The Hidden Places Page 4

  CHAPTER IV

  The steamer backed away from a float of which Hollister was the soleoccupant. She swung in a wide semicircle, pointed her bluff bow downthe Inlet, and presently all that he could see of her was the tip ofher masts over a jutting point and the top of her red funnel trailinga pennant of smoke, black against a gray sky.

  Hollister stood looking about him. He was clad like a logger, in thickmackinaws and heavy boots, and the texture of his garments wasappropriate to the temperature, the weather. He seemed to have steppedinto another latitude,--which in truth he had, for the head of TobaInlet lies a hundred and fifty miles northwest of Vancouver, and thethrust of that narrow arm of the sea carries it thirty miles into theglacial fastnesses of the Coast Range. The rain that drenchedVancouver became snow here. The lower slopes were green with timberwhich concealed the drifts that covered the rocky soil. A littlehigher certain clear spaces bared the whiteness, and all the treetops, the drooping boughs, carried a burden of clinging snow. Higherstill lifted grim peaks capped with massive snow banks that evenmidsummer heat could never quite dispel. But these upper heights werenow hidden in clouds and wraiths of frost fog, their faces shrouded inthis winter veil which--except for rare bursts of sunshine or sweepingnorthwest wind--would not be lifted till the vernal equinox.

  It was very cold and very still, as if winter had laid a compellingsilence on everything in the land. Except the faint slapping of littlewaves against the ice-encrusted, rocky shore, and the distant, harshvoices of some wheeling gulls, there was no sound or echo of a sound,as he stood listening.

  Yet Hollister was not oppressed by this chill solitude. In thatsetting, silence was appropriate. It was merely unexpected. For solong Hollister had lived amid blaring noises, the mechanical thunderand lightning of the war, the rumble of industry, the shuffle andclatter of crowds, he had forgotten what it was like to be alone,--andin the most crowded places he had suffered the most grievousloneliness. For the time being he was unconscious of his mutilation,since there was no one by to remind him by look or act. He was onlyaware of a curious interest in what he saw, a subdued wonder at themajestic beauty and the profound hush, as if he had been suddenlytransferred from a place where life was maddeningly, distractinglyclamorous to a spot where life was mute.

  The head of Toba is neither a harbor nor a bay. One turns out of theisland-studded Gulf of Georgia into an arm of the sea a mile inbreadth. The cliffs and mountains grow higher, more precipitous mileby mile, until the Inlet becomes a chasm with the salt water for itsfloor. On past frowning points, around slow curves, boring farther andfarther into the mainland through a passage like a huge tunnel, theroof of which has been blown away. Then suddenly there is an end tothe sea. Abruptly, a bend is turned, and great mountains bar the way,peaks that lift from tidewater to treeless heights, formidable rangesbearing upon their rocky shoulders the lingering remains of a glacialage. The Inlet ends there, the seaway barred by these frowningdeclivities.

  Hollister remembered the head of Toba after a fashion. He had the layof the land in his mind. He had never seen it in midwinter, but thesnow, the misty vapors drifting along the mountain sides, did notconfuse him.

  From the float he now perceived two openings in the mountain chain.The lesser, coming in from the northwest, was little more than a deepand narrow gash in the white-clad hills. On his right opened thebroader valley of the Toba River, up which he must go.

  For a space of perhaps five minutes Hollister stood gazing about him.Then he was reminded of his immediate necessities by the chill thatcrept over his feet,--for several inches of snow overlaid the plankedsurface of the landing float.

  Knowing what he was about when he left Vancouver, Hollister hadbrought with him a twenty-foot Hudson's Bay freight canoe, a capaciousshoal-water craft with high topsides. He slid this off the float,loaded into it sundry boxes and packages, and taking his seat astern,paddled inshore to where the rising tide was ruffled by the outsettingcurrent of a river.

  Here, under the steep shoulder of a mountain, rows of piles stoodgaunt above the tide flats. When Hollister had last seen the mouth ofthe Toba, those same piles had been the support of long boom-sticks,within which floated hundreds of logs. On the flat beside the riverthere had stood the rough shacks of a logging camp. Donkey engineswere puffing and grunting in the woods. Now the booming ground wasempty, save for those decaying, teredo-eaten sticks, and the camp wasa tumbledown ruin when he passed. He wondered if the valley of theToba were wholly deserted, if the forests of virgin timber coveringthe delta of that watercourse had been left to their ancient solitude.But he did not stop to puzzle over this. In ten minutes he was overthe sandy bar at the river's mouth. The sea was hidden behind him. Hepassed up a sluggish waterway lined by alder and maple, covered withdense thickets, a jungle in which flourished the stalwart salmonberryand the thorny sticks of the devil's club. Out of this maze ofundergrowth rose the tall brown columns of Douglas fir, of red cedar,of spruce and hemlock with their drooping boughs.

  Sloughs branched off in narrow laterals, sheeted with thin ice, exceptwhere the current kept it open, and out of these open patches flocksof wild duck scattered with a whir of wings. A mile up-stream heturned a bend and passed a Siwash rancheria. The bright eyes of littlebrown-faced children peered shyly out at him from behind stumps. Hecould see rows of split salmon hung by the tail to the beams of anopen-fronted smokehouse. Around another bend he came on a buck deerstanding knee-deep in the water, and at the sight of him the animalsnorted, leaped up the bank and vanished as silently as a shadow.

  Hollister marked all these things without ceasing to ply his paddle.His objective lay some six miles up-stream. But when he came at lastto the upper limit of the tidal reach he found in this deep, slackwater new-driven piling and freshly strung boom-sticks and acres oflogs confined therein; also a squat motor tugboat and certain lessercraft moored to these timbers. A little back from the bank he couldsee the roofs of buildings.

  He stayed his paddle a second to look with a mild curiosity. Then hewent on. That human craving for companionship which had gained noresponse in the cities of two continents had left him for the timebeing. For that hour he was himself, sufficient unto himself. Hereprobably a score of men lived and worked. But they were not men heknew. They were not men who would care to know him,--not after aclear sight of his face.

  Hollister did not say that to himself in so many words. He was onlysubconsciously aware of this conclusion. Nevertheless it guided hisactions. Through long, bitter months he had rebelled against spiritualisolation. The silent woods, the gray river, the cloud-wrapped hillsseemed friendly by comparison with mankind,--mankind which had marredhim and now shrank from its handiwork.

  So he passed by this community in the wilderness, not because hewished to but because he must.

  Within half a mile he struck fast water, long straight reaches upwhich he gained ground against the current by steady strokes of thepaddle, shallows where he must wade and lead his craft by hand. So hecame at last to the Big Bend of the Toba River, a great S curve wherethe stream doubled upon itself in a mile-wide flat that had beenstripped of its timber and lay now an unlovely vista of stumps, eachwith a white cap of snow.

  On the edge of this, where the river swung to the southern limit ofthe valley and ran under a cliff that lifted a thousand foot sheer, hepassed a small house. Smoke drifted blue from the stovepipe. A pile offreshly chopped firewood lay by the door. The dressed carcass of adeer hung under one projecting eave. Between two stumps a string oflaundered clothes waved in the down-river breeze. By the garmentsHollister knew a woman must be there. But none appeared to watch himpass. He did not halt, although the short afternoon was merging intodusk and he knew the hospitality of those who go into lonely places towrest a living from an untamed land. But he could not bear the thoughtof being endured rather than welcomed. He had suffered enough of that.He was in full retreat from just that attitude. He was growing afraidof contact with people, and he knew why he was afraid.

  When
the long twilight was nearly spent, he gained the upper part ofthe Big Bend and hauled his canoe out on the bank. A small flat ranback to the mouth of a canyon, and through the flat trickled a streamof clear water.

  Hollister built a fire on a patch of dry ground at the base of asix-foot fir. He set up his tent, made his bed, cooked his supper, satwith his feet to the fire, smoking a pipe.

  After four years of clamor and crowds, he marveled at the astonishingcontentment which could settle on him here in this hushed valley,where silence rested like a fog. His fire was a red spot with a yellownimbus. Beyond that ruddy circle, valley and cliff and clouded skymerged into an impenetrable blackness. Hollister had been cold and wetand hungry. Now he was warm and dry and fed. He lay with his feetstretched to the fire. For the time he almost ceased to think,relaxed as he was into a pleasant, animal well-being. And so presentlyhe fell asleep.

  In winter, north of the forty-ninth parallel, and especially in thosedeep clefts like the Toba, dusk falls at four in the afternoon, andday has not grown to its full strength at nine in the morning.Hollister had finished his breakfast before the first gleam of lighttouched the east. When day let him see the Alpine crevasses thatnotched the northern wall of the valley, he buckled on a belt thatcarried a sheath-ax, took up his rifle and began first of all acursory exploration of the flat on which he camped.

  It seemed to him that in some mysterious way he was beginning his lifeall over again,--that life which his reason, with cold, inexorablelogic, had classified as a hopeless ruin. He could not see wherein theruin was lessened by embarking upon this lone adventure into theoutlying places. Nevertheless, something about it had given a fillipto his spirits. He felt that he would better not inquire too closelyinto this; that too keen self-analysis was the evil from which he hadsuffered and which he should avoid. But he said to himself that if hecould get pleasure out of so simple a thing as a canoe trip in alonely region, there was hope for him yet. And in the same breath hewondered how long he could be sustained by that illusion.

  He had a blue-print of the area covering the Big Bend. That timberlimit which he had lightly purchased long ago, and whichunaccountably went begging a purchaser, lay south and a bit west fromwhere he set up his camp. He satisfied himself of that by theblue-print and the staking description. The northeast corner stakeshould stand not a great way back from the river bank.

  He had to find a certain particularly described cedar tree, thencemake his way south to a low cliff, at one extreme of which he shouldfind a rock cairn with a squared post in its center. From that hecould run his boundary lines with a pocket compass, until he locatedthe three remaining corners.

  Hollister found cedars enough, but none that pointed the way to a lowcliff and a rock cairn. He ranged here and there, and at last went upthe hillside which rose here so steeply as to be stiff climbing. Itbore here and there a massive tree, rough-barked pillars rising to abranchy head two hundred feet in the air. But for the most part theslope was clothed with scrubby hemlock and thickets of young fir andpatches of hazel, out of which he stirred a great many grouse and oncea deer.

  But if he found no stakes to show him the boundaries of his property,he gained the upper rim of the high cliff which walled the southernside of the Big Bend, and all the valley opened before him. Smokelifted in a pale spiral from the house below his camp. Abreast of thelog boom he had passed in the river, he marked the roofs of severalbuildings, and back of the clearings in the logged-over land openedwhite squares against the dusky green of the surrounding timber. Heperceived that a considerable settlement had arisen in the lowervalley, that the forest was being logged off, that land was beingcleared and cultivated. There was nothing strange in that. All overthe earth the growing pressure of population forced men continually toinvade the strongholds of the wilderness. Here lay fertile acres,water, forests to supply timber, the highway of the sea to markets.Only labor,--patient, unremitting labor--was needed to shape all thatgreat valley for cultivation. Cleared and put to the plow, it wouldproduce abundantly. A vast, fecund area out of which man, withdrawingfrom the hectic pressure of industrial civilization, could derivesustenance,--if he possessed sufficient hardihood to survive suchhardships and struggle as his forefathers had for their common lot.

  Hollister ranged the lower part of the hillside until hunger drove himback to camp. And, as it sometimes happens that what a man fails tocome upon when he seeks with method and intent he stumbles upon byaccident, so now Hollister, coming heedlessly downhill, found thecorner stake he was seeking. With his belt-axe he blazed a trail fromthis point to the flat below, so that he could find it again.

  He made no further explorations that afternoon. He spent a little timein making his camp comfortable in ways known to any outdoor man. Butwhen day broke clear the following morning he was on the hill, compassin hand, bearing due west from the original stake. He found the secondwithout much trouble. He ran a line south and east and north again andso returned to his starting point by noon with two salient factsoutstanding in his mind.

  The first was that he suspected himself of having bought a poke whichcontained a pig of doubtful value. This, if true, made plain thedifficulty of re-sale, and made him think decidedly unpleasant thingsof "Lewis and Company, Specialists in B.C. Timber." The second wasthat someone, within recent years, had cut timber on his limit. And itwas his timber. The possessive sense was fairly strong in Hollister,as it usually is in men who have ever possessed any considerableproperty. He did not like the idea of being cheated or robbed. In thiscase there was superficial evidence that both these things hadhappened to him.

  So when he had cooked himself a meal and smoked a pipe, he took to thehigh ground again to verify or disprove these unwelcome conclusions.In that huge and largely inaccessible region which is embraced withinthe boundaries of British Columbia, in a land where the industriallife-blood flows chiefly along two railways and three navigablestreams, there are many great areas where the facilities oftransportation are much as they were when British Columbia was a fieldexploited only by trappers and traders. Settlement is still but afringe upon the borders of the wilderness. Individuals andcorporations own land and timber which they have never seen, sourcesof material wealth acquired cheaply, with an eye to the future. Beyondthe railway belts, the navigable streams, the coastwise passages wheresteamers come and go, there lies a vast hinterland where canoe andpack-sack are still the mainstay of the traveler.

  In this almost primeval region the large-handed fashion of primitivetransactions is still in vogue. Men traffic in timber and mineralstakings on the word of other men. The coastal slopes and valleys aredotted with timber claims which have been purchased by men andcorporations in Vancouver and New York and London and Paris andBerlin, bought and traded "sight unseen" as small boys swapjackknives. There flourishes in connection with this, on the Pacificcoast, the business of cruising timber, a vocation followed by hardymen prepared to go anywhere, any time, in fair weather or foul.Commission such a man to fare into such a place, cruise such and suchareas of timber land, described by metes and bounds. This resourcefulsurveyor-explorer will disappear. In the fullness of weeks he willreturn, bearded and travel-worn. He will place in your hands a reportcontaining an estimate of so many million feet of standing fir, cedar,spruce, hemlock, with a description of the topography, an opinion onthe difficulty or ease of the logging chance.

  On the British Columbia coast a timber cruiser's report comes in thesame category as a bank statement or a chartered accountant's audit ofbooks; that is to say, it is unquestionable, an authentic statement offact.

  Within the boundaries defined by the four stakes of the limitHollister owned there stood, according to the original cruisingestimate, eight million feet of merchantable timber, half fir, halfred cedar. The Douglas fir covered the rocky slopes and the cedarlined the gut of a deep hollow which split the limit midway. It wasclassed as a fair logging chance, since from that corner which dippedinto the flats of the Toba a donkey engine with its mile-long arm ofsteel cable co
uld snatch the logs down to the river, whence they wouldbe floated to the sea and towed to the Vancouver sawmills.

  Hollister had been guided by the custom of the country. He had put asurplus fund of cash into this property in the persuasion that itwould resell at a profit, or that it could ultimately be logged at astill greater profit. And this persuasion rested upon the cruisingestimate and the uprightness of "Lewis and Company, Specialists inB.C. Timber, Investments, Etc."

  But Hollister had a practical knowledge of timber himself, acquired atfirst hand. He had skirted his boundaries and traversed the fringesof his property, and he saw scrubby, undersized trees where thefour-foot trunks of Douglas fir should have lifted in brown ranks. Hehad looked into the bisecting hollow from different angles and markedmagnificent cedars,--but too few of them. Taken with the fact thatLewis had failed to resell even at a reduced price, when standingtimber had doubled in value since the beginning of the war, Hollisterhad grave doubts, which, however, he could not establish until he wentover the ground and made a rough estimate for himself.

  This other matter of timber cutting was one he could settle in shortorder. It roused his curiosity. It gave him a touch of the resentmentwhich stirs a man when he suspects himself of being the victim ofpillaging vandals. No matter that despair had recently colored hismental vision; the sense of property right still functionedunimpaired. To be marred and impoverished and shunned as if he were amonstrosity were accomplished facts which had weighed upon him, anintolerable burden. He forgot that now. There was nothing much here toremind him. He was free to react to this new sense of outrage, thisnew evidence of mankind's essential unfairness.

  In the toll taken of his timber by these unwarranted operations therewas little to grieve over, he discovered before long. He had thatmorning found and crossed, after a long, curious inspection, a chutewhich debouched from the middle of his limit and dipped towards theriver bottom apparently somewhere above his camp. He knew that thisshallow trough built of slender poles was a means of conveyingshingle-bolts from the site of cutting to the water that should floatthem to market. Earlier he had seen signs of felling among the cedars,but only from a distance. He was not sure he had seen right until hediscovered the chute.

  So now he went back to the chute and followed its winding length untilit led into the very heart of the cedars in the hollow. Two or threeyears had elapsed since the last tree was felled. Nor had there everbeen much inroad on the standing timber. Some one had begun operationsthere and abandoned the work before enough timber had been cut to halfrepay the labor of building that long chute.

  Nor was that all. In the edge of the workings the branches and litterof harvesting those hoary old cedars had been neatly cleared from asmall level space. And on this space, bold against the white carpet ofsnow, stood a small log house.

  Hollister pushed open the latched door and stepped into the mustydesolation of long abandoned rooms. It was neatly made, floored withsplit cedar, covered by a tight roof of cedar shakes. Its tiny-panedwindows were still intact. Within, it was divided into two rooms.There was no stove and there had never been a stove. A rough fireplaceof stone served for cooking. An iron bar crossed the fireplace and onthis bar still hung the fire-blackened pothooks. On nails and shelvesagainst the wall pans still hung and dishes stood thick with dust. Ona homemade bunk in one corner lay a mattress which the rats hadconverted to their own uses, just as they had played havoc with papersscattered about the floor and the oilcloth on the table.

  Hollister passed into the other room. This had been a bedroom, awoman's bedroom. He guessed that by the remnants of fabric hangingover the windows, as well as by a skirt and sunbonnet which still hungfrom a nail. Here, too, was a bedstead with a rat-ruined mattress. Andupon a shelf over the bed was ranged a row of books, perhaps two dozenvolumes, which the rats had somehow respected,--except for sundrygnawing at the bindings.

  Hollister took one down. He smiled; that is to say, his eyes smiledand his features moved a little out of their rigid cast. Fancy findingthe _contes_ of August Strindberg, the dramatist, that genius ofsubtle perception and abysmal gloom, here in this forsaken place.Hollister fluttered the pages. Writing on the flyleaf caught his eye.There was a date and below that:

  DORIS CLEVELAND--HER BOOK

  He took down the others, one by one,--an Iliad, a Hardy novel, "TheWay of All Flesh" between "Kim" and "The Pilgrim Fathers", a volume ofSwinburne rubbing shoulders with a California poet who sang of gibbousmoons, "The Ancient Lowly" cheek by jowl with "Two Years Before theMast." A catholic collection, with strong meat sandwiched between someof the rat-gnawed covers. And each bore on the flyleaf the inscriptionof the first, written in a clear firm hand: Doris Cleveland--Her Book.

  Hollister put the last volume back in place and stood staring at therow. Who was Doris Cleveland and why had she left her books to therats?

  He gave over his wonder at the patently unanswerable, went out intothe living room, glanced casually over that once more, and so to theoutside where the snow crisped under his feet now that the sun hadwithdrawn behind the hills. About the slashed area where the cedarshad fallen, over stumps and broken branches and the low roof of thecabin, the virgin snow laid its softening whiteness, and the talltrees enclosed the spot with living green. A hidden squirrel broke outwith brisk scolding, a small chirruping voice in a great silence. Heremen had lived and worked and gone their way again. The forest remainedas it was before. The thickets would soon arise to conceal man'shandiwork.

  Hollister shook off this fleeting impression of man's impermanence,and turned downhill lest dark catch him in the heavy timber and makehim lose his way.