by Max Brand
His clothes were in tatters, but, as the cold increased, he began to wrap a blanket around him when he went out to hunt. Inside the cave he managed very well. He noticed on the roof of the cave a small section where roots grew down and it made him guess shrewdly that there was a considerable gap in the rock at that point. So he climbed up with the shovel and dug down through the dirt until, to his delight, his shovel struck through into empty air. When he had finished his digging, he had uncovered a hole of rugged outline, two feet across, in the center of his roof. That became his chimney. To be sure, a fire of wet wood or green wood would fill the cave insufferably with smoke, but on the whole the draft worked very well. Usually he had a brisk, bright blaze that kept the cave comfortable, while a thick blanketing of smoke gathered in the top of the cave and slowly poured out through the opening.
So furnished, he could defy the cold, and, when the wind stood in the south, he needed only to block the entrance to the cave with stones. Of course, there were vast, empty stretches when he was neither eating nor sleeping or hunting or cooking. But those periods he filled quite comfortably with reading the only two books that John Parks had put in his pack. Two books make up a small library, and these two could hardly have been better chosen for Tommy. There was a Bible, and there was a copy of Malory, both sadly battered by the packing, but both still readable. To Tommy they were inexhaustible treasures. Malory he knew before in fragments. Now he devoured it whole. As for the Bible, he had felt it to be a great and dreary book fit for old women and Sunday, but, when the conversation-hunger drove him, he opened it perforce—and was suddenly lost in talks of old wars, wild vengeances, strange prophecies, inspired men. There was much of it that he could not follow easily, but he found long passages that were solid entertainment, and many and many a long hour he spent tracing out the words, one by one, with the motion of a grimy little forefinger.
Grimy Tommy certainly was. Suppose a close look is made of him on the day of his tragedy, that fatal accident that nearly snuffed out poor Tommy’s life. Hunger wakes him. He sits up in the dim twilight of the winter and the cave combined. He lights a fire, groaning and shivering in the cold. The rising tongue of yellow flame shows first a ragged mop of long hair, partly standing on end and partly falling down across ears and neck. He is huddled in a blanket that for the moment covers his body. The firelight gleams on a berry-brown face, thin, with the cheeks, which should be rounded by childhood, as flat and straight as the cheeks of a grown man. His eyes, sunken under frowning brows, glitter with the firelight; keen, blue eyes as restless as the eyes of Madame Grizzly herself.
Now hunger rouses him. He stands up and goes to the nearest shelf of rock and takes from it two frozen fish, for yesterday he had broken the ice of a pool and had caught several prizes. But suddenly the thought of fish makes his stomach and throat close tight in revolt. He throws them back on the shelf. He steps into a pair of huge shoes—an extra pair of John Parks’s shoes, for his own had worn out that summer. He winds the blanket as deftly as an Indian chief. He goes to the entrance of the cave, rolls a stone back, and steps out onto the crackling, hard, frozen surface of the snow.
There he stands, breathing deeply of the fresher air, the color leaping up into his cheeks. He is a tall boy for his age—some three inches short of five feet, big-boned, with the promise of great hulk when he is matured—if he may live to maturity. But nine months of solitary life, solitary work and play in the wilderness, have hardened him like leather. The muscles of those lean, long arms have surprising strength.
He looks about him upon a white world. All the mountains that step away north and east and south are sheeted like ghosts. The plateau is thick with snow, which has blown here and there into mounds and drifts. The level branches of the evergreens are pressed down by thick layers of the heavy snow. A keen wind is blowing. It takes edges of the blanket and tugs them straight out. It pries through the loose folds of the cloth and sends its icy teeth through and through the slender body of the boy. But Tommy only shrugs his shoulders and steps out.
Yonder he enters the forest. Here the walking is better, for he does not have to wade to his knees through the snow. He needs only to pick a course where the trees have sifted the snow to the side, and where the ground is covered with only a thin layer. But, even so, now and again he steps into a little hollow up to the waist. In half an hour he is wet and freezing cold. But still he shrugs his shoulders and sets his teeth. If he lives to a happier day and a greater strength, the world will have to pay him a heavy toll for all this pain.
Now he stops short. His keen eyes have seen three little humps of snow and ice thrust up on a branch halfway to the top of a tall tree. He stands watching them intently, making sure. These are three young partridges, he is sure. They have roosted yonder in the early winter. Snow has covered them in a night. The warmth of their bodies has melted the nearest snow, so that it touches them in no place, and the heavy frost has frozen the outer layer of the snow to an iron-hard consistency. And so their winter house is made.
While he stands there, motionless, his eye catches on something white as the very snow, and moving like an arrow across its surface. It is a weasel, that fierce little wolf that preys on all small life. It darts past almost across his feet, so intent is the terrible killer on the blood trail across the surface of the pure snow. Instantly he is gone. Tommy looks after him with an involuntary shudder. Then he is into the branches of the tree. No matter that those branches are slippery with ice, no matter that the deft feet of Tommy are burdened with those great, oversized shoes; he is climbing to make a kill, and he will not slip.
Up he goes. He lies out on the branch, twining his legs around it. He crumbles the first icehouse. Yes, he was right! He wrings the neck of the poor bird and drops it to the ground, and so with the next, so with the third. But the third is smaller. He will carry it down with him. So he thrusts back a fold of the blanket and stuffs it into his coat pocket. Suddenly he thrills with fear. In that pocket are the matches, and they must not be moistened by this wet body.
He jerks out the bird again, and behold! Down through the air flutters a whole drift of matches that have adhered to its damp feathers. The sharp wind catches them. They blow away in a cloud and disappear among the branches of the next tree.
Poor Tommy! His heart stopped when he saw that dreadful mischance. He dropped the partridge unheeded. He thrust his hand into the pocket—not a match was left!
For the moment, he lay there, half stunned by his fortune. All he can see now is how small was that fire that he started to build before he left the cave. Down the tree he drops like a veritable monkey from branch to branch. He falls from the last one upon his face in the snow. But that is no matter. Neither do the precious birds matter to Tommy. Off he started, racing through the snow. If only the fire will last until he reaches the cave.
But he has come much farther than he dreamed. It seems that he would never be able to cover the distance between. At last, with burning lungs, with blinded eyes, with the blood pounding in his head, he rushes into the mouth of the cave and finds that the floor is black as night. Not one spark of the fire has lived!
Above it he stands, sick and stunned. There are the small branches lying in a little circle, with their center portions burned away, until they were out of touch with one another, and so the flame died in the cold air.
Tommy sinks down upon the sandy floor and presses his hands over his face. This, then, is the sentence of death. On raw meat he might live a little time, but without fire he must surely perish.
CHAPTER TWELVE
HEAVEN-SENT HEAT
The miserable days dragged on, and he still lived. He managed, by heaping all the blankets and the tarpaulin upon him, to keep warm enough in the cave so long as he was lying down, but, when he moved around, the cold ate into him venomously. If he had had the proper food, he could have endured well enough, but raw meat was more than his stomach could stand unless he were exercising vigorously, and in that bleak wea
ther he dared not expose himself for long at a stretch. Gradually his strength diminished. A great drowsiness began to grow in him. It spread through his body first—an aching fever, a false warmth broken with fierce spells of shivering and utter cold. Then it reached his brain, so that he wanted to do nothing but lie still all the day in the heap of warmth-giving stuff that he had piled up.
But, even in his drowsy times, there was an anguish of hunger, a craving for food that he could not have. He found himself wasting with a terrible rapidity. His body grew emaciated. His cheeks sunk. His hands, when he raised them, were wasted to a point that he hardly recognized them. Yet, every day, in spite of that diminishing strength, he forced himself to get up and go into the great outdoors to see if he could sight some animal, some beast of prey, that he might kill with a rifle bullet to clothe himself in the pelt.
Once he sighted a great timber wolf, but his shaking hands could not hold the weapon firm, and the bullet flew wide while the wolf trotted out of sight with the slowness of contempt for this puny hunter. He failed thus, on the only occasion when he sighted a pelt worth having. Now the time came when he went out more and more seldom. Finally for three successive days he did not leave the cave.
It was only a sudden reflex of will that drove him out at length. He wakened one afternoon from a stupor. He hardly felt hunger now. A haze hung before his eyes. The same haze hung over his very mind. But there was a sudden parting of the veil as he saw his hand raised before him, a mere, withered claw rather than a hand.
The horror brought him erect. There he stood, shuddering in the cold and realizing that, when he lay down again, it would be to fall into a sleep from which there was no waking. Fear drove him on more strongly than dread of the cold could keep him back. Presently swathed in blankets, he staggered weakly out of the cave. A side draft of the wind caught him and knocked him flat. He rose again and went on blindly through the forest, the rifle dragging down in his hands as though it were of a ton’s weight. He knew that, even if he saw a fur worth having, he could not shoot the wearer, and yet on he went, driven simply by a horror of the cave and the death to which he would be returning if he went back to it.
He found himself stumbling across a raw, bare patch of earth from which a recent landslide had torn the trees and shrubs. Tripping on a loose stone, he fell headlong for the tenth time. He was stunned by the fall. When he roused again, he found that he was half frozen, so frozen that, when he leaned and picked up the gun, the weapon fell from his numbed fingers and, striking a rock, knocked out a bright spark.
Tommy stared with vague agony down at the stone. In the very rock there seemed to be fire. He alone in all creation was without warmth. He was still half dazed, half stupid, but that spark had fascinated him. Regardless of the harm that might be done the barrel, he dropped the rifle again, and again the spark jumped from the piece of flat, black stone.
Suddenly he picked it up with a wild hope growing in him. Sparks will light fire. This must be a flint. What had the Indians used for centuries before him? With the stone hugged to his breast, with the rifle trailing behind him, he made on toward the cave as fast as his weak knees would support his strides.
So, muddy from his falls, with a ringing as of bells in his ears, he entered the cave and looked about him for tinder. He found something excellent for his purpose—a pile of dried bark that he had used to start his fires while the matches lasted. Some of this he shredded to a bundle of small fibers, so brittle that they threatened to crumble to a powder. He gathered larger wood nearby, and then he took the revolver, as a handier bit of steel, and, the flint dropped at an angle, he began to knock a shower of sparks upon the tinder.
They fell all over the bark. A faint smoke arose, but, when he ceased striking the flint, the smoke died out. He worked until his weak arm ached. Then, as despair was coming over him, there was a new thought. He hammered again with all his might and main, tossed aside the battered gun as soon as he saw a small spot glowing on the bark, and began to fan this with his breath.
He blew till his lungs threatened to burst, till his head grew dizzy, and, behold, the smoldering spot of dark grew in width, ate into the bark. Hastily he placed more of the shreds of the crumpled bark upon the spot. Again he blew. Now a thin column of smoke rose. To Tommy it was the most blissful sight he had ever seen. Literally it meant life!
Again he blew with all his might. The smoldering increased, grew audible. There was a faint sparkling; the smoke cloud increased tenfold. He began to fan the heap with a part of the blanket. Now the smoldering place became a vivid orange that lighted up his hands at work. Suddenly a little tongue of flame shot up, quivered, while Tommy hung breathlessly over it, and then steadied into a swiftly growing blaze. He had made fire! He had made it of steel and stone and wood! A great wave of gratitude flooded through Tommy. He cast up his arms. Tears streamed down his face.
But he dared not wait. Quickly he threw on the bits of wood. The smoke rose again as the fire worked. Then a new and stronger flame burst out. Like a madman, he threw on more and more wood. A roaring blaze shook up toward the top of the cave. A soaring flame licked against the roof itself. Tommy sat down with his blanket thrown away, unneeded, his arms put out to the heaven sent heat.
A month later, on a day, there blew up a warm wind. It was a true Chinook. It melted the snows in the lower valleys as though a fire had been built upon them. In a fortnight Tommy had dry footing for his hunting trips.
He came out from the winter prison, hollow-cheeked, still weak in body from the great ordeal, but full of pride, full of invincible confidence in his strength to face any ordeals before him.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE STRANGER COMES
He made his first trip to the cave of Madame Grizzly. The entrance was still blocked with brush. He exerted no effort to rouse them. He was wise enough to understand that there is no safety in interfering with Mother Nature when she is at her work.
So he went back down the slopes, finding every trail crossed with rivulets fed from snows that were melting under the trees. It was on this trip that he made his first kill of big game. Something stirred in a thicket before him. He jerked out the revolver and stood eagerly waiting, and in a moment a little, brown-bodied deer stepped into view, and Tommy fired.
He almost regretted what he had done as he stood over the beautiful little body a moment later, but life in the wilderness is a grim thing. It is kill or be killed, and Tommy had lived there long enough to understand it.
Many times he had seen his father cut up deer. Now he set busily to work getting off the hide. There was many a slip of the knife, many a slit in the tender pelt, but eventually, after a weary task of tugging and pulling and cutting, the work was done after a fashion. Then he cut the deer into quarters, hung three parts as high as he could on a shrub, and carried one ham back to the cave.
To roast a quarter in the Dutch oven was a considerable task. Moreover, it was one that he had never performed before except under the strict supervision of his father. It was dark in the cave before he peered at his cookery and decided that it was done. What a fragrance greeted his nostrils as he opened the oven! Surely that was worth waiting for.
He had just sat back to enjoy the meal in prospect, when a human voice, the first he had heard in almost a year, spoke from the entrance.
“Hello, son.”
He leaped to his feet with a shout of astonishment. He saw that a big, rough-bearded man had just crawled through the entrance to the cave and had risen to his height—a huge, thick-shouldered man in the later middle of life.
There was one pang of disappointment, of unbearable sorrow, in Tommy as he saw that it was not John Parks come back to him. In that instant, hope of his return died forever in Tommy’s breast. In another breathing space, he was wild with joy because a human being had at last crossed his trail. The long silence was ended. He went to the big man with a rush.
“Oh,” cried Tommy, “how did you come . . . how did you come? How did
you find me?”
Here the big fellow stepped back from him, gathered his bushy brows, and peered down at Tommy with little black, bright eyes.
“Look here, son,” he said, “you ain’t telling me that you’re living here alone, are you? Your pa ain’t here with you?”
He said this with an eagerness that Tommy could not understand, and the boy told all his story in ten words. But, the instant he learned that John Parks was dead, the stranger seemed to lose all interest in the rest of the narrative and the story of Tommy’s sufferings. He strode forward, lifted the cover, and inhaled the fragrance of the roasted venison.
“We’ll eat now,” he said, “and we’ll talk things over later on.”
So saying, his big knife instantly slashed into the vitals of the roast. He began to eat wolfishly, and Tommy, amazed and bewildered by such treatment, stood for a time in the offing. When he approached to take something for himself, the stranger lifted his eyes with a silent glare, and Tommy retreated again. Not until the big man had ended his meal, bolting the meat in great chunks, could Tommy take a portion in what he considered safety.
By this time he was thoroughly frightened, but the black-bearded fellow had reclined against a stone and spread out his legs toward the fire. He began to roll a cigarette.
“Make yourself handy, son,” he grunted after a time when the cigarette was lighted and he had blown a cloud of smoke upwards. “Get some wood on that fire.”
Tommy moved as though he had been struck with a whip, half choking on the mouthful he was eating. After he had obediently heaped on the wood and the flame was soaring, the fear of the taciturn stranger had increased in him to such an extent that his throat closed and he could not speak. He sat watching and waiting uneasily. Still the stranger did not stir, but seemed to drink up the heat of the fire, while his eyes bored into Tommy.
