Back Aa

Isobel

Close

<h4>XXI</h4> <h4>THE FIGHTING SPARK</h4> For ten minutes Billy buried himself blindly in the storm. He scarcely knew which direction he took, but at last he found himself in the shelter of the forest, and he was whispering Isobel’s name over and over again to himself. “Dead— dead—” he moaned. “She is dead— dead—” And then there rushed upon him, crushing back his deeper grief, a thought of the baby Isobel. She was still with McTabb down on the Little Beaver. In the blur of the storm he read again what he could make out of Rookie’s letter. Something in that last paragraph struck him with a deadly fear. “God... that kid... You, don’t know how I got to love her, Billy,... give her up...” What did it mean? What had McTabb told him in that part of the letter that was gone? The reaction came as he put the letter back into his pocket. He walked swiftly back to the inspector’s office. “I’m going down to the Little Beaver. I’m going to start to-day,” he said. “Who is there in Churchill that I can get to go with me?” Two hours later Billy was ready to start, with an Indian as a companion. Dogs could not be had for love or money, and they set out on snowshoes with two weeks’ supply of provisions, striking south and west. The remainder of that day and the next they traveled with but little rest. Each hour that passed added to Billy’s mad impatience to reach McTabb’s cabin. With the morning of the third day began the second of those two terrible storms which swept over the northland in that winter of famine and death. In spite of the Indian’s advice to build a permanent camp until the temperature rose again Billy insisted on pushing ahead. The fifth night, in the wild Barren country west of the Etawney, his Indian failed to keep up the fire, and when Billy investigated he found him half dead with a strange sickness. He made the Indian’s balsam shelter snow and wind proof, cut wood, and waited. The temperature continued to fall, and the cold became intense. Each day the provisions grew less, and at last the time came when Billy knew that he was standing face to face with the Great Peril. He went farther and farther from camp in his search for game. Even the brush sparrows and snow-hawks were gone. Once the thought came to him that be might take what food was left and accept the little chance that remained of saving himself. But the idea never got farther than a first thought. On the twelfth day the Indian died. It was a terrible day. There was food for another twenty-four hours. Billy packed it, together with his blankets and a few pieces of tinware. He wondered if the Indian had died of a contagious disease. Anyway, he made up his mind to put out the warning for others if they came that way, and over the dead Indian’s balsam shelter he planted a sapling, and at the end of the sapling he fastened a strip of red cotton cloth— the plague signal of the north. Than he struck out through the deep snows and the twisting storm, knowing that there was no more than one chance in a thousand ahead of him, and that the one chance was to keep the wind at his back. At the end of his first day’s struggle Billy built himself a camp in a bit of scrub timber which was not much more than bush. He had observed that the timber and that every tree and bush he had passed since noon was stripped and dead on the side that faced the north. He cooked and ate his last food the following day, and went on. The small timber turned to scrub, and the scrub, in time, to vast snow wastes over which the storm swept mercilessly. All this day he looked for game, for a flutter of bird life; he chewed bark, and in the afternoon got a mouthful of foxbite, which made his throat swell until he could scarcely breathe. At night he made tea, but had nothing to eat. His hunger was acute and painful. It was torture the next day— the third— for the process of starvation is a rapid one in this country where only the fittest survive on from four to five meals a day. He camped, built a small bush-fire at night, and slept. He almost failed to rouse himself on the morning that followed, and when he staggered to his feet and felt the cutting sting of the storm still in his face and heard the swishing wail of it over the Barren he knew that at last the hour had come when he was standing face to face with the Almighty. For some strange reason he was not frightened at the situation. He found that even over the level spaces he could scarce drag his snow-shoes, but this had ceased to alarm him as he had been alarmed at first. He went on, hour after hour, weaker and weaker. Within himself there was still life which reasoned that if death were to come it could not come in a better way. It at least promised to be painless— even pleasant. The sharp, stinging pains of hunger, like little electrical knives piercing him, were gone; he no longer experienced a sensation of intense cold; he almost felt that he could lie down in the drifted snow and sleep peacefully. He knew what it would be— a sleep without end, with the arctic foxes to pick his bones afterward— and so he resisted the temptation and forced himself onward. The storm still swept straight west from Hudson’s Bay, bringing with it endless volleys of snow, round and hard as fine shot, snow that had at first seemed to pierce his flesh and which swished past his feet as if trying to trip him and tossed itself in windrows and mountains in his path. If he could only find timber, shelter! That was what he worked for now. When he had last looked at his watch it was nine o’clock in the morning; now it was late in the afternoon. It might as well have been night. The storm had long since half blinded him. He could not see a dozen paces ahead. But the little life in him still reasoned bravely. It was a heroic spark of life, a fighting spark, and hard to put out. It told him that when he came to shelter he would at least feel it, and that he must fight until the last. The pack on his back held no significance and no weight for him. He might have traveled a mile or ten miles an hour and he would not have sensed the difference. Most men would have buried themselves in the snow and died in comfort, dreaming the pleasant dreams that come as a sort of recompense to the unfortunate who dies of starvation and cold. But the fighting spark commanded Billy to die upon his feet if he died at all. It was this spark which brought him at last to a bit of timber thick enough to give him shelter from wind and snow. It burned a little more warmly then. It flared up and gave him new vision. And then, for the first time, he realized that it must be night. For a light was burning ahead of him, and all else was gloom. His first thought was that it was a campfire miles and miles away. Then it drew nearer, until he knew that it was a light in a cabin window. He dragged himself toward it, and when he came to the door he tried to shout. But no sound fell from his swollen lips. It seemed an hour before he could twist his feet out of his snow-shoes. Then he groped for a latch, pressed against the door, and plunged in. What he saw was like a picture suddenly revealed for an instant by a flashlight. In the cabin there were four men. Two sat at a table directly in front of him. One held a dice box poised in the air, and had turned a rough, bearded face toward him. The other was a younger man, and in this moment it struck Billy as strange that he should be clutching a can of beans between his hands. A third man stared from where he had been looking down upon the dice-play of the other two. As Billy came in he was in the act of lowering a half-filled bottle from his lips. The fourth man sat on the edge of a bunk, with a face so white and thin that he might have been taken for a corpse if it had not been for the dark glare in his sunken eyes. Billy smelled the odor of whisky; he smelled food. He saw no sign of welcome in the faces turned toward him, but he advanced upon them, mumbling incoherently. And then the spark, the fighting spark in him, gave out, and he crumpled down on the floor. He heard a voice which came to him from a great distance, and which said, “Who the hell is this?” and then, after what seemed to be a long time, he heard that same voice say, “Pitch him back into the snow.” After that he lost consciousness. But in that last moment between light and darkness he experienced a strange thrill that made him want to spring to his feet, for it seemed to him that he had recognized the voice that had said “Pitch him back into the snow.” <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

1 of 2

2 of 2