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Chapter XV
The Day Before Departure

The Kansas pair clumped downstairs while I was finishing a late breakfast next morning. They had wired asking another son to join them and preparations for their hunt, which was to last a month, would not be complete before Sunday morning when Mike hoped to be ready to start. In addition to stores and equipment, arrangements had to be made about ponies and the hiring of extra guides, for by law every visiting hunter had to be accompanied by a licensed guide, white or Indian. So, they now told me they were going to stretch their legs exploring Mike’s trapping trail and invited me to join them. Regretfully I declined, fearing that they probably would be going too far for me and that I might delay them. So picking up their guns on the chance of seeing some small game they set out.

The morning was sunless and a chill wind still blew from the Lake, ruffling it into sharp white crests that broke impatiently on the shore. The far hills looked dark and forbidding. The woods would be more sheltered I decided and began to regret my decision not to go with the hunters.

“Why not go after them?” suggested Mary. I might still catch up with them by taking the small trail through the woods beyond the swamp near the boats. It came out she said, on the Highway almost opposite the entrance to Mike’s trapping trail and would be much shorter than leaving the Lodge by the main trail to the Highway as they had, and walking back along it from there.

I hastened down past the Nolan’s own cabin set back among the trees. Mike had built it some years previously while still a bachelor and long before the Lodge itself had been thought of. Its bark covered logs and the snowshoes and bleached antlers of moose and caribou hanging from the walls had all weathered to a silverish grey that blended almost indistinguishably with the surrounding spruce boles.

Pushing through the willowy scrub that lined the inlet where the boats were moored, I found the mossy logs Mary had spoken of spanning a small creek, a mere trickle seeping through the swamp. Beyond this a narrow trail no wider than a rabbit’s track threaded the undergrowth and I followed it until it crossed another tiny creek. A few yards beyond the trail ended – or rather it just petered out. I stopped. The utter stillness enveloped me like a cloak, for here on the low level within the shelter of the woods, no sound of wind penetrated. Only the tree tips swayed slightly. The Highway, I knew was less than a quarter mile away and it had taken only a few minutes to reach this spot from the Lake shore. Yet in every direction I saw only the spruce tips pricking the sky above or the dense, limitless coloured maze of undergrowth beneath. In that moment I understood what it would be to be lost.

For many years I had read about the great Northern forest, not only of its wonders but also of the menace it holds for anyone inexperienced, like myself, to penetrate alone or without a compass. Unless one has been there and sensed its vastness and primeval stillness, it is impossible to comprehend its full meaning. Had I tried to go on, following what appeared to be the right general direction – a cleft between two creeper clad rocks, a wider gap in the maze of tree trucks where the scrub looked less dense - inevitably, within ten minutes and less than half a mile from the Lodge I should have been utterly and ignominiously lost! I felt my heart thump foolishly before recognizing the first tiny creek. For a moment, I had been unsure whether I had turned in the right direction but and thankfully, I recrossed the slippery logs in the swamp to reach the familiar shore with its rocking boats.

Many months later, talking with an old friend experienced in hunting and woods living in northern Montana and Wyoming to whom I confessed my fears and how I had felt before turning back. He told me, “You did the only sensible thing – to stop right there when you did!”

I returned past the Lodge and on up the main trail past Mrs. Whitehorse Billy’s erstwhile camp, the closed flap of her tent and the blackened ring of her fireplace proclaimed the owner’s absence with a desolate air pervading the shuttered house.

How strange it felt to stroll along a Road that was unraveling uninterruptedly ahead for six hundred miles and behind for another nine hundred! A Road brought into being only when the threat of invasion and possible closure of the sea route to Alaska had turned what had previously been regarded as an impossible dream into reality. Built by the bitter urgency of war and the labour of nearly three million men, it had been completed in nine months and six days! And at an estimated cost of something, at that time, like one hundred and thirty eight million dollars.

Since then, the tide of humanity hurled in that fierce, brief onslaught against the hitherto impregnable fortress of primeval land had ebbed away and the surrounding wilderness had resumed its sway, scored only by the Road, its initial gash healed now to a scar. A scar which, but for the vigilance of the Maintenance crews in the camps spaced throughout its length would itself be obliterated by the silent, implacable advance of forest and landslide, the unending menace of rivers and muskeg and ice.

About a mile north of the Lodge a pile of brushwood marked the entrance to Mike’s trapping trail. Beyond its first bend, not twenty paces from the Highway I was aware of a silence unlike any other I had known, silence intense and profound. For many moments, as if on a threshold of a door, which I had pushed aside, I remained still, listening to it. At last I went on, the broad trail winding gently upwards through groves of cottonwoods, bordered sometimes by spruce and hemlock, the earth beneath a brilliant mosaic of scattered leaves.

One or two narrower trails branched from the broad trail itself, which was scored with wheel tracks and the confused print of men and horses. I tried to pick out those of the two men who had preceded me, but I knew they must be far ahead by now for they had had a long start and Mike had given them a lift along the Highway on his way into Whitehorse.

The trail became steeper before following a crest; dipping again to another hollow, only to climb again. The sun had come out and from one higher point I caught a glimpse of Marsh Lake, a silver streak between the golden vista of trees, and the distant howling of huskies at the Lodge lifted briefly on the wind traveling through the spruce tops with the hushing sound of the sea.

Suddenly I remembered bears: What if I should meet one? There was the grizzly too, a local inhabitant Mary had told me could sometimes be heard ‘grunting around’ – suppose he was around this morning? Very soon however, all fears were forgotten with the surrounding glory and my desire to see what lay beyond the next bend. Why worry about bears when the spruce crockets were carved like that against the glowing tapestry of leaves? When the earth was suffused with such colour welling through every stem and smallest leaf, embossing every patch of moss. Where the lichens smouldered on rocks and the tiniest thread of creeper was dyed with the year’s lifeblood, scarlet berries and wine stained tendrils. A myriad of threads: tawny, orange and crimson; flame, copper, saffron and purple – an unimaginable riot of colour independent of the sun and lighting the forest from within - I seemed no longer surrounded by glowing trees, but drawn within one universal, incandescent flame.

Squirrels and chipmunks frisked and chirred at me and grey ‘Whisky Jacks’, the lovely Canada jay, flirted across the trail with the crisp flit of an opening fan to perch on a nearby sapling.

Since leaving the Highway, I had come little more than two miles, but now sitting on the crest of a rise, I realized the morning had almost slipped away. For a long while, I sat there beneath a hemlock knowing that here in the heart of these brilliant woods, I had reached the peak of my journey – the realization of so many years of longing. Tomorrow I must go on, along the Highway and although almost a thousand miles of wilderness still lay ahead, they would be southwards – downhill as it were. I knew too that Time would be powerless to dim the magic of these moments and that, with so material a measure as distance, the vistas of continent and ocean which soon would stretch between my everyday life and these moments could be dissolved by a single flash of thought. Even as now, when slowly I began to wander back, watching the light flash through the fur of a squirrel overhead, they were non-existent in my thoughts of home.

The sun went in as I turned from the last bend and stepped out on to the empty Highway and a dull chill of coming snow, filled the air. Back at the Lodge everything was very quiet. No trucks stood before its door, and in the warm room Mitch was stretched out beneath the west window, sound asleep. Norma, all her usual tasks completed moved softly about polishing windows, alternatively rubbing and pausing to gaze critically at her handiwork. Mary, pottering about the kitchen, insisted on giving me some lunch, and later on the stairs I met the Czech Doctor, suitcase in hand. His face wore the petulant look of a spoilt child as he replied to my enquiry for his fishing.

“Not even a single strike!” he exclaimed aggrievedly. “I am very disappointed!” No, he would not stay any longer. This one day was all he had.

It was half past five before the hikers returned, smiling and serene. They had walked they guessed, about ten miles up the trapping trail. Did they pass some lakes? Mike asked them, he had returned from Whitehorse some while before, bringing two more clients, a doctor and his wife from Seattle, fishers, who were making a return visit to the Lodge.

“Yes.” The Kansas Père replied. He told of how they had passed three lakes and thought they must have reached pretty nearly the end of the trail.
“Oh no, it ran on into the hills for some twenty miles.” Mike told them. It was way up there, far beyond the point they had reached that the beavers lived on yet another small lake, he added as he turned to me.

Tireless as ever, he whisked off again on the eighty mile return trip to Whitehorse to take the crestfallen Czech to his plane. And the Kansas Père, after a hearty combination of lunch and supper, soon retired to bed. The doctor and his wife had lost no time on arrival in changing their clothes and had already gone out in the launch with Joe to fish.

From the far hills, iron-like and threatening in the stormy twilight, the wind was driving the Lake in broken, grey green waves licking among the boulders on the shore. It roared round the Lodge walls and rang hollowly up the chimney outside the bathroom door, enhancing the peaceful warmth of the room below. All night long the tall spruce bent and tossed like black reeds against the clouds and the birches shivered and shed a thousand whirling leaves.
 

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