Snow-blind
cold; the straining snap of harness thongs, the humming of sledge
runners and the steady crunching of snowshoes, the _pat, pat, pat_ of
furry feet digging along: they gained the Great Owl cabin clearing, and
Kit shouted to Oogly to turn.
Away to the left swung the dogs, with their forerunner a stride ahead,
among the stumps and headlong into the blackness of the “haunted”
forest. The sounds of pursuit had dwindled to silence. But out of
hearing did not necessarily mean out of striking range. There were teams
and men running the plainly marked trail. The fleeing dogs knew it, and
Kit and Oogly and Diane never lost the occult feeling of being pushed
hard by danger behind them.
The owls were away from home, out foraging over the frozen prairies far
to the north. It was deathly quiet under the trees. Oogly was familiar
with every inch of the ground here, and he cut through the owl woods,
dodging low, avoiding the great trunks by some uncanny method of
perception. They struck the creek again several miles farther down, near
the point where Kit and Diane had first come into this country from the
south. Here they found an ice-bridge crossing. They worked over to the
north bank, groped their way through the stunted, wind-torn thickets on
the opposite shore, and turned their faces at last towards the Arctic
Sea.
There was hope now that their pursuers had been shaken off, or at least
held up for a while in front of the Great Owl woods. No Yellow Knife
would venture into that unhallowed pit of darkness, unless the lust of
the chase had keyed him up to a fine, high point of frenzy. Then he
might go anywhere, dare anything. In any event the savages might circle
the forest and strike the trail where it crossed farther downstream. But
this would mean a clear gain for the fugitives of an hour or two or
three.
Unfortunately the wind had whipped around into the southwest some time
in the night, and the promise of heavy snow had failed. It had grown
colder and calmer, and the great, soft flakes had turned to a misty
sleet. Oogly, the weather-wise, had announced that they might see blue
sky in the morning.
There was nothing to do but to keep going, to make all the distance they
could while the dogs stood up. It is astonishing how much reserve
vitality the ordinary human being holds on tap if the emergency call is
great enough. Earlier in the night--hours and hours ago, it seemed to
them now--the three fugitives had known the torture of overtaxed hearts
and lungs, an unquenchable thirst, the dry taste of blood. Then they had
caught their “second wind.” A pleasant numbness seemed to drug their
physical sensibilities. Legs and bodies moved automatically, without
effort. Breathing became easier. Indeed it seemed almost unnecessary to
breathe. It was as though they had been running and could keep on
running always.
Daylight caught them far out on the frozen prairies. As a mariner loses
his landfall in the night, so they had lost sight of the peopled world.
A dead-level sea of snow and ice surrounded them. There was not a tree
nor shrub, not a speck of color within range of straining eyes. The
clouds had blown clear, and the early gray of the sky changed gradually
to the flawlessness of hard, blued-steel. The sun came up, and the white
monotony of the barrens became an aching, dazzling glare.
Diane was drooping again, staggering now and then as she tried to hold
the killing pace. Oogly’s face looked as drawn and bloodless as smoked
moosemeat. Kit was beginning to suspect that in time he might reach the
end of his “second wind.” The breathing of the dogs sounded like the
rattle of broken skid-chains. They stopped by mutual consent, because
nobody could go much farther.
Behind them the horizon line was a scintillating glaze. Landmarks all
had vanished. The Great Owl forest had been left so far in the rear that
not even a smudge of color showed against the field of snow. There were
no specks or dots anywhere to betray the existence of beasts or men.
At the left the Vermilion River pursued its endless course northward,
held between treeless snow banks so low that the dykes of the waterway,
even at a short distance, could not be distinguished from the rest of
the flat, sweeping landscape.
The travelers camped on the river ice, because at least there was some
slight protection behind the low embankments.
Kit unpacked their alcohol stove and started coffee boiling. “Ready for
breakfast?” he asked Diane.
“No, thanks. Not hungry. Sleep. I want to go to sleep.”
He unstrapped a fur bag and spread it in the lee of an ice hummock. The
girl stayed awake only long enough to pull off her boots. Then she
crawled into the warm pocket, and ten seconds later was asleep, with the
sun beaming into her face.
Kit and Oogly dined on chunks of cold pemmican, washed down with
scalding swigs of coffee. Then the Esquimau stumbled off behind the
parked sledge, rolled up in his robes and started snoring. The dogs had
dropped in their tracks the instant after they were fed. Kit alone
stayed awake.
He turned, squinting, to gaze back over the glistening reaches of the
open tundra. No sign as yet of pursuit. But his own trail, the ruthless
thread of fatality, linked him with the horizon. At any moment he might
see little, evil shapes moving in the shimmer of the sun.
Sighing, he picked up a blanket and tucked his rifle beneath his arm. He
seemed to have been elected unanimously to the post of responsibility.
Oogly was dead to the world, with his head wrapped in a robe. Diane lay
on her side, a glinting, silky wing of hair tumbled over her eye, her
mouth relaxed in a faint, unwitting smile.
For just a moment Kit’s gaunt features were robbed of their guarded
sternness. His glance hovered wistfully as he half leaned over her, and
then, with an inexorable shrug, he turned on his heel and trudged back
to the southward.
For two or three miles he walked the down trail. Then he picked a
defensible spot behind the river bank, where he spread his blanket and
stretched out on his stomach to watch over the line of northbound
footprints.
If his enemies came out on the barrens the trail would lead them past
the ambush point. He could take them on the flank, and by surprise. They
wouldn’t get him for a long while. He was loaded down with cartridges,
and he was covered on three sides. Oogly and Diane would hear the shots.
They’d have time to run for it again. Kit was confident that he could
hold the Yellow Knives long enough to give his companions a safe start.
Better one than three.
All of that morning Kit lay on his blanket, keeping vigil.
The sun had come up in the southeast, and it was from that direction
that his pursuers must come. He lay on his diaphragm and stared into the
sun.
An endless morning. He had nothing to do but to gaze across the flat
wastes and try to keep his eyelids open. It was a wearying, painful
prospect, snow and ice stretching everywhere, shadowless, colorless, a
vast mirror reflecting the sunlight.
A merciless sun. A silvery, frigid incandescence pouring balefully upon
the world. The snow remained as hard as crystal, and flashed and
sparkled like the dancing of flame.
An appalling silence. Even the wind is without noise when there is
nothing to interfere with its blowing. The tick of Kit’s wrist watch,
the thud of his pulse, were mighty sounds in ears attuned to an absolute
vacancy. He could hear the friction of his toes when he wiggled them for
warmth in his ribbed-wool socks.
A forlorn panorama. Sometimes he saw with an astonishing clarity,
seemingly for miles and miles, but there was nothing to look at. The
boundaries of earth and sky were so much alike that he could not tell
surely where one left off and the other began.
The waves of cold on the snow-fields sometimes waver visibly like heat
waves on the desert. In the flickering daylight he later began to see
things. Men and dogs and sledges and shifting herds of musk-ox moved
distantly before his widening gaze; then a black, bumping object, like a
locomotive laboring over a rough road-bed. By that time he knew
something was wrong. He studied his finger tip for a minute to bring his
pupils back in focus, and when his glance ranged the far tundras again
there was nothing whatever in sight.
If the Yellow Knives were coming he wished they’d come.
The queer mirages formed and faded for a while, and then a dullness
stole over his vision. When he took off his mitten again to concentrate
on his forefinger, the finger somehow looked bigger than it should and a
trifle vague in outline. The heatless sun, strangely, felt as though it
were beginning to burn his eyeballs. The muscles of his eyelids started
to twitch, and he could not hold them still. And he began to notice a
pin-prick of pain in the nerves behind the bridge of his nose.
For relief he allowed his eyes to close against the glaring sunlight.
And he went to sleep, to awaken suddenly in a sweat of terror. He had
dozed off. He had failed his companions, when he was supposed to be on
watch. Nothing had happened. The silence was as intense as ever, and
there were no shadows beneath the coldly blazing sun. That was nothing
to his credit. He had slept.
He looked at his watch, and had no idea of the time of day. The watch
dial and the hands and numerals fluttered in a kaleidoscope of changing
colors. He gazed across the tundra and the colors swam off ahead of him
into the horizon.
His eyes felt as though something had blown into them. Sticks or
cinders. He rubbed them with the back of his hand, and then stopped
because of the smarting. If the Yellow Knives were coming, please let
them come while he still could see them.
In the meantime he could not endure the agony of the snowlight and the
sunlight. He let his eyes close again--for just a second. His chin was
propped on his forearm and his face stared insensibly across the white
barrens. And the second lengthened into minutes and the minutes into
hours.
What aroused him he did not know. The movement behind him was so
stealthy that a man in his full waking senses might not have noticed,
nor had reason to look around. But Kit sprang to his feet as suddenly as
though an alarm clock had banged off by his head.
A towering, muffled shape stood over him. Twilight and cold--the sharp,
calm, bitter cold of the arctic evening. His eyes were all wrong. It was
as though he were trying to look through fuzz. There really was
something, though--an erect figure on two feet--a face and a body and a
rigid arm, and a pistol muzzle pointing at his head.
CHAPTER XXII
OOGLY
Dazed as he was, half-blind, half-awake, Kit recognized his fate.
Intuition was better than eyesight. This was no Indian. It was Hell
Bent. He knew that. Everything was as good as ended. There’d be a flash,
and then the obliterating shock, nothing worse than that. His mouth
twisted sardonically.
“What are you waiting for? Go ahead and be damned!”
Funny the man didn’t fire. All these weeks, gunning for Bent and Bent
for him--
The man whirled with a snarling sound in his throat. Something had
stumbled up from behind the river embankment. Kit was vaguely aware of a
broad shape and heavy feet crunching the snow.
“Oogly!” he yelled. “Back! Get down!”
The stocky figure swayed on outspread legs, a heavy, two-handed spear
poised above his head.
A streak of flame reached above the snow. The sound of that one shot,
out of all the pistol shots Kit had ever heard, lingered in his head
with a reëchoing of horror.
The spear-thrower lurched forward violently, and his spear was gone.
A second shot and a third, point-blank; the stench of gas and
powder-burnt fur; a squat body on staggering legs, that still would not