_ CHAPTER XXI. THE RIFLED CACHE
The cold of February, intense, searching, deadly, tightened its grip upon the wilderness, sapping the life of the three struggling human derelicts--for derelicts Shad Trowbridge felt himself and his two companions to be--as they fought their way, now hopefully, now despondently, but ever with slower pace, as strength ebbed, toward the precious cache on the shores of the Great Lake; and with the slower progress that growing weakness demanded, it was quickly found necessary to reduce by half the already minute portion of dried caribou meat allotted to each.
Everything in the world save only themselves seemed to have been frozen into oblivion. There was no sound, save the monotonous swish, swish of their own snowshoes, to disturb the silence--a silence otherwise as absolute and vast as the uttermost depths of the grave.
Storms overtook them, but they mercifully were storms of short duration, and seldom interfered with hours of travel. Staggering, but ever struggling forward, they forced their way painfully on and on, over pitiless windswept ridges, across life-sapping, desolate barrens, through scarcely less inhospitable forests. Exerting their waning strength to its utmost, they never stopped, save when exhausted nature compelled them to halt for brief intervals of sleep and rest, to recuperate their wasted energies.
Shad Trowbridge came finally to wonder vaguely if he were not dead, this another existence, and be doomed to keep going and going through endless ages over endless reaches of snow. To his numbed intellect it seemed that he had been thus going for months and years.
Like a vague, pleasant dream of something experienced in a previous life, he remembered Bob and the tilts, Wolf Bight farther back, and the dear old college. What would the fellows say now, if they were to see him--the fellows who had known him in that former, happier life?
At other times he fancied he heard Ungava Bob and the others hallooing in the distance, and he would answer in glad, expectant shouts. But there never came a reply.
The first time this occurred Manikawan turned and looked inquiringly at him, through eyes sunk deep in their sockets. When it was repeated later--and he came to hear the voices and to shout to the empty snow wastes at least once every day--she would step to his side, solicitously touch his shoulder and say:
"The friend of White Brother of the Snow hears the voices of the Matchi Manitu of Hunger. Let him close his ears and be deaf, for the Matchi Manitu is mocking him."
Mookoomahn's face was not pleasant to see now; it was horrible--the dark skin was drawn tight over the high cheek bones, the lips shrunken to the gums, and the eyes fallen far back into the skull. His face resembled more than anything else the smoked and dried skull of a mummy.
Shad laughed sometimes when he looked at Mookoomahn's ghastly face, framed in a mass of long, straggling black hair; at other times he was overcome with a heart-rending pity for Mookoomahn that brought tears to his eyes. But tears froze, and were annoying and painful.
Manikawan, too, had changed woefully. The lean, gaunt figure stalking along uncomplainingly with Shad and Mookoomahn had small resemblance to the beautiful, commanding Manikawan that bade Bob and Shad be patient in their imprisonment on the island until she returned to relieve them; or the glowing, happy Manikawan that accompanied Shad and the others to the river tilt after she had accomplished the rescue. Though there still burned within her an unquenchable fire of energy, and she never lagged on the trail, she was no longer the Manikawan of old.
In spite of all the hardships and all the pain, and slowly starving as she was, she never ceased her attention to Shad, and she never once lost her patience with him.
When Shad laughed hysterically and derisively at his fate, as he did sometimes, Manikawan would step to his side, touch him lightly with her hand, and say in the same old voice, lower than of old, but even more musical and sweet:
"The friend of White Brother of the Snow is brave. He is not a coward. He is not afraid to die."
This always had a magical, soothing effect upon Shad. Though he never learned to interpret her language, the touch of the hand, the human note of encouragement in her voice, the light in the eyes that looked into his, never failed to recall him to his manhood and to himself, and to the remembrance of his vow that as a white man he must by mere force of will prove his superiority.
All record of time was lost. But the days were visibly lengthening with each sunrise and sunset, and when the wind did not blow to freeze them, and the snow did not drift to blind them, the sunshine gave forth a hint--just a hint--of warmth.
One day the dead silence was suddenly startled by the long-drawn-out howl of a wolf. It was a blood-curdling and almost human cry, and Shad likened it to the agonised cry of a lost soul in the depths of eternal torment. Again and again it sounded, then suddenly ceasing, Shad discovered the animal itself trotting leisurely after them far in the rear, and a feeling of fellowship--of pity--welled up in his bosom.
But when he discovered the creature still following them the next day, now so near that he could see its lolling red tongue, its lean sides, and ugly fangs, he became possessed with a feeling of revulsion toward it. Then he fancied it the embodied Spirit of Starvation stalking them and awaiting an opportunity to destroy them. This fancy gave birth to a consuming, intense hatred of the thing. Finally it attained the proportions of a mocking, tantalising demon.
Cunningly he watched for a moment when it was well within rifle shot, and drawing his rifle from the toboggan he dropped upon a knee, aimed carefully, and pulled the trigger. The frost-clogged firing pin did not respond, and the wolf, seeming to understand its peril, slunk away unharmed.
Shad had seen it plainly--its repulsive gray sides so lank that they seemed almost to meet, its red, hungry tongue lolling from its ugly mouth, its cruel white fangs, and its malevolent, gleaming eyes. His hatred for the creature became an obsession, for it appeared again presently, persistently following, but now keeping at a respectful distance.
On the third day, however, the wolf had forgotten its temporary timidity, and with increased boldness stole steadily upon their heels. With a patience quite foreign to him Shad waited, glancing behind constantly, but making no demonstration until the wolf, apparently satisfied that it had little to fear from the hunger-stricken plodders, trotted boldly up and took a place behind them, so near that if the rifle failed at the first snap there would be opportunity for a second attempt before the beast could pass out of range.
Shad again stopped, and seizing the rifle discovered that the beast had also stopped and stood glaring at him, mocking and unafraid. As though, knowing their weakness, it had lost respect for their power to injure it.
A mighty rage took possession of Shad. He fell to his knee again, aimed carefully, and again pulled the trigger. This time there was a report, and in an insane frenzy of delight he beheld the carcass of the tantalising creature stretched upon the snow.
Mookoomahn and Manikawan had halted, and stood in breathless silence watching the result of Shad's shot. Now with an exclamation of pleasure from Mookoomahn the two rushed forward, knives in hand, and in an incredibly short time the carcass of the wolf was quartered, a fire lighted, and some of the meat cooking.
It was a lean, scrawny wolf, and the meat tough and stringy, but to the famished travellers it meant life, and Shad thought the half-cooked piece which Mookoomahn doled to him as his share the sweetest morsel he had ever eaten.
The wolf meat, carefully husbanded, supplied food until one morning Mookoomahn by a series of signs conveyed the information to Shad that they were within one day's march of the cache. Then they ate the last of it, that it might give them strength for the final effort.
It was evening, but not yet dark, when familiar landmarks told Shad that they were nearing the goal, and a little later they halted where the poles of Sishetakushin's lodge stood in the edge of the woods above the lake shore.
With furious haste Shad and Mookoomahn rushed to the cache, but suddenly stopped, aghast and stupefied. The cache had been rifled of its contents, and lying near it, half covered with snow, lay the frozen, emaciated body of an Indian. _