The Isle of Retribution/Chapter 8
VIII
Before ever that long night was done, clouds had overswept the sky and a cold rain was beating upon the sea. It swept against the ports of the little craft and brought troubled dreams to Lenore and Mrs. Hardenworth. Bess, who knew life better than these two, to whom the whole journey had been a joyous adventure, did not wholly escape a feeling of uneasiness and dismay. At this latitude and season the weather was little to be trusted.
The drizzle changed to snow that lay white on the deck and hissed softly in the water. As yet, how ever, it was nothing to fear. Snow was common in these latitudes in September. The sudden break of winter might lead to really serious consequences—perhaps the unpleasant prospect of being ice bound in some island harbor—but in all probability real winter was still several weeks distant. The scene looked wintry enough to Lenore and Ned, however. The air and the sky and the sea seemed choked with snow.
Lenore found herself wishing she had not been so contemptuous of the North. Perhaps it would have been better not to have taken so many worn-out dresses to trade, but to have filled her chests with woolens and furs. Even in her big coat she couldn't stay warm on the deck. The wind was icy out of the Arctic seas.
Once more the craft plied among islands; but now that they had passed into Bering Sea the character of the land had changed. These were not the dull-green, wooded isles met with on first entering Alaskan waters. Wild and inhospitable though the latter had seemed, they were fairy bowers compared to these. Nor did the mossy mainland continue to show a marvelous beryl green through mist.
In the first place, even the prevailing color scheme had undergone an ominous change from blue to gray. The sun kissed the sea no more: under the sifting snow it stretched infinitely bleak and forbidding. Gray were the clouds in the sky that had been the purest, most serene blue. And now even the islands had lost their varied tints.
Evergreen forests almost always look blue at a distance,—bluish-green when the sun is bright, bluish-black under clouds. But these voyagers saw, with a dim, haunting dread, that the forests mostly had been left far behind them. The islands they passed now were no longer heavily wooded; only a few of the sheltered valleys and the south slopes of the hills bore thickets of stunted aspen, birch, and Sitka spruce. Mostly these too were gray, gray as granite, merely a different shade of gray from that of the sea from which they rose.
The truth was that these islands were far-scattered fragments of the Barrens, those great wastes of moss and tundra between the timber belt and the eternal ice cap of the pole. Largely treeless, wind-swept, mostly unpeopled except for a few furtive creatures of the wild, they seemed no part of the world that Ned and Lenore had previously known. They were all so gray, so bleak, swept with an unearthly sadness, silent except for the weary beat of waves upon their craggy shores.
Mostly the islands were mere snow-swept mountains protruding above the waters, at a distance seemingly as gray as the rest of the toneless landscape. Only the less mountainous of the islands had human occupants, and these were in small, far-scattered Indian villages. Seemingly they had reached the dim, gray limits of the world: surely they must soon turn back. Indeed, these were the Skopins, the group that comprised Ned's first trading ground, and Muchinoff Island, the northernmost land in the group and the point selected as his first stopping place, from which he would begin the long homeward journey from island to island, was only a few days' journey beyond.
Yet they sped northward a while more, nothing changing except day and night. Indeed, day and night itself seemed no longer the unvarying reality that it used to be. Between the dark clouds and the dark sea, night never seemed to go completely away. Day after day they caught no glimpse of the sun.
The islands were seen but dimly through mist, as might the outlying shores of a Twilight Land, a place where souls might come but never living men,—a gray and eerie training camp like that of which Ned's father had spoken. It was all real enough, truly, remorselessly real; yet Ned couldn't escape from the superstitious fear he had known at first. The gray, desolate character of the islands seemed to bear it out. It grew on him, rather than lessened.
Yet his standards were changing. Things that had not concerned him a few weeks before mattered terribly now. For instance, the bareness of the islands oppressed him, and he found himself longing for the sight of trees. Just trees,—bending in the wind, shaking off their leaves in the fall. They hadn't mattered before: he had regarded them as mere ornaments that nature supplied for lawns and parks, if indeed he had ever consciously regarded them at all; but now they were ever so much more important than a hundred things that had previously seemed absolutely essential to his life and happiness. Had his thought reached further, he could have understood, now, the joy of Columbus—journeying in waters scarcely less known than these—at the sight of the floating branch; or the exultation in the Ark when the dove returned with its sprig of greenery.
Lately the ship had taken a northeastern turn, following the island chain, and the cloudy, windy, rainy days found them not far from the mainland, in a region that would be wholly icebound in a few weeks more. And when they were still a full day from their turning point, Knutsen sought out Ned on the deck.
“Mr. Cornet, do you know where we're getting?” he asked quietly.
Unconsciously startled by his tone, Ned whirled toward him. “I don't know these waters,” he replied. “I suppose we're approaching Muchinoff Island.”
“Quite a sail between here and der, yet. Mr. Cornet, we're getting into de most unknown and untraveled waters in all dis part of the Nort'. De boats to Nome go way outside here, and de trut' is I'm way out of my old haunts. I'm traveling by chart only; neither me nor McNab, nor very many oder people know very much the waterways between dese islands. You're up here to trade for furs, and you haven't got all winter. You know dat dese waters here, shut off from the currents, are going to be tighter dan a drum before very many weeks. Why don't you make your destination Tzar Island, and start back from dere?”
“You think it's really dangerous?”
“Not really dangerous, maybe, but mighty awkward if anyt'ing should go wrong wit' de old brig. You understan' dat not one out of four of dese little islands is inhabited. Some of de larger islands have only a scattered village or two; some of 'em haven't a living human being. Der's plenty and plenty of islands not even named in dis chart, and I'd hate to hit the reefs of one after dark! Der's no one to send S. O. S. calls to, in case of trouble, even if we had wireless. De only boat I know dat works carefully through dis country is anot'er trader, the Intrepid—and dat won't be along till spring. Mr. Cornet, it's best for you to know dat you're in one of the most uninhabited and barren countries”
“And the most dreary and generally damnable,”
Ned agreed with enthusiasm. “Why didn't you tell me this before? Muchinoff Island isn't anything in my young life. I picked it out as a starting point simply because it was the farthest north of the Skopins, but since there seems to be plenty of territory”
“It will make you hump some to cover all de good territory now, including some of the best of de Aleuts, and get around Alaskan Peninsula before winter sets in, in earnest. Tzar Island is yust to our nort'east. Shall I head toward it?”
“How long will it take”
“Depends on de wind. Dis is a ticklish stretch of water in here, shallow in spots, but safe enough, I guess. I think we can skim along and make it in long before dawn.”
“Then do it!” Ned's face suddenly brightened. “The sooner I can shake my legs on shore, the better I'll like it.”
The seaman left him, and for a moment Ned stood almost drunk with exultation on the deck. Even now they were nearing the journey's end. A few hours more, and they could turn back from this dreary, accursed wintry sea,—this gray, unpeopled desolation that had chilled his heart. It was true that the long journey home, broken by many stops, still lay before, but at least he would face the south! Once on his native shores, forever out of this twilight land and away from its voice of reproach, he could be content with his old standards, regain his old self-confidence. He could take up his old life where he had left it, forgetting these desolate wastes as he would a dream.
He was a fool ever to regret his wasted days! He laughed at himself for ever giving an instant's thought to his father's doleful words. The worst of the journey was over, they had only to go back the way they had come; and his puzzling sense of weakness, his premonition of disaster, most of all his superstitious fear of death had been the veriest nonsense. His imagination had simply got out of bounds.
The old Charon! He had been afraid of her name. Seemingly he had forgotten, for the time, that he was a man of the twentieth century, the product of the most wonderful civilization the world had ever seen. He had been frightened by old bogeys, maudlin with time-worn sentiments. And now his old egotism had returned to him, seemingly unshaken.
Presently he turned, made his way into the hold, and opened one of a pile of iron-bound wooden cases. When he returned to the dining saloon he carried a dark bottle in each hand.
“All hands celebrate to-night!” he cried. “We're going to go home!”
Out of the sea the wind seemed to answer him. It swept by, laughing.