“Well, if you _got_ to go, I’ll have to go, too.” He waited for the brief grip of Garry’s hand, which he somehow expected. But Garry was looking at him from a mental distance, very kindly. Seeing Kob’s vexed, inquiring face, he said only, “I guess maybe it’s them Boers again,” and went out to the cache behind the shack.
Quietly, for four days, he made his preparations for the biggest job he had ever undertaken in his life—the job of getting Kob to Fort Scarlett, single-handed and without dogs. Like most of the very strong, he was ruthless in his purpose, but he was tenderly careful of Kob.
They started on the fifth day. Garry had left as little as possible to chance. The sledge was loaded with many things besides Kob, including two sealskin sleeping bags, a tiny canvas shelter, a big lamp for cooking and heating, and food for ten days. He reckoned they could make Fort Scarlett in ten days. Kob was well below his normal weight, but even so, the load was over the two-hundred and fifty pounds, which is about the limit that a man can pull.
Daylight only lasted about five hours, but there was a moon half-way to the full; the weather was clear and still—so still that there was not a sound to be heard save the shrieking runners as the sledge put out from the shack, like a small ship putting out from a familiar harbour into a trackless sea; Kob whimpering a little under the furs, the strange late sun gilding the south, and the great stars lighting the rim of the grey northern snows.
That sea was not trackless to Garry. His young eyes, weather-wrinkled at the lids like an old man’s, picked up this mark and that; the wrinkle in the vast white plain that was a river-bed, and the low hills like a rampart, the wedge of spruce that drove to meet them like the vanguard of an army fronting the implacable north. He knew it, was at home here, soul and body. But now he felt a sudden pang of desolation at the thought of the trodden snow about the shack; that ahead was untouched, unmarked. The north receives no impress from man but a few foot-prints in the ever-changing, eternal snow. For all his strength, that was the only mark he had made on this land.
“That’s all right.” Garry slackened an instant, and shifted the sealskin band that ran from the traces around his chest. It would cut him, eventually, he knew, with that weight behind, in spite of the dried moss he had stuffed into his shirt. The sledge sped on again, swiftly; the miles were marked by no more than the imperceptible advance of the spruce-belt and Garry’s monotonous, careful questions; “You all right, Kob? How’s your feet, Kob? Do you still feel your hands?”