The Rim of the Desert | Page 3

glance to follow the rest, it struck him as a second shock
that Tisdale was the only one on whom the significance of the moment
was lost.
The interval passed. Tisdale stirred, and his glance, coming back from
the door, rested on a dish that had been placed before him. "Japanese
pheasant!" he exclaimed. The mellowness glowed in his face. He lifted
his eyes, and the delegate, meeting that clear, direct gaze, dropped his
own to his plate. "Think of it! Game from the other side of the Pacific.
They look all right, but--do you know?"--the lines deepened
humorously at the corners of his mouth--"nothing with wings ever
seems quite as fine to me as ptarmigan."
"Ptarmigan!" Feversham suspended his fork in astonishment. "Not
ptarmigan?"
"Yes," persisted Tisdale gently, "ptarmigan; and particularly the ones
that nest in Nunatak Arm."
There was a pause, while for the first time his eyes swept the Circle. He
still held the attention of every one, but with a difference; the tenseness
had given place to a pleased expectancy.
Then Foster said: "That must have been on some trip you made, while
you were doing geological work around St. Elias."
Tisdale shook his head. "No, it was before that; the year I gave up
Government work to have my little fling at prospecting. You were still
in college. Every one was looking for a quick route to the Klondike
then, and I believed if I could push through the Coast Range from
Yakutat Bay to the valley of the Alsek, it would be smooth going
straight to the Yukon. An old Indian I talked with at the mission told
me he had made it once on a hunting trip, and Weatherbee--you all

remember David Weatherbee--was eager to try it with me. The Tlinket
helped us with the outfit, canoeing around the bay and up into the Arm
to his starting point across Nunatak glacier. But it took all three of us
seventy-two days to pack the year's supplies over the ice. We tramped
back and forth in stages, twelve hundred miles. We hadn't been able to
get dogs, and in the end, when winter overtook us in the, mountains, we
cached the outfit and came out."
"And never went back." Banks laughed, a shrill, mirthless laugh, and
added in a higher key: "Lost a whole year and--the outfit."
Tisdale nodded slowly. "All we gained was experience. We had plenty
of that to invest the next venture over the mountains from Prince
William Sound. But--do you know?--I always liked that little canoe trip
around from Yakutat. I can't tell you how fine it is in that upper fiord;
big peaks and ice walls growing all around. Yes."--he nodded again,
while the genial wrinkles deepened--"I've seen mountains grow. We
had a shock once that raised the coast-line forty-five feet. And another
time, while we were going back to the village for a load, a small glacier
in a hanging valley high up, perhaps two thousand feet, toppled right
out of its cradle into the sea. It stirred things some and noise"--he shook
his head with an expressive sound that ended in a hissing whistle. "But
it missed the canoe, and the wave it made lifted us and set us safe on
top of a little rocky island." He paused again, laughing softly. "I don't
know how we kept right side up, but we did. Weatherbee was great in
an emergency."
A shadow crossed his face. He looked off to the end of the room.
"I guess you both understood a canoe," said Banks. His voice was still
high-pitched, like that of a man under continued stress, and his eyes
burned in his withered, weather-beaten face like the vents of buried
fires. "But likely it was then, while you was freighting the outfit around
to the glacier, you came across those ptarmigan."
Tisdale's glance returned, and the humor played again softly at the
corners of his eyes. "I had forgotten about those birds. It was this way. I
made the last trip in the canoe alone, for the mail and a small load,

principally ammunition and clothing, while Weatherbee and the Tlinket
pushed ahead on one of those interminable stages over the glacier. And
on the way back, I was caught in fog. It rolled in, layer on layer, while I
felt for the landing; but I managed to find the place and picked up the
trail we had worn packing over the ice. And I lost it; probably in a new
thaw that had opened and glazed over since I left. Anyhow, in a little
while I didn't know where I was. I had given my compass to
Weatherbee, and there was no sun to take bearings from, not a
landmark in sight. Nothing but fog and ice, and