For five days Thorpe cut wood, made fires, drew water, swept floors, and ran errands.Sometimes he would look across the broad stump-dotted plain to the distant forest.He had imagination.No business man succeeds without it.With him the great struggle to wrest from an impassive and aloof nature what she has so long held securely as her own, took on the proportions of a battle.The distant forest was the front.To it went the new bands of fighters.
From it came the caissons for food, that ammunition of the frontier;messengers bringing tidings of defeat or victory; sometimes men groaning on their litters from the twisting and crushing and breaking inflicted on them by the calm, ruthless enemy; once a dead man bearing still on his chest the mark of the tree that had killed him.Here at headquarters sat the general, map in hand, issuing his orders, directing his forces.
And out of the forest came mystery.Hunters brought deer on sledges.
Indians, observant and grave, swung silently across the reaches on their snowshoes, and silently back again carrying their meager purchases.In the daytime ravens wheeled and croaked about the outskirts of the town, bearing the shadow of the woods on their plumes and of the north-wind in the somber quality of their voices;rare eagles wheeled gracefully to and fro; snow squalls coquetted with the landscape.At night the many creatures of the forest ventured out across the plains in search of food,--weasels; big white hares; deer, planting daintily their little sharp hoofs where the frozen turnips were most plentiful; porcupines in quest of anything they could get their keen teeth into;--and often the big timber wolves would send shivering across the waste a long whining howl.And in the morning their tracks would embroider the snow with many stories.
The talk about the great stove in the boarding-house office also possessed the charm of balsam fragrance.One told the other occult facts about the "Southeast of the southwest of eight." The second in turn vouchsafed information about another point of the compass.
Thorpe heard of many curious practical expedients.He learned that one can prevent awkward air-holes in lakes by "tapping" the ice with an ax,--for the air must get out, naturally or artificially;that the top log on a load should not be large because of the probability, when one side has dumped with a rush, of its falling straight down from its original height, so breaking the sleigh;that a thin slice of salt pork well peppered is good when tied about a sore throat; that choking a horse will cause him to swell up and float on the top of the water, thus rendering it easy to slide him out on the ice from a hole he may have broken into; that a tree lodged against another may be brought to the ground by felling a third against it; that snowshoes made of caribou hide do not become baggy, because caribou shrinks when wet, whereas other rawhide stretches.These, and many other things too complicated to elaborate here, he heard discussed by expert opinion.Gradually he acquired an enthusiasm for the woods, just as a boy conceives a longing for the out-of-door life of which he hears in the conversation of his elders about the winter fire.He became eager to get away to the front, to stand among the pines, to grapple with the difficulties of thicket, hill, snow, and cold that nature silently interposes between the man and his task.
At the end of the week he received four dollars from his employer;dumped his valise into a low bobsleigh driven by a man muffled in a fur coat; assisted in loading the sleigh with a variety of things, from Spearhead plug to raisins; and turned his face at last toward the land of his hopes and desires.
The long drive to camp was at once a delight and a misery to him.
Its miles stretched longer and longer as time went on; and the miles of a route new to a man are always one and a half at least.
The forest, so mysterious and inviting from afar, drew within itself coldly when Thorpe entered it.He was as yet a stranger.
The snow became the prevailing note.The white was everywhere, concealing jealously beneath rounded uniformity the secrets of the woods.And it was cold.First Thorpe's feet became numb, then his hands, then his nose was nipped, and finally his warm clothes were lifted from him by invisible hands, and he was left naked to shivers and tremblings.He found it torture to sit still on the top of the bale of hay; and yet he could not bear to contemplate the cold shock of jumping from the sleigh to the ground,--of touching foot to the chilling snow.The driver pulled up to breathe his horses at the top of a hill, and to fasten under one runner a heavy chain, which, grinding into the snow, would act as a brake on the descent.
"You're dressed pretty light," he advised; "better hoof it a ways and get warm."The words tipped the balance of Thorpe's decision.He descended stiffly, conscious of a disagreeable shock from a six-inch jump.
