The Long Portage. Harold Bindloss
and mode of life had been, they had much in common. Then, too, there was something in the prospect spread out before them that impelled tranquillity. The clump of wet cedars among which they had camped distilled a clean, aromatic smell; and there was a freshness in the cool evening air that reinvigorated their tired bodies. Above the low hilltops the sky glimmered with saffron and transcendental green, and half the lake shone in ethereal splendor; the other half was dim and bordered with the sharply-cut shadows of the trees. Except for the lap of water upon the pebbles and the wild cry of a loon that rang like a peal of unearthly laughter out of a darkening bay, there was nothing to break the deep stillness of the waste.
Lisle pointed to the gap in the hills, which was filling with thin white mist.
“That’s the last big portage the Gladwynes made,” he remarked. “They came in by a creek to the west, and they were badly played out when they struck this divide; the struggle to get through broke them up.” He paused before he added: “What kind of men were they?”
“George wasn’t effusive; he was the kind of man you like better the longer you know him. If I were told that he ever did a mean thing, I wouldn’t believe it. His last action—sending the others on—was characteristic.”
“They didn’t want to go,” Lisle interposed quietly.
His companion nodded.
“I believe that’s true. I like to think so.”
There was something curious in his tone, which Lisle noticed.
“From the beginning,” Nasmyth went on, “George behaved very generously to Clarence.”
“It was Clarence that I meant to ask about more particularly.”
Nasmyth looked thoughtful, and when he answered, it struck Lisle that he was making an effort to give an unbiased opinion.
“Clarence,” he said, “is more likable when you first meet him than George used to be; a handsome man who knows how to say the right thing. Makes friends readily, but somehow he never keeps the best of them. He’s one of the people who seem able to get whatever they want without having to struggle for it and who rarely land in any difficulty.”
Again a grudging note became apparent, as though the speaker were trying to subdue faint suspicion or disapproval, and Lisle changed the subject.
“Had George Gladwyne any immediate relatives?”
“One sister, as like him as it’s possible for a woman to be. He wasn’t greatly given to society; I don’t think he’d ever have married. His death was a crushing blow to the girl—they were wonderfully attached to each other—but I’ve never seen a finer display of courage than hers when Clarence cabled the news.”
He broke off, as if he felt that he had been talking with too much freedom, and just then the report of a rifle came ringing across the water.
“That’s a duck’s head shot off. Jake doesn’t miss,” he said.
Lisle nodded. He could take a hint; and he had no doubt that Nasmyth was right regarding the shot, though it is not easy to decapitate a swimming duck with a rifle. He began to talk about the portage; and soon after Jake returned with a single duck they went to sleep.
It was clear and bright the next morning and they spent the day carrying their loads a few miles up the hollow which pierced the height of the divide. Part of it was a morass, fissured with little creeks running down from the hills whose tops rose at no great elevation above the opening. This was bad to traverse, but it was worse when they came to a muskeg where dwarf forest had once covered what was now a swamp. Most of the trees had fallen as the soil, from some change in the lake’s level, had grown too wet. They had partly rotted in the slough, and willows had afterward grown up among them.
Now and then the men laid down their loads and hewed a few of the still standing trunks, letting them fall to serve as rude bridges where the morass was almost impassable, but the real struggle began when they went back for the canoe. At first they managed to carry her on their shoulders, wading in the bog, but afterward she must be dragged through or over innumerable tangles of small fallen trunks and networks of rotten branches that had to be laboriously smashed. It was heroic labor—sometimes they spent an hour making sixty yards—and Lisle’s face grew anxious as well as determined. Game had been very scarce; the deer would not last them long; and disastrous results might follow a continuance of their present slow progress. When, utterly worn out, they made camp on slightly firmer ground toward four o’clock in the afternoon, Lisle strode off heavily toward the bordering hills, while Jake pushed on to prospect ahead. Nasmyth, who was quite unable to accompany either, prepared the supper and awaited their reports with some anxiety.
Lisle came back first and shook his head when Nasmyth asked if he had found a better route on higher ground.
“Not a slope we could haul along,” he reported. “That way’s impracticable.”
It was nearly dark when Jake came in.
“It’s not too bad ahead,” he informed them.
They were not greatly reassured, because Jake’s idea of what was really bad was alarming. Nasmyth glanced at his companion with a smile.
“Is it any better than this?” he asked.
“A little,” answered Jake. “An old trail runs in.”
“Gladwyne’s trail?” exclaimed Nasmyth. “The one we’re looking for?”
“Why, yes,” drawled Jake, as if it were scarcely worth mentioning. “I guess it is.”
Nasmyth turned to Lisle.
“I was lucky when I lighted on you as a companion for this trip. You have been right in your predictions all along, and now you’re only out in striking the trail a day before you expected.”
“I know the bush,” returned Lisle. “It’s been pretty easy so far—but, for several reasons, I wish the next week or two were over.”
Nasmyth looked troubled. One could have imagined that misgivings which did not concern his personal safety were creeping into his mind.
“So do I,” he confessed, and turning toward the fire he busied himself with Jake’s supper.
There was no change in the work the next morning, but in the afternoon it became evident that another party had made that portage ahead of them. The soil was a little drier and where the small trees grew more thickly they could see that a passage had been laboriously cleared. In the swampy hollows, which still occurred, trunks had here and there been flung into the ooze. This saved them some trouble and they made better progress, but both Lisle and Nasmyth became silent and grave as the signs of their predecessors’ march grew plainer. By nightfall they had reached the second camping-place, which told an eloquent story of struggle with fatigue and exhaustion. Lisle, stopping in the gathering dusk, glanced around the old camp site.
“A good place to pitch the tent, but I think I’d rather move on a little,” he said.
Nasmyth made a sign of comprehension.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I couldn’t sleep soundly here. Everything about us is too plain a reminder; I’ve no doubt you feel it as I do. A firm and trusted friend lay, famishing, beside that fire, in what extremity of weakness and suffering I dare not let myself think. It’s possible he cut those branches yonder.”
Lisle’s face expressed emotion sternly held in check.
“That was Vernon’s work—no Englishman new to the country could have slashed them off so cleanly. But look at this small spruce stump. He was the better chopper, but it’s significant that he used three or four strokes where I would have taken one.”
Even the laconic Jake appeared relieved when they forced their way a little farther through the tangled undergrowth, until finding a clear space they set up the tent.