Life is an offence to it, for life is movement and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It is not the way of the Wild to like movement. On the sled, in the box, lay a third man whose toil was over,–a man whom the Wild had conquered and beaten down until he would never move nor struggle again. At the rear of the sled toiled a second man. In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man. There were other things on the sled–blankets, an axe, and a coffee-pot and frying-pan but prominent, occupying most of the space, was the long and narrow oblong box. On the sled, securely lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box. The front end of the sled was turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of soft snow that surged like a wave before it. It was made of stout birch-bark, and its full surface rested on the snow. Leather harness was on the dogs, and leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along behind.
Their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Down the frozen waterway toiled a string of wolfish dogs.
It was the Wild, the savage, frozen- hearted Northland Wild.īut there WAS life, abroad in the land and defiant. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness–a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness.
The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway.
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