The day book. [volume], May 09, 1914, LAST EDITION, Image 20

About The day book. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1911-1917

Image provided by: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library, Urbana, IL

                
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Mr,
ept within his tiny cabin that night
and slept.
When the man, unrested, woke and
forced a passage beneath his sail
through the snow to the boat's deck,
he saw that his world Qf another day
was turned from one of black ice to
one of endless white.
Taking whatjtea and food was left,
and his blankets and kettle, he left
the sloop and trudged westward
through the loose snow in the face
of the tireless wind. That day he
won a score of miles, and slept at
night, dog-like, in a snow hole behind
a sheltered corner of the shore. Re
suming his way in the gray morning,
he clambered across a projecting
finger of land to make his way down
again toward the frozen lake edge
where the footing was less rough. It
was here that he slipped among the
shore rocks and pitched sidelong
down the sharp declivity. Clawing
in the snow, he rose again on his
right foot, stepped forward and fell
in a helpless huddle as though he had
trusted his weight to an alder staff.
The man turned, and, hobbling
with great caution, came at last to
the ending of his half -obliterated trail
of the day before. By nightfall he
had retraced it tsn miles.
All day long an uneasy sense of
some other presence had been with
him like an obsession. All day long
he had failed to justify the dread.
Cunningly he would hobble on, and
then, without a warning, pause, whirl
in his tracks to stare to rearward.
Ever there was nothing.
That night he slept uneasily and
in pain. One time he came alertly
conscious and listened with intent
ness. There was no sound.
Through all the painful toiling of
the ensuing day the man was dogged
still by the sense of an unseen, silent
presence that watched his way from
afar and followed it with stealthy
menacing. That night he won again
and through the deepened snow to
the shelter of the ice-bound sloop.
That night, too, he heard again in
the full-toned voicing of irremediable
fault. Highup in the scale it com
menced, like a demoniac shriek, slur
ring then slowly down to the quiver
ing moan of last despair, and ca
dencing in its mournful course
through all the mingling moods of
fury, terror, anguish and dismay.
Rising, falling, rising, falling, flood
ing the frigid midnight air with pal
pitant waves, it was the primal and
the ultimate voicing of the world-old
melancholy of all life.
Peering outward, the man saw that
the snow had ceased and the stars
were far, glittering points above the
world. And he saw at last the hither
to half-sensed presence.
Gaunt they were, and their eyes
were bright with the emboldened
eagerness of long hunger. Occasion
ally one would stand and, touching
the snow with his quivering brush,
point his lean jaws to the distant
stars and break out in the long wolf
howl.
The man with the injured knee
crept back into the cabin with some
firewood.' '
"Hell!" he remarked.
During the night he heard the pad
ding of many feet on the deck above
him.
At morning he .opened his door
quickly and limped out, ax in hand.
A gray form leaped, but the ax blow
was quicker and a great wolf plunged
forward and lay quivering in death
on the foot-tracked snow beside the
sloop. l
Exultantly the man faced to the
north.
The jest. was turned! It had been
willed that the wolves besiege him,
and here of their number was one
dead by his hand; andof its skin he
would make a covering, and of its
flesh his food. 'But even as he start
ed forward the pack were upon the
fallen leader and in a space he was
not.
The man, with reckless fury, flung
himself upon them as they fought
for their food, and his ax swung twice