CHAPTER VI A JOURNEY WELL BEGUN

Two hours before the tardy dawn, Marian and Attatak were away. With three tried and trusted reindeer-Spot, Whitie, and Brownie-they were to attempt a journey of some hundreds of miles. Across trackless wilderness they must lay their course by the stars until the Little Kalik.u.mf River was reached. After this it was a straight course down a well marked trail to the trading station, providing the river was fully frozen over.

This river was one of the many problems they must face. There were others. Stray dogs might attack their deer; they might cross the track of a mother wolf and her hungry pack of half grown cubs; a blizzard might overtake them and, lacking the guiding light of the stars, they might become lost and wander aimlessly on the tundra until cold and hunger claimed them for their own. But of all these, Marian thought most of the river. Would it be frozen over, or would they be forced to turn back after covering all those weary miles and enduring the hardships?

"Attatak," she said to the native girl, "they say the Little Kalik.u.mf River has rapids in it by the end of a glacier and that no man dares shoot those rapids. Is that true?"

"_Eh-eh_," (yes) answered Attatak. "Spirit of water angry at ice cut away far below. Want to shoot rapids; boats and man run beneath that ice. Soon smashed boat, killed man. That's all."

It was quite enough, Marian thought; but somehow they must pa.s.s these rapids whether they were frozen over or not.

"Ah, well," she sighed, "that's still far away. First comes the fight with tundra, hills and sweeping winds."

Patting her reindeer on the side, she sent him flying up the valley while she raced along beside him.

These reindeer were wonderful steeds. No food need be carried for them.

They found their own food beneath the snow when day was done. A hundred miles in a day, over a smooth trail, was not too much for them. Soft snow-the wind-blown, blizzard-sifted snow that was like granulated sugar-did not trouble them. They trotted straight on. There was no need to search out a water hole that they might slake their thirst; they scooped up mouthfuls of snow as they raced along.

"Wonderful old friends," murmured Marian as she reached out a hand to touch her spotted leader. "There are those who say a dog team is better.

Bill Scarberry, they say, never drives reindeer; always drives dogs. But on a long journey, a great marathon race, reindeer would win, I do believe they would. I-"

She was suddenly startled from her reflections by the appearance of a brown-hooded head not twenty rods away. Their course had led them closer to Scarberry's camp than she thought. As she came out upon the ridge she saw an Eskimo scout disappearing into the willows from which a camp smoke was rising.

Marian was greatly disturbed by the thought that Scarberry's camp would soon know of her departure. She had hoped that they might not learn of her errand, that they might not miss her from the camp. For Patsy's sake she was tempted to turn back, but after a moment's indecision, she determined to push forward. There was no other way to win, and win she must!

An hour later she halted the deer at a fork in the trail. Directly before her stood a bold range of mountains, and their peaks seemed to be smoking with drifting snow. Blizzards were there, the perpetual blizzards of Arctic peaks. She had never crossed those mountains, perhaps no person ever had. She had intended skirting them to the north. This would require at least one added day of travel. As she thought of the perils that awaited Patsy while alone with the herd, and as she thought of the great necessity of making every hour count, she was tempted to try the mountain pa.s.s. Here was a time for decision; when all might be gained by a bold stroke.

Rising suddenly on tip-toe, as if thus to emphasize a great resolve, she pointed away to the mountains and said with all the dignity of a Jean d'Arc:

"Attatak, we go that way."

Wide-eyed with amazement, Attatak stared at Marian for a full minute; then with the cheerful smile of a born explorer-which any member of her race always is-she said:

"_Na-goo-va-ruk-tuck._" (That will be very good.)

CHAPTER VII THE ENCHANTED MOUNTAIN

Since the time she had been able to remember anything, these mountains of the far north, standing away in bleak triangles of lights and shadows, smoking with the eternally drifting snows, had always held an all but irresistible lure for Marian. Even as a child of six, listening to the weird folk-stories of the Eskimo, she had peopled those treeless, wind swept mountains with all manner of strange folks. Now they were fairies, white and drifting as the snow itself; now they were strange black goblins with round faces and red noses; and now an Eskimo people who lived in enchanted caves that never were cold, no matter how bitterly the wind and cold a.s.sailed the fortresses of rocks that offered them protection.

"All my life," she murmured as she tightened the rawhide thong that served as a belt to bind her parka close about her waist, "I have wanted to go to the crest of that range, and now I am to attempt it."

She shivered a little at thought of the perils that awaited her. Many were the strange, wild tales she had heard told round the glowing stove at the back of her father's store; tales of privation, freezing, starvation and death; tales told by grizzled old prospectors who had lost their pals in a bold struggle with the elements. She thought of these stories and again she shivered, but she did not turn back.

Once only, after an hour of travel up steep ravines and steeper foothills, she paused to unstrap her field gla.s.ses and look back over the way they had come. Then she threw back her head and laughed. It was the wild, free laugh of a daring soul that defies failure.

Attatak showed all her splendid white teeth in a grin.

"Who is afraid?" Marian laughed. "Snow, cold, wind-who cares?"

Marian spoke to her reindeer, and again they were away.

As they left the foothills and began to circle one of the lesser peaks-a slow, gradually rising spiral circle that brought them higher and higher-Marian felt the old charm of the mountains come back to her. Again they were peopled by strange fairies and goblins. So real was the illusion that at times it seemed to her that if worst came to worst and they found themselves lost in a storm at the mountain top, they might call upon these phantom people for shelter.

The mountain was not exactly as she had expected to find it. She had supposed that it was one vast cone of gleaming snow. In the main this was true, yet here and there some rocky promontory, towering higher than its fellows, reared itself above the surface, a pier of granite standing out black against the whiteness about it, mute monument to all those daring climbers who have lost their lives on mountain peaks.

Once, too, off some distance to her right and farther up, she fancied she saw the yawning mouth of a cavern.

"Doesn't seem possible," she told herself. And yet, it did seem so real that she found herself expecting some strange Rip Van Winkle-like people to come swarming out of the cavern.

She shook herself as a rude blast of wind swept up from below, all but freezing her cheek at a single wild whirl.

"I must stop dreaming," she told herself stoutly. "Night is falling. We are on the mountain, nearing the crest. A storm is rising. It is colder here than in any place I have ever been. Perhaps we have been foolhardy, but now we must go on!"

Even as she thought this through, Attatak pointed to her cheek and exclaimed:

"Froze-tuck."

"My cheek frozen!" Marian cried in consternation.

"_Eh-eh_" (yes.)

"And we have an hour's climb to reach the top. Perhaps more. Somehow we must have shelter. Attatak, can you build a snow house?"

"Not very good. Not build them any more, my people."

"Then-then," said Marian slowly, as she rubbed snow on the white, frozen spots of her cheek, "then we must go on."

Five times in the next twenty minutes Attatak told her her cheeks were frozen. Twice Attatak had been obliged to rub the frost from her own cheeks. Each time the intervals between freezings were shorter.

"Attatak," Marian asked, "can we make it?"

"_Canok-ti-ma-na_" (I don't know.) The Eskimo girl's face was very grave.

As Marian turned about she realized that the storm from below was increasing. Snow, stopping nowhere, raced past them to go smoking out over the mountain peak.

She was about to start forward when again she caught sight of a dark spot on the mountain side above. It looked like the mouth of a cavern.

"If only it were," she said wistfully, "we would camp there for the night and wait for the worst of the storm to pa.s.s."

"Attatak," she said suddenly, "you wait here. I am going to try to climb up there." She pointed to the dark spot on the hillside.