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Updated: June 9, 2025
The muskeg berries did not allay this gnawing, while they made his tongue and the roof of his mouth sore with their irritating bite. He came upon a valley where rock ptarmigan rose on whirring wings from the ledges and muskegs. Ker ker ker was the cry they made. He threw stones at them, but could not hit them. He placed his pack on the ground and stalked them as a cat stalks a sparrow.
For nearly a week Sam thought this must be a ruse, or a cast by which to gain some route known to Jingoss. But the forests began to dwindle; the muskegs to open. The Land of Little Sticks could not be far distant, and beyond them was the Barren Grounds. The old woodsman knew the defaulter for a reckless and determined man.
"I don't understand what you're leading up to," Benson remarked. "It's this I suspect Clarke intended us to get entangled among these muskegs where we'd have no chance of renewing our provisions, and misled us about the Stony village, which he didn't wish us to reach. Well, he has succeeded in getting us into trouble and now he has to help us out. The fellow is a doctor."
They gazed at it in silence for a time; and then Harding said, "I've a notion that this is the valley where Blake fell sick, and it's going to straighten out things for us if I'm right." "That's so," Benson agreed. "We would be sure of striking the Stony village, and we could afterwards follow the low ground right down to the river. With the muskegs frozen solid, it ought to make an easy road."
Close about the little settlement crept the balsams and spruce, the birch and poplar, behind which lurked vast dreary muskegs, a chaos of bowlder-splits, the forest. The girl had known nothing different for many years. Once a summer the sailing ship from England felt its frozen way through the Hudson Straits, down the Hudson Bay, to drop anchor in the mighty River of the Moose.
Even the soft green of the wheatlands took on a look like verdigris, as though it were something malignant and poisonous. And farther out there were muskegs, and beyond the three-wire fence, which would stand no bar to a wandering child, there were range-cattle, half-wild cattle that resented the approach of anything but a man on horseback.
"Wild geese; the forerunners of the host that will soon come down from the marshes by the Polar Sea." "But do they go so far?" He laughed. "They cross this continent twice a year; up from the steaming lagoons on the Gulf to the frozen muskegs of the North, and back again. They're filled with a grand unrest and wholly free; travelers of the high air, always going somewhere."
Then he kicked off his boots, which were stout and every ounce mattered when one took to walking on muskegs; but as his clothing consisted of only a flannel shirt and serge knickerbockers there were no clothes for him to shed. Katherine slipped one loop of rope over his shoulders, put the other looped rope into his hand, then laid an oar on the mud.
They were crossing one of the high steppes of the middle prairie toward the belt of pines and muskegs which divides it from the barrens of the North. The broad stretch of fertile loam, where prosperous wooden towns are rising fast among the wheatfields, lay to the south of them, and the arid tract through which they journeyed had so far no attraction for even the adventurous homestead pre-emptor.
The white desolation was empty of life, and silent except for the wind among the pine-tops. "I'd meant to look into the Snake Creek muskegs, but the cold drove me back," he said. "In summer one's bitten by sand-flies and mosquitoes; in winter one runs some risk of freezing to death. I wonder now and then whether mining's worth the hardship and why we stop here."
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