The Rim of the Desert | Page 4

it all looked alike. The
surface was too hard to take my impressions, so I wasn't able to follow
my own tracks back to the landing. But I had to keep moving, it was so
miserably cold; I hardly let myself rest at night; and that fog hung on
five days. The third evening I found myself on the water-front, and
pretty soon I stumbled on my canoe. I was down to a mighty small
allowance of crackers and cheese then, but I parcelled it out in rations
for three days and started once more along the shore for Yakutat. The
next night I was traveling by a sort of sedge when I heard ptarmigan. It
sounded good to me, and I brought my canoe up and stepped out. I
couldn't see, but I could hear those birds stirring and cheeping all
around. I lay down and lifted my gun ready to take the first that came
between me and the sky." His voice had fallen to an undernote, and his
glance rested an absent moment on the circle of light on the rafter
above an electric lamp. "When it did, and I blazed, the whole flock rose.
I winged two. I had to grope for them in the reeds, but I found them,
and I made a little fire and cooked one of them in a tin pail I carried in
the canoe. But when I had finished that supper and pushed off-- do you
know?"--his look returned, moving humorously from face to face--"I
was hungrier than I had been before. And I just paddled back and
cooked the other one."
There was a stir along the table; a sighing breath. Then some one
laughed, and Banks piped his strained note. "And," he said after a
moment, "of course you kept on to that missionary camp and waited for
the fog to lift."
Tisdale shook his head. "After that supper, there wasn't any need; I
turned back to the glacier. And before I reached the landing, I heard

Weatherbee's voice booming out on the thick silence like a siren at sea;
piloting me straight to that one dip in the ice-wall."
He looked off again to the end of the room, absently, with the
far-sighted gaze of one accustomed to travel great solitudes. It was as
though he heard again that singing voice. Then suddenly his expression
changed. His eyes had rested on a Kodiak bearskin that hung against a
pillar at the top of the gallery steps. The corner was unlighted, in heavy
shadow, but a hand reaching from behind had drawn the rug slightly
aside, and its whiteness on the brown fur, the flash of a jewelled ring,
caught his attention. The next moment the hand was withdrawn. He
gave it no more thought then, but a time came afterward when he
remembered it.
"Weatherbee had noticed that fog-bank," he went on, "from high up the
glacier. It worried him so he finally turned back to meet me, and he had
waited so long he was down to his last biscuit. I was mighty reckless
about that second ptarmigan, but the water the birds were cooked in
made a fine soup. And the fog broke, and we overtook the Tlinket and
supplies the next morning."
There was another stir along the table, then Foster said: "That was a
great voice of Weatherbee's. I've seen it hearten a whole crowd on a
mean trail, like the bugle and fife of a regiment."
"So have I." It was Lucky Banks who spoke. "So have I. And
Weatherbee was always ready to stand by a poor devil in a tight place.
When the frost got me"--he held up a crippled and withered hand--"it
was Dave Weatherbee who pulled me through. We were mushing it on
the same stampede from Fairbanks to Ruby Creek, and he never had
seen me before. It had come to the last day, and we were fighting it out
in the teeth of a blizzard. You all know what that means. In the end we
just kept the trail, following the hummocks. Sometimes it was a pack
under a drift, or maybe a sled; and sometimes it was a hand reaching up
through the snow, frozen stiff. Then it came my turn, and I lay down in
my tracks. But Weatherbee stopped to work over me. He wouldn't go
on. He said if I was determined to stay in that cemet'ry, I could count
on his company. And when he got me on my feet, he just started

'Dixie,' nice and lively, and the next I knew he had me all wound up
and set going again, good as new."
His laugh, like the treble notes of the Arctic wind, gave an edge to the
story.
Presently Foster