The Hidden Places Page 5
CHAPTER V
A wind began to sigh among the trees as Hollister made his waydownhill. Over his evening fire he heard it grow to a lusty gale thatfilled the valley all night with moaning noises. Fierce gustsscattered the ashes of his fire and fluttered the walls of his tent asthough some strong-lunged giant were huffing and puffing to blow hishouse down. At daylight the wind died. A sky banked solid with cloudsbegan to empty upon the land a steady downpour of rain. All throughthe woods the sodden foliage dripped heavily. The snow melted, pouringmuddy cataracts out of each gully, making tiny cascades over the edgeof every cliff. Snowbanks slipped their hold on steep hillsides highon the north valley wall. They gathered way and came roaring down outof places hidden in the mist. Hollister could hear these slidesthundering like distant artillery. Watching that grim facade acrossthe river he saw, once or twice during the day, those masses plungeand leap, ten thousand tons of ice and snow and rock and crushedtimber shooting over ledge and precipice to end with fearful crashingand rumbling in the depth of a steep-walled gorge.
He was tied to his camp. He could not stir abroad without morediscomfort than he cared to undergo. Every bush, every bough, wouldprecipitate upon him showers of drops at the slightest touch. He satby his fire in the mouth of the tent and smoked and thought of thecomfortable cabin up in the cedar hollow, and of Doris Cleveland'sbooks. He began by reflecting that he might have brought one down toread. He ended before nightfall of a dull, rain-sodden day with aresolution to move up there when the weather cleared. A tent was wellenough, but a house with a fireplace was better.
The rain held forty-eight hours without intermission. Then, as if theclouds had discharged their aqueous cargo and rode light asunballasted ships, they lifted in aerial fleets and sailed away, whitein a blue sky. The sun, swinging in a low arc, cocked a lazy eye overthe southern peaks, and Hollister carried his first pack-load up tothe log cabin while the moss underfoot, the tree trunks, the greenblades of the salal, and the myriad stalks of the low thickets werestill gleaming with the white frost that came with a clearing sky.
He began with the idea of carrying up his blankets and three or fourdays' food. He ended by transporting up that steep slope everythingbut his canoe and the small tent. It might be, he said to himself ashe lugged load after load, just a whim, a fancy, but he was free toact on a whim or a fancy, as free as if he were in the first blush ofcareless, adventurous youth,--freer, because he had none of theimpatient hopes and urges and dreams of youth. He was finished, hetold himself in a transient mood of bitterness. Why should he begoverned by practical considerations? He was here, alone in theunsentient, uncritical forest. It did not matter to any one whether hecame or stayed. To himself it mattered least of all, he thought. Therewas neither plan nor purpose nor joy in his existence, save as heconceived the first casually, or snatched momentarily at the other insuch simple ways as were available to him here,--here where at leastthere was no one and nothing to harass him, where he was surrounded bya wild beauty that comforted him in some fashion beyond hisunderstanding.
When he had brought the last of his food supply up to the cabin, hehauled the canoe back into a thicket and covered it with the glossygreen leaves of the salal. He folded his tent in a tight bundle andstrung it to a bough with a wire, out of reach of the wood rats.
These tasks completed, he began his survey of the standing timber onhis limit.
At best he could make only a rough estimate, less accurate than aprofessional cruiser's would be, but sufficient to satisfy him. In aweek he was reasonably certain that the most liberal estimate leftless than half the quantity of merchantable timber for which he hadpaid good money. The fir, as a British Columbia logging chance, wasall but negligible. What value resided there lay in the cedar alone.
By the time he had established this, the clear, cold, sunny days cameto an end. Rain began to drizzle half-heartedly out of a murky sky.Overnight the rain changed to snow, great flat flakes eddyingsoundlessly earthward in an atmosphere uncannily still. For two daysand a night this ballet of the snowflakes continued, until valley andslope and the high ridges were two feet deep in the downy white.
Then the storm which had been holding its breath broke with singularfury. The frost bared its teeth. The clouds still volleyed, but theirdischarge now filled the air with harsh, minute particles that stungbare skin like hot sand blown from a funnel. The wind shrieked itswhole tonal gamut among the trees. It ripped the clinging masses ofsnow from drooping bough and exposed cliff and flung it here and therein swirling clouds. And above the treble voices of the stormHollister, from the warm security of the cabin, could hear theintermittent rumbling of terrific slides. He could feel faint tremorsin the earth from the shock of the arrested avalanche.
This elemental fury wore itself out at last. The wind shrank to chillwhisperings. But the sky remained gray and lowering, and the greatmountain ranges--white again from foot to crest, save where the slideshad left gashes of brown earth and bare granite--were wrapped inwinter mists, obscuring vapors that drifted and opened and closedagain. Hollister could stir abroad once more. His business there wasat an end. But he considered with reluctance a return to Vancouver.He was not happy. He was merely passive. It did not matter to anyonewhere he went. It did not matter much to himself. He was as well hereas elsewhere until some substantial reason or some inner spur rowelledhim into action.
Here there was no one to look askance at his disfigurement. He wasless alone than he would be in town, for he found a subtle sense ofcompanionship in this solitude, as if the dusky woods and those grim,aloof peaks accepted him for what he was, discounting all thatmisfortune which had visited him in the train of war. He knew that wassheer fantasy, but a fantasy that lent him comfort.
So he stayed. He had plenty of material resources, a tight warm house,food. He had reckoned on staying perhaps a month. He found now thathis estimate of a month's staples was away over the mark. He couldsubsist two months. With care he could stretch it to three, for therewas game on that southern slope,--deer and the white mountain goat andbirds. He hunted the grouse at first, but that gave small return forammunition expended, although the flesh of the blue and willow grouseis pleasant fare. When the big storm abated he looked out one cleardawn and saw a buck deer standing in the open. At a distance of sixtyyards he shot the animal, not because he hankered to kill, but becausehe needed meat. So under the cabin eaves he had quarters of venison,and he knew that he could go abroad on that snowy slope and stalk adeer with ease. There was a soothing pleasantness about a great blazecrackling in the stone fireplace. And he had Doris Cleveland's books.
Yes, Hollister reiterated to himself, it was better than a bedroom offthe blank corridor of a second-rate hotel and the crowded streets thatwere more merciless to a stricken man than these silent places.Eventually he would have to go back. But for the present,--well, heoccupied himself wholly with the present, and he did not permithimself to look far beyond.
From the deerskin he cut a quantity of fine strips and bent into ovalshape two tough sticks of vine maple. Across these he strung a web ofrawhide, thus furnishing himself with a pair of snowshoes which were anecessity now that the snow lay everywhere knee-deep and in manyplaces engulfed him to the waist when he went into the woods.
It pleased him to go on long snowshoe hikes. He reached far up theridges that lifted one after another behind his timber. Once he gaineda pinnacle, a solitary outstanding hummock of snow-bound graniterising above all the rest, rising above all the surrounding forest.From this summit he gained an eagle's view. The long curve of TobaInlet wound like a strip of jade away down to where the islands of thelower gulf spread with channels of the sea between. He could see thetwin Redondas, Cortez, Raza, the round blob that was Hernando,--apicturesque nomenclature that was the inheritance of Spanishexploration before the time of Drake. Beyond the flat reaches ofValdez, Vancouver Island, an empire in itself, lifted its rockybackbone, a misty purple against the western sky. He watched asteamer, trailing a black banner of smoke, slide
through Baker Pass.
Out there men toiled at fishing; the woods echoed with the ring oftheir axes and the thin twanging of their saws; there would be theclank of machinery and the hiss of steam. But it was all hidden andmuffled in those vast distances. He swung on his heel. Far below, thehouses of the settlement in the lower Toba sent up blue wisps ofsmoke. To his right ran with many a twist and turn the valley itself,winding away into remote fastnesses of the Coast Range, a strip oflevel, fertile, timbered land, abutted upon by mountains that shamedthe Alps for ruggedness,--mountains gashed by slides, split by gloomycrevasses, burdened with glaciers which in the heat of summer spewedfoaming cataracts over cliffs a thousand foot sheer.
"Where the hill-heads split the tide Of green and living air, I would press Adventure hard To her deepest lair.
I would let the world's rebuke Like a wind go by, With my naked soul laid bare To the naked sky."
Out of some recess in his memory, where they had fixed themselves longbefore, those lines rose to Hollister's lips. And he looked a longtime before he turned downhill.
A week passed. Once more the blustery god of storms asserted hisdominion, leaving the land, when he passed, a foot deeper in snow. Ifhe had elected to stay there from choice, Hollister now kept close tohis cabin from necessity, for passage with his goods to the steamerlanding would have been a journey of more hardships than he cared toundertake. The river was a sheet of ice except over the shallowrapids. Cold winds whistled up and down the Toba. Once or twice onclear days he climbed laboriously to a great height and felt the coldpressure of the northwest wind as he stood in the open; and throughhis field glasses he could see the Inlet and the highroads of the seapast the Inlet's mouth all torn by surging waves that reared and brokein flashing crests of foam. So he sat in the cabin and read DorisCleveland's books one after another--verse, philosophy, fiction--andwhen physical inaction troubled him he cut and split and piledfirewood far beyond his immediate need. He could not sit passive toolong. Enforced leisure made too wide a breach in his defenses, andthrough that breach the demons of brooding and despondency were quickto enter. When neither books nor self-imposed tasks about the cabinserved, he would take his rifle in hand, hook on the snowshoes, andtrudge far afield in the surrounding forest.
On one of these journeys he came out upon the rim of the great cliffwhich rose like a wall of masonry along the southern edge of the flatsin the Big Bend. It was a clear day. Hollister had a pair of verypowerful binoculars. He gazed from this height down on the settlement,on the reeking chimneys of those distant houses, on the tiny blackobjects that were men moving against a field of white. He could hear afaint whirring which he took to be the machinery of a sawmill. Hecould see on the river bank and at another point in the nearby woodsthe feathery puff of steam. He often wondered about these people,buried, like himself, in this snow-blanketed and mountain-ringedremoteness. Who were they? What manner of folk were they? He trifledwith this curiosity. But it did not seriously occur to him that by twoor three hours' tramping he could answer these idle speculations atfirst hand. Or if it did occur to him he shrank from the undertakingas one shrinks from a dubious experiment which has proved a failure informer trials.
But this day, under a frosty sky in which a February sun hunglistless, Hollister turned his glasses on the cabin of the settlernear his camp. He was on the edge of the cliff, so close that when hedislodged a fragment of rock it rolled over the brink, bounded oncefrom the cliff's face, and after a lapse that grew to seconds struckwith a distant thud among the timber at the foot of the precipice.Looking down through the binoculars it was as if he sat on the topmostbough of a tall tree in the immediate neighborhood of the cabin,although he was fully half a mile distant. He could see each garmentof a row on a line. He could distinguish colors--a blue skirt, thedeep green of salal and second-growth cedar, the weathered hue of thewalls.
And while he stared a woman stepped out of the doorway and stoodlooking, turning her head slowly until at last she gazed steadily upover the cliff-brow as if she might be looking at Hollister himself.He sat on his haunches in the snow, his elbows braced on his knees,and trained the powerful lenses upon her. In a matter of half a minuteher gaze shifted, turned back to the river. She shrugged hershoulders, or perhaps it was a shiver born of the cold, and then wentback inside.
Hollister rested the binoculars upon his knee. His face did not alter.Facile expression was impossible to that marred visage. Pain or angeror sorrow could no longer write its message there for the casualbeholder to read. The thin, twisted remnants of his lips could tightena little, and that was all.
But his eyes, which had miraculously escaped injury, could still glowwith the old fire, or grow dull and lifeless, giving some index to themutations of his mind. And those darkly blue eyes, undimmed beaconsamid the wreckage of his features, burned and gleamed now with astrange fire.
The woman who had been standing there staring up the hillside, withthe sun playing hide and seek in her yellow hair, was Myra Hollister,his wife.