Snow-blind
it was too late to worry about that. Whatever the gun had in it he’d use
it if he had to.
Two or three times during the next hour or so he had lost the feeling of
the wind in his face. But before he was seriously alarmed the lightly
fanning breeze sprang up again. He went along confidently for a while,
and then all at once realized that he was moving in an apparent calm.
Either there was a sudden lull, or else his skin was not as sensitive as
it had been. He halted abruptly and tried Jerry’s plan of rubbing the
face with snow.
It seemed to work. The right cheek felt much colder than the left. Once
more he trudged onward with the assurance that he must be going the
right direction.
After this he paused every now and then to gather a handful of snow and
dab it over his stinging face.
Time and distance--how long he had been slogging ahead, how far he had
come, he hadn’t a faintest notion. The numbers he had counted were
beginning to jumble up meaninglessly in his head. He couldn’t seem to
recall whether he was in his twentieth or thirtieth thousand. He began
to think of himself as a minute, selfless object moving eternally in
endless, invisible space....
In the middle of his long, hurrying stride he halted as abruptly as
though he had hit a wall. His head turned one direction and then
another, and his breathing stopped. A puff of icy wind had struck the
left side of his face.
Kit flung off his hood and stood aghast in the vast silence. There was a
distinct breeze quartering his path from the sinister side. Either he
had unwittingly changed his direction, or else the wind had veered.
He was careful to keep his feet planted exactly as they were when the
alarming change pulled him up. He mustn’t get excited. It wasn’t any use
being frightened. As deliberately as he had ever moved in his life he
pulled out his flash-lamp, and laid his compass in the palm of his hand,
and snapped on the electric beam.
It is a peculiarity of snow-blindness that the vision is more befogged
and the eyes hurt worse at night than in the full daylight. The glare of
the search-lamp made him blink. It was easy enough to differentiate
between light and darkness, and he even caught the glint of the metallic
disc in his hand. But that was all. He couldn’t make out the compass
card or the arrow. He couldn’t tell which point was north and which was
south.
Kit deliberated, with a stern effort to keep his head. He had to reach
the Great Owl cabin to-night. Even now he might be too late.
The breeze seemed to be much stronger than it had been. Coming off from
the left. Jerry must have been certain that it would not change its
point during the night. But Jerry was not infallible. It might have
shifted. Or in a moment of aberration Kit perhaps had swung off his
course. How was he to know?
He put away his useless torch. His head pivoted blindly in a
half-circle. There was no sound nor scent to guide him, nothing that he
could touch with his hand. He stood in the midst of barrenness and
desolation, completely at sea. And in his heart was the tantalizing,
maddening conviction that Diane was in desperate straits somewhere near,
needing him frightfully--and he did not know which way to go.
The compass was clenched in his hand. In a sudden fury with himself and
his sightless eyes he started to fling it away. Then, just in time, he
checked his arm. It occured to him that perhaps he might read his
directions by the sense of touch. He stooped to one knee, laid the
compass firmly on the other knee, and tapped the crystal with the hilt
of his knife. The glass shattered into fragments. The sharpest point of
the needle, he recalled, was the magnetized end. He slipped his hand out
of his glove, and with a gingerly forefinger he tried to trace the line
of the wabbling sliver of steel.
But he was overanxious, and his hand was not as quiet as it might have
been. His blundering finger dislodged the needle from its jeweled post.
He heard the needle slide across the card, and it was gone before he
could save it.
He went after the tiny metal arrow with his bare hands. In a widening
circle he groped and searched. He dug up handfuls of snow and explored
minutely among the frozen crystals. And before very long his flesh was
ice and all sense of feeling had left his fingers. He wouldn’t have
recognized the compass needle if he picked it up.
Now he needed his self-command. He was aware of the beginnings of that
strange form of insanity that attacks lost men: the raging desire to do
something, to be somewhere else, to walk off whichever way the feet are
turned, to break from a walk into a run, to keep on running from the
multiplying horrors that can run faster than a man.
This was the time for Kit to remember that he was one of a hardy line
whose men do not lose their heads in the wilds. The old lessons of
wilderness lore had been drummed into him from the days of his infancy.
When in doubt, don’t move. Sit down. Cover up. He put his freezing
fingers in his mouth, and did not budge.
There was nothing to be done now. He’d have to wait for the sun. He
pulled his hood over his head and sank down in the snow, despairing, and
shivering with cold.
And from off in the darkness, a long while afterwards, he thought he
heard a sound. He was crouched in a ball with his head on his knee. His
body had grown so cold that he was almost in a torpor. It may be that he
had dozed now and then. He didn’t know. His faculties were nearly
dormant.
But he did hear something. He raised his head. His breath had congealed
under his hood. With his sleeve he wiped the frost rime from his face
and eyes. Both arms were so stiff he half listened to hear them creak.
What was it that had aroused him?
He remembered. There was a noise of some sort off across the tundra. He
leaned forward on his hands and labored drowsily to stand up. There it
was again--far off in front of him. A voice in the air--a ghostly
whistle changing into faint chuckling laughter.
He was on his feet now, swaying a trifle, staring vacantly. For some
reason he had picked up his shotgun. Listening until the pulse of his
heart seemed to wait--
The cry! This time it was nearer--a grotesque, quavering note that
reached his ears and trembled all the way down his backbone. He knew it
now--the sound that had awakened him other nights in the sweat of an
unearthly abhorrence--the horrid, hunting call of a great owl.
Kit stumbled forward. The creature was ahead of him. It would be time
soon for it to be going home. The owls lived off there somewhere in the
depths of the forest, on the other side of the creek. They circled over
the barrens at night and went back at the first crack of dawn.
Whether it was night or morning, Kit didn’t know. He couldn’t even see
the glimmer of the stars. His eyes had gone totally blind while he
huddled in the cold. But he could hear the complaining of the owl. A
low, gasping sound, with a hoarse croak at the end.
Why, it was Shedim--the bird that had caught cold in Hades! It was
Diane’s owl.
Kit’s legs had refused to obey him for a minute or two. But he had
staggered on somehow, and now he was beginning to feel his feet under
him. His snowshoes were gripping the crusty snow. He was getting into
his stride.
At moments there was utter quiet, and then he would hear the throaty
wheeze in the air, at his right or at his left, or sometimes off in
front of him, but always drifting farther ahead, leading him on.
He ran full tilt into a clump of bushes, and rejoiced in the frozen
branches that cut his face. This was no longer the bleak tundra. He was
getting somewhere at last.
The owl was still ranging ahead, and Kit charged on recklessly. There
were other patches of brush in his path, and now and then a group of
dwarfed trees. Usually his outgroping hands saved him.
The ground suddenly sloped down from his feet. He crashed through a
tangled barrier of small growths, and then all at once he caught the
clean, pungent smell of pine woods. Shedim was somewhere behind him. But
he did not wait. He picked his way cautiously down the declivity, and
was gladdened by the sound of running water.
Here was the creek. This must be Great Owl Run. He felt his way along
the stream and found a place where the thick ice reached out from the
bank. On his hands and knees he crept precariously across the slippery
bridge to the opposite bank.
He no longer heard Shedim, but there was something else--not far
away--rhythmic thuds of chopping, an ax blade ringing in wood. Through a
border of willows and alders he thrust a path and emerged into an open
space.
The chopping went on briskly, close at hand it seemed. He turned towards
the sounds, started forward, and hit his knee on a stump. The axman must
have seen him. The strokes stopped, and there was intense quiet. Kit had
a feeling that he was being stared at.
And then something like a spurt of wind crashed past his face, a red
flame leaped at him, a rifle explosion battered his ears.
He flung his shotgun to his shoulder and fired both barrels. The double
shock, the dreadful hush that followed, and then a woman’s cry throbbing
wildly....
“Diane!”
Kit leaped forward, and tripped, and fell. The uproar in his head faded
to leaden silence.
CHAPTER XXIX
COCKY-BIRD
The quiet and drowsy warmth; the languid pleasure of stretching out
weary legs; shadows that soothed his heavy, aching eyes; the cheery
crackling of a hearth-fire and wavering of ruddy firelight: Kitchener’s
reawakening senses went adrift in a spell of dreamy contentment.
He was under shelter somewhere, wrapped in a soft blanket, his head on a
pillow. It seemed to him in those moments that he had never felt a
keener consciousness of well-being. Something stirred gently beside him.
He tried to see, and couldn’t, quite, and so he closed his eyes again.
“Who is it?” he asked.
Somebody came closer, and a hand strayed to his face, and then ran its
fingers through his hair.
His heart stopped, and then swelled in mighty beating. He reached for
the hand, but it was gone.
“Diane! Where are you?”
“I’m here.” The voice held him thrillingly awake.
He sat up and threw off the blanket.
“Diane! Are you all right? I was all night getting here. I was so
frightened--I wanted to get to you so--and I couldn’t see--”
“It’s all right,” she told him. “You got here in time--you got here just
in time.” There was something like awe in her muted voice. “I’ll never
understand what it was, but--deep in me, all the time I had the
strangest feeling that you were coming--that you’d get here. And you
did.”
“What happened?” he asked. “I don’t quite remember.”
“You stumbled over a stump and fell and hit your head on the sill of the
cabin. You’ve been lying here without knowing anything for nearly five
hours.”
Kit put up his hand to feel an enormous swelling above his right
eyebrow. “I don’t mean that,” he said impatiently. “That’s nothing. But
before then?” He scowled in an effort to collect his faculties. “I
remember the chopping, and then somebody fired at me, and I let him have
it.”
“He was chopping down the door of the cabin,” Diane told him, and
shivered. “He came here last night and demanded that I tell him where
the--where those old bags were hidden, and I wouldn’t, and he said he’d
make me. I never heard anything as frightful as his talk. He went away,
and some time later he came back with an ax and started chopping down
the door, and I had no gun or anything, and I was just crouching in the
corner, when--when I heard the rifle and then the shotgun. And I knew it
was you.”
“I guess I killed him,” said Kit.
“No, you didn’t. You must have had bird-shot in your gun. A few of the