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Page 4
For this "divinity student" was a young man of parts and character,
though as yet, of course, untraveled; and on this trip--the first time
he had seen any country but his own and little Switzerland--the huge
scale of things somewhat bewildered him. It was one thing, he realized,
to hear about primeval forests, but quite another to see them. While to
dwell in them and seek acquaintance with their wild life was, again, an
initiation that no intelligent man could undergo without a certain
shifting of personal values hitherto held for permanent and sacred.
Simpson knew the first faint indication of this emotion when he held the
new.303 rifle in his hands and looked along its pair of faultless,
gleaming barrels. The three days' journey to their headquarters, by lake
and portage, had carried the process a stage farther. And now that he
was about to plunge beyond even the fringe of wilderness where they were
camped into the virgin heart of uninhabited regions as vast as Europe
itself, the true nature of the situation stole upon him with an effect
of delight and awe that his imagination was fully capable of
appreciating. It was himself and D�fago against a multitude--at least,
against a Titan!
The bleak splendors of these remote and lonely forests rather
overwhelmed him with the sense of his own littleness. That stern quality
of the tangled backwoods which can only be described as merciless and
terrible, rose out of these far blue woods swimming upon the horizon,
and revealed itself. He understood the silent warning. He realized his
own utter helplessness. Only D�fago, as a symbol of a distant
civilization where man was master, stood between him and a pitiless
death by exhaustion and starvation.
It was thrilling to him, therefore, to watch D�fago turn over the canoe
upon the shore, pack the paddles carefully underneath, and then proceed
to "blaze" the spruce stems for some distance on either side of an
almost invisible trail, with the careless remark thrown in, "Say,
Simpson, if anything happens to me, you'll find the canoe all correc' by
these marks;--then strike doo west into the sun to hit the home camp
agin, see?"
It was the most natural thing in the world to say, and he said it
without any noticeable inflexion of the voice, only it happened to
express the youth's emotions at the moment with an utterance that was
symbolic of the situation and of his own helplessness as a factor in it.
He was alone with D�fago in a primitive world: that was all. The canoe,
another symbol of man's ascendancy, was now to be left behind. Those
small yellow patches, made on the trees by the axe, were the only
indications of its hiding place.
Meanwhile, shouldering the packs between them, each man carrying his own
rifle, they followed the slender trail over rocks and fallen trunks and
across half-frozen swamps; skirting numerous lakes that fairly gemmed
the forest, their borders fringed with mist; and towards five o'clock
found themselves suddenly on the edge of the woods, looking out across a
large sheet of water in front of them, dotted with pine-clad islands of
all describable shapes and sizes.
"Fifty Island Water," announced D�fago wearily, "and the sun jest goin'
to dip his bald old head into it!" he added, with unconscious poetry;
and immediately they set about pitching camp for the night.
In a very few minutes, under those skilful hands that never made a
movement too much or a movement too little, the silk tent stood taut and
cozy, the beds of balsam boughs ready laid, and a brisk cooking fire
burned with the minimum of smoke. While the young Scotchman cleaned the
fish they had caught trolling behind the canoe, D�fago "guessed" he
would "jest as soon" take a turn through the Bush for indications of
moose. "_May_ come across a trunk where they bin and rubbed horns," he
said, as he moved off, "or feedin' on the last of the maple leaves"--and
he was gone.
His small figure melted away like a shadow in the dusk, while Simpson
noted with a kind of admiration how easily the forest absorbed him into
herself. A few steps, it seemed, and he was no longer visible.
Yet there was little underbrush hereabouts; the trees stood somewhat
apart, well spaced; and in the clearings grew silver birch and maple,
spearlike and slender, against the immense stems of spruce and hemlock.
But for occasional prostrate monsters, and the boulders of grey rock
that thrust uncouth shoulders here and there out of the ground, it might
well have been a bit of park in the Old Country. Almost, one might have
seen in it the hand of man. A little to the right, however, began the
great burnt section, miles in extent, proclaiming its real
character--_brul�_, as it is called, where the fires of the previous
year had raged for weeks, and the blackened stumps now rose gaunt and
ugly, bereft of branches, like gigantic match heads stuck into the
ground, savage and desolate beyond words. The perfume of charcoal and
rain-soaked ashes still hung faintly about it.
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