The Big Otter | Page 5

which
Lumley reverted to his unfinished exposition of grossness, and, in the

enthusiasm of his nature, was slowly working himself back into a
wakeful condition, when I put an abrupt end to the discourse by
drawing a prolonged snore. It was a deceptive snore, unworthy of
success, yet it succeeded.
My friend turned round and, with a contented sigh, went to sleep. After
a brief space the snore which had been a fiction became a reality, and
thus, on our bed of snow, in the depths of an Arctic night, in the heart
of the frozen wilderness, and while the mighty fire burned slowly down,
we unitedly took our departure for the land of Nod.
CHAPTER TWO.
THE WINTER PACKET.
On returning next morning towards the outpost from our encampment
in the woods, Lumley and I made a discovery which excited us greatly.
It was nothing more than a track in the snow, but there was a revelation
in the track which sent the blood tingling through our veins.
It was not the track of a Polar bear. We should have been somewhat
surprised, no doubt, but not greatly excited by that. Neither was it the
track of a deer or an Arctic fox. It was only the track of a sledge!
"Is that all?" exclaims the reader. No, that is not all. But, in order that
you may understand it better, let me explain.
Fort Dunregan, in which we dwelt, stood more than a thousand miles
distant from the utmost verge of civilised life in Canada. We were
buried, so to speak, in the heart of the great northern wilderness. Our
nearest neighbour lived in an outpost between one and two hundred
miles distant, similar to our own in all respects but even more lonely,
being in charge of a certain Scotsman named Macnab, whose army of
occupation consisted of only six men and two Indian women! The
forests around us were not peopled. Those vast solitudes were indeed
here and there broken in upon, as it were, by a few families of
wandering Red-Indians, who dwelt in movable tents--were here to-day
and away to-morrow--but they could not be said to be peopled, except

by deer and bears and foxes and kindred spirits.
Of course, therefore, we were far beyond the every day influences of
civilised life. We had no newspapers, no mails; no communication
whatever, in short, with the outer world except twice in the year. The
one occasion was in summer, when a brigade of boats arrived with our
outfit of goods for the year's trade with the few scattered Indians above
referred to; the other occasion was in the depth of our apparently
interminable winter, when a packet of letters was forwarded from
outpost to outpost throughout the land by the agents of the Hudson's
Bay Company which we served.
This half-yearly interval between mails had a double effect on our
minds. In the first place, it induced a strange feeling that the great
world and all its affairs were things of the past, with which we had little
or nothing to do--a sort of dream--and that the little world of our
outpost, with its eight or ten men and three or four Indian women, its
hunting, and trapping, and firewood-cutting, and fishing, and trading,
and small domestic arrangements and dissensions, was the one place of
vital importance and interest, before which empires and dynasties and
the trifling matter of politics sank into mere insignificance! In the
second place, it created an intense longing--a hungering and
thirsting--for news of our kindred "at home."
Our chief, Mr Strang, and our two selves, with another fellow-clerk
who was named Spooner, as well as most of our men, were from "the
old country," where we had left fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters--in
some cases sweethearts--behind us. It may be conceived then with what
anxiety and yearning we looked forward to the periodical break in the
weary six months of total silence that had enveloped us. Men in
civilised, or even semi-civilised communities, cannot understand this.
Convicts on penal servitude for long periods may have some faint
notion of it, but even these have periods of literary intercourse more
frequently than we had. The reader must just take the statement on trust
therefore, that our anxious yearnings were remarkably powerful. What
might not have occurred in these six months of dark silence! Who
might not have been married, born, laid low by sickness, banished to

the ends of the earth like ourselves, or even removed by death!
Is it surprising, then, that we caught our breath and flushed, and that
our hearts leaped when we came unexpectedly upon the track of the
two men who had dragged news from home for hundreds of miles over
the snow? We knew the tracks well. Our intimate