deeper into the Northland winter. The Big andLittle Salmon rivers were throwing mush-ice into the main river as theypassed, and, below the riffles, anchor-ice arose from the river bottomand coated the surface with crystal scum. Night and day the rim-icegrew, till, in quiet places, it extended out a hundred yards from shore.And Old Tarwater, with all his clothes on, sat by the stove and kept thefire going. Night and day, not daring to stop for fear of the imminentfreeze-up, they dared to run, an increasing mushiness of ice running withthem.
“What ho, old hearty?” Liverpool would call out at times.
“Cheer O,” Old Tarwater had learned to respond.
“What can I ever do for you, son, in payment?” Tarwater, stoking thefire, would sometimes ask Liverpool, beating now one released hand andnow the other as he fought for circulation where he steered in thefreezing stern-sheets.
“Just break out that regular song of yours, old Forty-Niner,” was theinvariable reply.
And Tarwater would lift his voice in the cackling chant, as he lifted itat the end, when the boat swung in through driving cake-ice and moored tothe Dawson City bank, and all waterfront Dawson pricked its ears to hearthe triumphant pæan:
Like Argus of the ancient times, We leave this modern Greece, Tum-tum, tum-tum, tum, tum, tum-tum, To shear the Golden Fleece,
Charles did it, but he did it so discreetly that none of his party, leastof all the sailor, ever learned of it. He saw two great open bargesbeing filled up with men, and, on inquiry, learned that these weregrubless ones being rounded up and sent down the Yukon by the Committeeof Safety. The barges were to be towed by the last little steamboat inDawson, and the hope was that Fort Yukon, where lay the strandedsteamboats, would be gained before the river froze. At any rate, nomatter what happened to them, Dawson would be relieved of theirgrub-consuming presence. So to the Committee of Safety Charles went,privily to drop a flea in its ear concerning Tarwater’s grubless,moneyless, and aged condition. Tarwater was one of the last gathered in,and when Young Liverpool returned to the boat, from the bank he saw thebarges in a run of cake-ice, disappearing around the bend belowMoose-hide Mountain.
Running in cake-ice all the way, and several times escaping jams in theYukon Flats, the barges made their hundreds of miles of progress fartherinto the north and froze up cheek by jowl with the grub-fleet. Here,inside the Arctic Circle, Old Tarwater settled down to pass the longwinter. Several hours’ work a day, chopping firewood for the steamboatcompanies, sufficed to keep him in food. For the rest of the time therewas nothing to do but hibernate in his log cabin.
Warmth, rest, and plenty to eat, cured his hacking cough and put him inas good physical condition as was possible for his advanced years. But,even before Christmas, the lack of fresh vegetables caused scurvy tobreak out, and disappointed adventurer after disappointed adventurer tookto his bunk in abject surrender to this culminating misfortune. Not soTarwater. Even before the first symptoms appeared on him, he was puttinginto practice his one prescription, namely, exercise. From the junk ofthe old trading post he resurrected a number of rusty traps, and from oneof the steamboat captains he borrowed a rifle.
Thus equipped, he ceased from wood-chopping, and began to make more thana mere living. Nor was he downhearted when the scurvy broke out on hisown body. Ever he ran his trap-lines and sang his ancient chant. Norcould the pessimist shake his surety of the three hundred thousand ofAlaskan gold he as going to shake out of the moss-roots.
“But this ain’t gold-country,” they told him.
“Gold is where you find it, son, as I should know who was mining beforeyou was born, ’way back in Forty-Nine,” was his reply. “What was BonanzaCreek but a moose-pasture? No miner’d look at it; yet they washedfive-hundred-dollar pans and took out fifty million dollars. Eldoradowas just as bad. For all you know, right under this here cabin, or rightover the next hill, is millions just waiting for a lucky one like me tocome and shake it out.”
At the end of January came his disaster. Some powerful animal that hedecided was a bob-cat, managing to get caught in one of his smallertraps, dragged it away. A heavy snow-fall put a stop midway to hispursuit, losing the trail for him and losing himself. There were butseveral hours of daylight each day between the twenty hours ofintervening darkness, and his efforts in the grey light and continuallyfalling snow succeeded only in losing him more thoroughly. Fortunately,when winter snow falls in the Northland the thermometer invariably rises;so, instead of the customary forty and fifty and even sixty degrees belowzero, the temperature remained fifteen below. Also, he was warmly cladand had a full matchbox. Further to mitigate his predicament, on thefifth day he killed a wounded moose that weighed over half a ton. Makinghis camp beside it on a spruce-bottom, he was prepared to last out thewinter, unless a searching party found him or his scurvy grew worse.
But at the end of two weeks there had been no sign of search, while hisscurvy had undeniably grown worse. Against his fire, banked from outercold by a shelter-wall of spruce-boughs, he crouched long hours in sleepand long hours in waking. But the waking hours grew less, becomingsemi-waking or half-dreaming hours as the process of hibernation workedtheir way with him. Slowly the sparkle point of consciousness andidentity that was John Tarwater sank, deeper and deeper, into theprofounds of his being that had been compounded ere man was man, andwhile he was becoming man, when he, first of all animals, regardedhimself with an introspective eye and laid the beginnings of morality infoundations of nightmare peopled by the monsters of his ownethic-thwarted desires.
Like a man in fever, waking to intervals of consciousness, so OldTarwater awoke, cooked his moose-meat, and fed the fire; but more andmore time he spent in his torpor, unaware of what was day-dream and whatwas sleep-dream in the content of his unconsciousness. And here, in theunforgetable crypts of man’s unwritten history, unthinkable andunrealizable, like passages of nightmare or impossible adventures oflunacy, he encountered the monsters created of man’s first morality thatever since have vexed him into the spinning of fantasies to elude them ordo battle with them.
In short, weighted by his seventy years, in the vast and silentloneliness of the North, Old Tarwater, as in the delirium of drug oranæsthetic, recovered within himself, the infantile mind of the child-manof the early world. It was in the dusk of Death’s fluttery wings thatTarwater thus crouched, and, like his remote forebear, the child-man,went to myth-making, and sun-heroizing, himself hero-maker and the heroin quest of the immemorable treasure difficult of attainment.
Either must he attain the treasure—for so ran the inexorable logic of theshadow-land of the unconscious—or else sink into the all-devouring sea,the blackness eater of the light that swallowed to extinction the suneach night . . . the sun that arose ever in rebirth next morning in theeast, and that had become to man man’s first symbol of immortalitythrough rebirth. All this, in the deeps of his unconsciousness (theshadowy western land of descending light), was the near dusk of Deathdown into which he slowly ebbed.
But how to escape this monster of the dark that from within him slowlyswallowed him? Too deep-sunk was he to dream of escape or feel the prodof desire to escape. For him reality had ceased. Nor from within thedarkened chamber of himself could reality recrudesce. His years were tooheavy upon him, the debility of disease and the lethargy and torpor ofthe silence and the cold were too profound. Only from without couldreality impact upon him and reawake within him an awareness of reality.Otherwise he would ooze down through the shadow-realm of the unconsciousinto the all-darkness of extinction.
But it came, the smash of reality from without, crashing upon his eardrums in a loud, explosive snort. For twenty days, in a temperature thathad never risen above fifty below, no breath of wind had blown movement,no slightest sound had broken the silence. Like the smoker on the opiumcouch refocusing his eyes from the spacious walls of dream to the narrowconfines of the mean little room, so Old Tarwater stared vague-eyedbefore him across his dying fire, at a huge moose that stare
d at him instartlement, dragging a wounded leg, manifesting all signs of extremeexhaustion; it, too, had been straying blindly in the shadow-land, andhad wakened to reality only just ere it stepped into Tarwater’s fire.
He feebly slipped the large fur mitten lined with thickness of wool fromhis right hand. Upon trial he found the trigger finger too numb formovement. Carefully, slowly, through long minutes, he worked the barehand inside his blankets, up under his fur _parka_, through the chestopenings of his shirts, and into the slightly warm hollow of his leftarm-pit. Long minutes passed ere the finger could move, when, with equalslowness of caution, he gathered his rifle to his shoulder and drew beadupon the great animal across the fire.
At the shot, of the two shadow-wanderers, the one reeled downward to thedark and the other reeled upward to the light, swaying drunkenly on hisscurvy-ravaged legs, shivering with nervousness and cold, rubbingswimming eyes with shaking fingers, and staring at the real world allabout him that had returned to him with such sickening