“That was Vernon’s work—no Englishman new to the country could have slashed them off so cleanly. But look at this small spruce stump. He was the better chopper, but it’s significant that he used three or four strokes where I would have taken one.”

Even the laconic Jake appeared relieved when they forced their way a little farther through the tangled undergrowth, until finding a clear space they set up the tent.