Part 28

At length they reached the opposite shore, fighting against the gale at every step. Now there was a hill to cross.

Here on the lee side of the hill they met mighty drifts of feathery snow into which the dogs wallowed to their backs and the snowshoes of the men sunk deep. They were compelled to haul on the traces with the dogs. They had to lift and manipulate the sledges with tremendous effort. Up the grade they toiled and strained, yard by yard, foot by foot. Sometimes it seemed to them they were making no appreciable progress, but on they fought through the black night and the driving snow, sweating in spite of the Arctic blasts and clouds of drift that sometimes nearly stopped their breath and carried them off their feet.

The life of the young fisherman's wife at Cape Norman hung in the balance. The toiling men visualized her lying on a bed of pain and perhaps dying for the need of a doctor. They saw the agonized husband by her side, tortured by his helplessness to save her. They forgot themselves and the risk they were taking in their desire to bring to the fisherman's wife the help her husband was beseeching God to send. This is true heroism.

As the saying on the coast goes, "'tis dogged as does it," and as Grenfell himself says, "not inspiration, but perspiration wins the prizes of life." They finally reached the crest of the hill.

On the opposite or weather side of the hill the gale met them with full force. It had swept the slope clean and left it a glade of ice. They slid down at a dangerous speed, taking all sorts of chances, colliding in the darkness with stumps and ice-coated rocks and other snags, in imminent danger of having their brains knocked out or limbs broken.

The open places below were little better. Everything was ice-coated. They slipped and slid about, falling and rising with every dozen steps. If they threw themselves on the sledges to ride the dogs came to a stop, for they could not haul them. If they walked they could not keep their feet. Their course took them along the bed of Bartlett River, and twice Grenfell and some of the others broke through into the icy rapids.

At half past one in the morning they reached the mouth of Bartlett River where it empties into the sea and between them and Cape Norman lay twenty miles of unobstructed sea ice. They had been traveling for nearly six hours and had covered but ten miles of the journey. The temporary lull in the storm had long since passed, and now, beating down upon the world with redoubled fury, it met them squarely in the face. No dog could stem it. The men could scarce stand upright. The clouds of snow suffocated them, and the cold was withering.

Far out they could hear the thunder of smashing ice. It was a threat that the still firm ice lying before them might be broken into fragments at any time. Sea water had already driven over it, forming a thick coating of half-frozen slush. Even though the gale that swept the ice field had not been too fierce to face, any attempt to cross would obviously have been a foolhardy undertaking.

XIX

HOW AMBROSE WAS MADE TO WALK

One of the men from Cape Norman had been acting as leader on the trail from St. Anthony. His name was Will, and he was a big broad-shouldered man, a giant of a fellow. He knew all the trappers on this part of the coast, and where their trapping grounds lay. One of his neighbors, whom he spoke of as "Si," trapped in the neighborhood where the baffled men now found themselves.

"I'm rememberin', now, Si built a tilt handy by here," he suddenly exclaimed.

"A tilt!" Grenfell was sceptical. "I've been going up and down this coast for twenty years and I never heard of a tilt near here."

"He built un last fall. I thinks, now, I could find un," Will suggested.

"Find it if you can," urged Grenfell hopefully. "Where is it?"

"'Tis in a bunch of trees, somewheres handy."

"Is there a stove in it?"

"I'm not knowin' that. I'll try to find un and see."

They had retreated to the edge of the forest. Will disappeared among the trees, and Grenfell and the others waited. It was still six hours to daylight, and to stand inactive for six hours in the storm and biting cold would have been perilous if not fatal.

Presently Will's shout came out of the forest, rising above the road of wind:

"Ti-l-t and St-o-ve!"

They followed Will's voice, bumping against trees, groping through flying snow and darkness, and quickly came upon Will and the tilt. There was indeed, to their great joy, a stove in it. There was also a supply of dry wood, all cut and piled ready for use. In one end of the tilt was a bench covered with spruce boughs which Si used as a bed.

There was nothing to feed the exhausted dogs, but they were unharnessed and were glad enough to curl up in the snow, where the drift would cover them, after the manner of northern dogs.

Then a fire was lighted in the stove. Will went out with the ax and kettle, and presently returned with the kettle filled with water dipped from Bartlett River after he had cut a hole through the ice.

Setting the kettle on the stove, Will, standing by the stove, proceeded to fill and light his pipe while Doctor Grenfell opened his dunnage bag to get the tea and sugar. Suddenly Will's pipe clattered to the floor. Will, standing like a statue, did not stoop to pick it up and Grenfell rescued it and rising offered it to him, when, to his vast astonishment, he discovered that the man, standing erect upon his feet was fast asleep. He had been nearly sixty hours without sleep and forty-eight hours of this had been spent on the trail.

They aroused Will and had him sit down on the bench. He re-lighted his pipe but in a moment it fell from his teeth again. He rolled over on the bench and was too soundly asleep to be interested in pipe or tea or anything to eat.

Daylight brought no abatement in the storm. The ice was deep under a coating of slush, and quite impassable for dogs and men, and the sea was pounding and battering at the outer edge, as the roar of smashing ice testified, though quite shut out from view by driving snow. There was nothing to do but follow the shore, a long way around, and off they started.

Here and there was an opportunity to cut across small coves and inlets where the ice was safe enough, and at two o'clock in the afternoon they reached Crow Island, a small island three-quarters of a mile from the mainland.