Chapter X: A Startling Discovery

To Attatak, whose mind was filled with the weird tales of the spirit world, to enter a cave away on this unknown mountain side was a far greater trial than it was to Marian. Cold, blizzards, the wild beasts of timberlands—these she could face; but the possible dwelling place of the spirits of dead polar bears and walruses, to say nothing of old women who had died because they had disregarded the incantations of witch doctors, “Ugh!”—this was very bad indeed.

Marian felt the native girl tremble as she took her arm and led her gently forward into the dark depths of the cave.

The entrance was not wide, perhaps twelve feet across, but it was fully as high as it was broad.

“Our deer can come in, too,” whispered Marian, “if it goes back far enough.”

“If there are no wolves,” said Attatak with a shudder.

“Wolves?” Marian had not thought of that. “You wait here,” she whispered. “I’ll go for the rifle.”

“No! No!” Attatak gripped her arm until it hurt. “I will go, too.”

So back out of the cave they felt their way, now tripping over rocks that rolled away with a hollow sound like distant thunder, now brushing the wall, till they came at last to the open air.

Marian hated all this delay. Famished with hunger, chilled to the very marrow, and weary enough to drop, she longed for the warmth of the fire she hoped they might light, for the food they would warm over it, and the comforting rest that would follow. Yet she realized that the utmost caution must be taken. Wolves, once driven from a cave, might stampede their reindeer and lose them forever in the mountains. Without reindeer they should have great trouble in getting back to camp; the Agent would go on his way ignorant of their dilemma; their pasture land would be lost, and perhaps their herd with it.

The rifle securely gripped in the hands of Attatak, who was the surer shot of the two, they again started into the cave. Strange to say, once the rifle was in her grasp, Attatak became the bravest of the brave.

Marian carried a candle in one hand, and in the other a block of safety matches. The candle was not lighted. So drafty was the entrance that no candle would stay lighted. Each step she hoped would bring them to a place where the draft would not extinguish her candle. But in this she was disappointed.

“It’s a windy cavern,” she said. “Must be an entrance at each end.”

Calling on Attatak to pause, Marian struck a match. It flared up, then went out. A second one did the same. The third lighted the candle. There was just time for a hasty glance about. Gloomy brown walls lay to right and left of them, and the awful gloom of the cave was most alarming.

Glancing down at her feet, Marian uttered a low exclamation of surprise. Then, with such a definite and direct puff of wind as might come from human lips, the candle was snuffed out.

“Wha—what was it?” Attatak whispered. She was shaking so that Marian feared she would let the rifle go clattering to the rocky floor.

“Nothing,” Marian answered. “Really nothing at all. The ashes of a camp-fire, and I thought—thought,” she gulped, “thought I saw bones in the ashes!”

“Bones?” This time the rifle did clatter to the floor.

“Attatak,” Marian scolded; “Attatak. This is absurd!”

Groping in the dark for the rifle, she grasped a handful of ashes, then something hard and cold that was not the rifle.

“Ugh!” she groaned, struggling with all her might to keep from running away.

Again she tried for the rifle, this time successfully. She gave it to Attatak, with the admonition:

“_Ca-ca!_” (Do take care!)

“_Eh-eh_,” Attatak whispered.

Stepping gingerly out of the ashes of the mysterious camp-fire, they again started forward.

The current of air now became less and less strong, and finally when Marian again tried the candle it burned with a flickering blaze.

A glance about told them they were now between narrow dark walls, that the ceiling was very high, and there was nothing beneath their feet but rock.

The yellow glow of light cheered them. If there were wolves they had made no sound; the gleam of their eyes had not been seen. If the spirits of the men who had built that long extinguished fire still haunted the place, the light would drive them away. Attatak assured Marian of that.

With one candle securely set in a rocky recess, and with another close at hand, Attatak was even willing to remain in the cave while Marian brought the reindeer in a little way and carried the articles necessary for a meal to the back of the cave.

“There is no moss on this barren mountain,” Marian sighed. “Our reindeer must go hungry to-night, but once we are off the mountain they shall have a grand feast.”

By the time they had made a small fire on the floor of the cave and had finished their supper, night had closed in upon their mountain world. Darkness came quickly, deepened tenfold by the wild storm that appeared to redouble its fury at every fresh blast. The darkness without vied with the bleakness of the cave until both were one. Such a storm as it was! Born and reared on the coast of Alaska, Marian had never before experienced anything that approached it in its shrieking violence. She did not wonder now that the mountains appeared to smoke with sweeping snow. She shivered as she thought what it would have meant had they not found the cave.

“Why,” she said to Attatak, “we should have been caught up by the wind like two bits of snow and hurled over the mountain peak.”

The two girls walked to the mouth of the cave and for a moment stood peering into the night. The whistle and howl of the wind was deafening. “Whew—whoo—whoo—whe-w—w-o—,” how it did howl! The very rock ribbed mountain seemed to shake from the violence of it.

“_Eleet-pon-a-muck_,” (too bad), said Attatak as she turned her back to the storm.

For Marian, however, the spectacle held a strange fascination. Had the thing been possible, she should have liked nothing better than leaping out into it. To battle with it; to answer its roar with a wild scream of her own; to whirl away with it; to become a part of it; to revel in its madness—this, it seemed to her, would be the height of ecstatic joy. Such was the call of unbridled nature to her joyous, triumphant youth.

It was with reluctance that she at last turned back into the depths of the cave and helped Attatak unroll the bedding roll and prepare for the night.

“To-morrow,” she whispered to Attatak before she closed her eyes in sleep, “if the storm has not passed, and we dare not venture out, we will explore the cave.”

“_Eh-eh_,” Attatak answered drowsily.

The next moment the roaring storm had no auditors. The girls were fast asleep.