CHAPTER VII
IN THE LILLIMUIT
Speak _desolation_. What does it mean to you? What picture rises beforeyour eyes? A land laid waste by the ravages of war? A brain picture ofsodden, trampled fields, leaning fences, grey piles of smoking asheswhich are the ruins of homes, flanking a long, white, unpeopled highwaystrewn with litter, broken wagons, abandoned caissons, and, here andthere, long fresh-heaved ridges of brown earth that cover the men whowere? Isn't that the picture? And isn't it the evening of a dull greyday, just at the time when the gloom of twilight shades into the blackpall of night, and way toward the edge of the world, on the indistincthorizon, a lurid red glow tints the low-hung clouds--no flames--only thedull, illusive glow that wavers and fades in the heavens above otherburning homes? Yes, that is desolation. And, yet--men have beenhere--everything about you speaks the presence of people. Here peoplelived and loved and were happy; and here, also, they were heartbrokenand sad. The whole picture breathes humanity--and the inhumanity of men.And, as people have lived here, instinctively you know that people willlive here again; for this is man-made desolation.
Only those to whom it has been given to know the Big North--the gaunt,white, silent land beyond the haunts of men--can realize the truesignificance of _desolation_.
Stand surrounded by range upon towering range of unmapped mountainswhose clean-cut peaks show clear and sharp through the keen air--air sodry and thin that the slanting rays of the low-hung midday sun gleamwhitely upon the outlines of ice crags a hundred miles away. Stand therealone, enveloped by the solitude of the land where men never lived--norever will live--where the silence is a _thing_, pressing closer andcloser about you--smothering you--so that, instinctively, you throw outyour hands to push it away that you may breathe--then you begin to knowdesolation--the utter desolation of the frozen wilderness, the cold,dead land of mystery.
The long howl of the great grey wolf as he lopes over the hunger trailis an eerie sound; so is the cackling, insane laughter of a pack ofcoyotes in the night-time, and the weird scream of the _loup-cervier_;but of all sounds, the most desolate, the sound that to the ears of manspells the last word of utter solitude and desolation, is the short,quick, single bark of the Arctic fox as he pads invisible as a phantomin his haunts among the echoing rim-rocks. Amid these surroundings,brains give way. Not soften into maudlin idiocy, but explode in a frenzyof violence, so that men rush screaming before the relentless solitude;or fight foolishly and to the death against the powers of cold amid theunreal colours of the aurora borealis whose whizzing hiss roars intheir ears when, at the last, they pitch forward into the frozenwhiteness--bushed!
This was the scene of desolation that confronted Connie Morgan asMcDougall's straining _malamutes_ jerked the sled from the ice-cavernthat had served as a shelter through all the days of the great blizzard,when the wind-lashed snow, fine as frozen fog, eddied and whirled acrossthe surface of the glacier which towered above him, and drifted deep inthe narrow pass.
The sled runners squeaked loudly in the flinty snow, and Connie haltedthe dogs and surveyed the forbidding landscape. Never in his life had hebeen so utterly alone. For twenty days he had followed the trail ofWaseche Bill, and now he stood at the end of the trail--worse than that,for the high piled drifts that buried the trail of Waseche covered hisown back trail, completely wiping out the one slender thread thatconnected him with the land of men. He stood alone in the dreadedLillimuit! Before him rose a confusion of mountains--tier after tier ofnaked peaks clear and sharp against the blue sky. Fresh as he was fromthe great Alaska ranges, the boy was strangely awed by the vastness ofit all. It was unreal. He missed the black-green of the timber belt thatrelieved the long sweep of his own mountains, for here, from roundedfoothill to topmost pinnacle, the mountains were as bare of vegetationas floating icebergs. The very silence was unnatural and the boy's lipspressed tightly together as thoughts of Ten Bow crowded his brain: thewindlass-capped shafts, the fresh dumps that showed against the whitesnow of the valley; the red flash and glow of the fires in the nightthat thawed out the gravel for the next day's digging; the rough logcabins ranged up and down the gulch in two straggling rows--he couldalmost hear the good-natured banter which was daily exchanged across thefrozen creek bed between the rival residents of Broadway and "FiffAvenue," as the two irregular "streets" of the camp were named. Hethought of his own cabin and the long evenings with his big partner,Waseche Bill, sitting close to the roaring little "Yukon stove,"puffing contentedly upon his black pipe, which he removed now and thenfrom between his lips to judiciously comment upon the stories that theboy read from the man-thumbed, coverless magazines of other years, whichhad been passed from hand to hand by the big men of the frozen places.
A lump came in his throat and he swallowed hard, and as he looked, thenaked peaks blurred and swam together; and two hot, salty tears stunghis eyes. At the sting of the tears the little form stiffened and theboy glanced swiftly about him as, with a mittened hand, he dashed themoisture from his eyes. The small fingers clenched hard about the handleof the long-lashed, walrus hide dog whip, and he stepped quickly to thegee-pole of the sled.
"I'm a _piker_!" he cried, "a _chechako_ and a _kid_ and a _tin-horn_and a _piker_! Crying like a girl because I'm homesick! _Bah!_ Whatwould Waseche say if he could see me now? And _Dad_? _There_ was a_man_! Sam Morgan!" The little arms extended impulsively toward thegreat white peaks and the big blue eyes glowed proudly:
"Oh, Dad! _Dad!_ They call you unlucky! But I'd rather have the big menback there think of me like they talk of _you_, than to have all thegold in the world!" He leaped suddenly beyond the sled and shook a tinyclenched fist toward the glittering crags.
"I'm _not_ a piker!" he cried, fiercely. "I couldn't be a piker, and beSam Morgan's boy! I got here in spite of the men of Eagle! And I'll findWaseche, too! I'm not afraid of you! You cold, white Lillimuit--withyour big, bare, frozen mountains, and your glaciers, and your stillness!You can't bluff _me_! You may _get_ me--but you can't _turn_ me! _I'mgame!_"
As the voice of the boy thinned into the cold air, Slasher, the gaunt,red-eyed wolf-dog, that no man had ever tamed, ranged himself close athis side and, with bristling hair and bared fangs, added his rumbling,throaty growl to Connie Morgan's defiance of the North.
With a high-pitched whoop of encouragement and a loud crack of the whip,the boy swung the impatient ten-team to the westward and headed it downthe canyon into the very heart of the Lillimuit. High mountains toweredabove him to the left, and to the right the sheer wall of the glacierformed an insurmountable barrier. The dry, hard-packed snow affordedexcellent footing and McDougall's trained sled dogs made good time asthey followed the lead of old Boris who, trotting in advance, unerringlypicked the smoothest track between the detached masses of ice andgranite that in places all but blocked the narrowing gorge, into whichthe trail of Waseche Bill had led on the first day of the greatblizzard.
Mile after mile they covered, and as the walls drew closer together thelight dimmed, for the slanting rays of the winter sun even at middaynever penetrated to the floor of the narrow canyon. As he rounded asharp bend, Connie halted the dogs in dismay for, a short distance infront of him, the ice-wall of the glacier slanted suddenly against thegranite shoulder of a high butte. Wide eyed, he stared at the barrier.He was in a blind pocket--a _cul-de-sac_ of the mountains! But where wasWaseche? Weary and disappointed the boy seated himself on the sled toreason it out.
"There _must_ be a way out," he argued. "I didn't camp till the snow gotso thick I couldn't see, and he had to camp, too. If he doubled back Iwould have seen him." He started to his feet in a sudden panic. "Iwonder if he did--while I slept?" Then, as his glance fell upon thedogs, he smiled. "You bet, he didn't!" he cried aloud, "not withthirteen wolf-dogs camped beside the trail. Slasher would growl andbristle up if a man came within half a mile of us, and Waseche couldnever get past old Boris." He remembered the words of Black JackDemaree: "Never set up yer own guess agin' a good dog's nose." ConnieMorgan was learning th
e North--he was trusting his dogs.
"There's a trail, somewhere," he exclaimed, "and it's up to me to findit!" He cracked his whip, but instead of leaping to the pull, the dogscrouched quivering in the snow. The ground trembled as in the throes ofa mighty earthquake and the boy whirled in his tracks as the canyonreverberated to the crash of a thousand thunders. He dashed to the pointwhere, a few minutes before, he had rounded the sharp angle of the trailand gasped at the sight that met his gaze. The weather-whitened ice ofthe glacier wall was rent and shivered in a broad, green scar, and inthe canyon a mass of broken ice fifty feet high completely blocked theback trail. He was imprisoned! Not in a man-made jail of iron bars andconcrete--but a veritable prison of the wilderness, whose impregnablewalls of ice and granite seemed to touch the far-off sky. The boy'sheart sank as he gazed upon the perpendicular wall that barred thetrail. For just an instant his lip quivered and then the littleshoulders stiffened and the blue eyes narrowed as they had narrowed thatevening he faced the men of Eagle.
"You didn't get me, Lillimuit!" he shouted. "You'll have to shoot theother barrel!" His voice echoed hollow and thin between the gloomywalls, and he turned to the dogs. Old Boris, always in search of atrail, sniffed industriously about the base of the glacier. Big,lumbering Mutt, who in harness could out-pull any dog in the Northland,rolled about in the snow and barked foolishly in his excitement.Slasher, more wolf than dog, stood snarling his red-eyed hate in theface of the new-formed ice barrier. And McDougall's _malamutes_, wise inthe ways of the snow trail, stood alert, with eyes on the face of theboy, awaiting his command.
Forty rods ahead, where the _cul-de-sac_ terminated in a great moraine,Connie could discern a tangle of scrub growth and dead timber pushedaside by the glacier. The short, three-hour day was spent, and thegloomy walls of the narrow gorge intensified the mysterioussemi-darkness of the long, sub-arctic night. The boy shouted to thedogs, and the crack of his long whiplash echoed in the chasm like apistol shot. At the foot of the moraine he unharnessed and fed the dogs,spread his robes in the shelter of a bold-faced grey rock, and unrolledhis sleeping bag. He built a fire and thawed out some bannock, overwhich he poured the grease from the pan of sizzling bacon. Connie washungry and he devoured his solitary meal greedily, washing it down withgreat gulps of steaming black coffee. After supper, surrounded by thethirteen big dogs, he made a hasty inspection of the walls of hisprison. The light was dim and he realized he would have to wait untildaylight before making anything like a thorough examination;nevertheless, he was unwilling to sleep until he had made at least oneeffort to locate the trail to the outer world.
An hour later he crawled into his sleeping bag and lay a long timelooking upward at the little stars that winked and glittered in cold,white brilliance where the narrow panel of black-blue showed between thetowering walls of the canyon.
"I'll get out someway," he muttered bravely.
"My dad would have got out, and, you bet, so will I!"]
"If I can't walk out, I'll _crawl_ out, or _climb_ out, or _dig_ out! Mydad would have got out, and, you bet, so will I! _He_ wasn't afraid totackle _big_ things--he was ready for 'em. What got him was a _little_thing--just a little piece of loose ice on a smooth trail--he wasn't_looking_ for it--that's all. But, at that, when he pitched head firstinto Ragged Falls canyon that day, he died like a _man_ dies--in the bigoutdoors, with the mountains, and the pine trees, and the snow! Andthat's the way I'll die! If I never get out of this hole, when they findme they won't find me in this sleeping bag--'cause I'll work to the endof my grub. I'll dig, and chop, and hack a way out till my grub's gone,then I'll--I'll eat Mac's dogs--and when they're gone I'll--No! ByJimminy! I _won't_ eat old Boris, nor Slasher, nor Mutt--I'll--I'll_starve first_!" He reached for the flap of his sleeping bag, and as hedrew it over his head there came, faint and far from the rim-rocks, theshort, sharp bark of a starving fox.