The Valley of Silent Men | Page 8

in his chest
he drank it in deeply and leaned over so that his eyes traveled over
wide spaces of the world that had been his only a short time before.
It occurred to him that he had suggested this knoll that overlooked both
settlement and river as the site for the building which Dr. Cardigan
called his hospital. It was a structure rough and unadorned, unpainted,
and sweetly smelling with the aroma of the spruce trees from the heart
of which its unplaned lumber was cut. The breath of it was a thing to
bring cheer and hope. Its silvery walls, in places golden and brown with
pitch and freckled with knots, spoke joyously of life that would not die,
and the woodpeckers came and hammered on it as though it were still a
part of the forest, and red squirrels chattered on the roof and scampered
about in play with a soft patter of feet.
"It's a pretty poor specimen of man that would die up here with all that
under his eyes," Kent had said a year before, when he and Cardigan had
picked out the site. "If he died looking at that, why, he just simply
ought to die, Cardigan," he had laughed.
And now he was that poor specimen, looking out on the glory of the
world!
His vision took in the South and a part of the East and West, and in all
those directions there was no end of the forest. It was like a vast,
many-colored sea with uneven billows rising and falling until the blue
sky came down to meet them many miles away. More than once his
heart ached at the thought of the two thin ribs of steel creeping up foot
by foot and mile by mile from Edmonton, a hundred and fifty miles

away. It was, to him, a desecration, a crime against Nature, the murder
of his beloved wilderness. For in his soul that wilderness had grown to
be more than a thing of spruce and cedar and balsam, of poplar and
birch; more than a great, unused world of river and lake and swamp. It
was an individual, a thing. His love for it was greater than his love for
man. It was his inarticulate God. It held him as no religion in the world
could have held him, and deeper and deeper it had drawn him into the
soul of itself, delivering up to him one by one its guarded secrets and
its mysteries, opening for him page by page the book that was the
greatest of all books. And it was the wonder of it now, the fact that it
was near him, about him, embracing him, glowing for him in the
sunshine, whispering to him in the soft breath of the air, nodding and
talking to him from the crest of every ridge, that gave to him a strange
happiness even in these hours when he knew that he was dying.
And then his eyes fell nearer to the settlement which nestled along the
edge of the shining river a quarter of a mile away. That, too, had been
the wilderness, in the days before the railroad came. The poison of
speculation was stirring, but it had not yet destroyed. Athabasca
Landing was still the door that opened and closed on the great North.
Its buildings were scattered and few, and built of logs and rough
lumber. Even now he could hear the drowsy hum of the distant sawmill
that was lazily turning out its grist. Not far away the wind-worn flag of
the British Empire was floating over a Hudson Bay Company's post
that had bartered in the trades of the North for more than a hundred
years. Through that hundred years Athabasca Landing had pulsed with
the heart-beats of strong men bred to the wilderness. Through it,
working its way by river and dog sledge from the South, had gone the
precious freight for which the farther North gave in exchange its still
more precious furs. And today, as Kent looked down upon it, he saw
that same activity as it had existed through the years of a century. A
brigade of scows, laden to their gunwales, was just sweeping out into
the river and into its current. Kent had watched the loading of them;
now he saw them drifting lazily out from the shore, their long sweeps
glinting in the sun, their crews singing wildly and fiercely their beloved
Chanson des Voyageurs as their faces turned to the adventure of the
North.

In Kent's throat rose a thing which he tried to choke back, but which
broke from his lips in a low cry, almost a sob. He heard the distant
singing, wild and free as the forests themselves, and he wanted