MacLeod left his fur coat with Stovel, and taking a couple of bannocks for lunch he travelled in moccasins and a heavy pea jacket. The day was intensely cold. Speed was doubly of the essence of the programme--to cover the ground in the time allotted, and to keep from freezing. At the turn of the year, in the Battleford latitude daylight is done about four o’clock.
Once more, the day’s work seemed commonplace enough to the men who did it. From fireside and radio, twenty years afterwards, it looks what it was--a daring adventure, in an empty country, with a temperature that made lonely human travel more hazardous than most people ever know, and the possibility of a blizzard starting without warning, to the extremest risk of life and limb. Indeed, only a few days after MacLeod all alone, with a walking suit, two bannocks, a box of matches, a compass and a jack-knife, his only exterior defenses against disaster, hurried down the valley looking where to place an imagined bridge, a C.P.R. engineer named Bass, who was making a trial line for the C.P.R. below Battleford, was frozen to death quite near his camp.
MacLeod strode over the ice till noon, seeing no place where a railroad might advantageously be brought down the north bank, a bridge built over the wide current, and conducted up the southern escarpment. He ate his bannocks, resting long enough to be warned by Thirty Below that further repose was impermissible. He trudged again till three o’clock, and then, tired enough, he sat on the ice for a smoke. Seeing Stovel and the team, on a bare knoll, overlooking the vale, about three miles behind him, he assumed that all would be well.
He resumed his walking; and as dusk was falling began to leave the river bed. But a wolf’s bark, which seemed to give notice to a pack, warned him to keep somewhat longer on the ice. When he did climb up a partially wooded ravine, and reached the top, the seeing was not good. Evidently he and Stovel must each be searching for the other’s tracks.
MacLeod found nothing, and being very weary, and among bluffs where dry wood was, he tried to light a fire. The wind, which was moving the snow in the wreathing gusts which every driver and walker over the uncharted wintry plain knows so well, prevented any such consolation, and the cold prohibited a stop in one spot for more than two or three minutes. So MacLeod walked for warmth in the darkness, searching as well as he could for a sleigh track, and finding nothing, and bearing eastward towards Bresaylor. At last he came to a fence, and vainly tried again to make a fire.