Chapter XIII: The Long Trail

At nightfall of the following day, worn from the constant travel, and walking as if in their sleep, the two girls came to the junction of the two forks of a modest sized river. The frozen stream, coated as it was by a hard crust of snow, had given them a perfect trail over the last ten miles of travel. Before that they had crossed endless tiers of low-lying hills whose hard packed and treacherously slippery sides had brought grief to them and to their reindeer. Twice an overturned sled had dragged a reindeer off his feet, and reindeer, sled and driver had gone rolling and tumbling down the hill to be piled in a heap in the gully below.

Those had been trying hours; but now they were looking forward to many miles of smooth going between the banks of this river.

First, however, there must be rest and food for them and for their deer. They were watching the shelving bank for some likely place to camp, where there was shelter from the biting wind and driftwood lodged along the bank for a fire. Then, with a little cry of surprise, Marian pointed at a bend in the river.

“At this point,” she said, “the river runs southwest.”

Attatak looked straight down the river and at the low sweeping banks beyond, then uttered a low: “_Eh-eh_,” in agreement.

“That means that we cannot follow the river,” said Marian. “Our course runs northwest. Every mile travelled on the river takes us off our course and lessens our chance of reaching our goal in time.”

“What shall we do?” asked Attatak, in perplexity.

“Let me think,” said Marian. “There is time enough to decide. We must camp here. The deer must have food and rest. So must we. There is not much danger of wolves. If any come prowling around, the deer will let us know soon enough. We will sleep on our sleds and if anything goes wrong, the deer, tethered to the sleds, will tumble us out of our beds. Anyway, they will waken us.”

Soon supper was over. The deer, having had their fill of moss dug from beneath the snow, had lain down to rest. The girls spread their sleeping bags out upon the sleds and prepared for a few hours of much needed rest. Attatak, with the carefree unconcern that is characteristic of her race, had scarcely buried her face in an improvised pillow when she was fast asleep.

Sleep did not come so quickly to Marian. Many matters of interest lingered in her mind. It was as if her mind were a room all littered up with the odds and ends of a day’s work. She must put it to rights before she could sleep.

She thought once more of the strange treasures they had brought from the cave. Tired as she was, she was tempted to get out those articles and look at them, and to brush them up a bit and see what they were like.

“I know it’s foolish,” she told herself, “but it’s exactly as if I had hung up my stocking on Christmas Eve, and then when Christmas morning came, had been obliged to seize my stocking without so much as a glance inside, and forced to start at once on a long journey which would offer me no opportunity to examine my stocking until the journey was at an end. But I won’t look; not now. It’s too cold. Brr-r,” she shivered.

As she drew herself farther down into the furry depths of her sleeping bag, she was reminded of the time she and Patsy had slept together beneath the stars. She could not help wishing that Patsy was with her now, sharing her sleeping bag, and looking up at the gleaming Milky Way.

She wondered vaguely how Patsy was getting on with the herd, but the thought did not greatly disturb her. She was about to drift off to the land of dreams, when a thought popped into her mind that brought her up wide awake again. Their morning’s course was not yet laid. What should it be?

She closed her eyes and tried to think. Then, like a flash, it came to her.

“It’s the hard way,” she whispered to herself. “Seems as if it were always the hard way that is safe and sure.”

The thought that had come to her was this: In order to reach their destination, they must still travel several miles north. The river they were following flowed southwest. To go south was to go out of their way. Were they to strike due north, across country, they might in the course of a day’s travel come to another stream which did not angle toward the south. That would mean infinitely hard travel over snow that was soft and yielding, and across tundra whose frozen caribou bogs were as rough as a cordwood road.

“It’s the long, hard way,” she sighed, “but we may win. If we follow this river we never can.”

Then, with all her problems put in order, she fell asleep.