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Updated: June 27, 2025
He hanged himself, I should say, not more than half an hour before we reached the cabin. Give me a hand, David!" With a mighty effort David pulled himself together. After all, it was nothing more than a dead man hanging there. But his hands were like ice as he seized hold of it. A knife gleamed in the moonlight over Tavish's head as the Missioner cut the rope.
At the end of his tenth day the sixth after leaving Tavish's David felt that he was no longer a stranger in the country of the big snows. He did not say as much to Father Roland, for to express such a thought to one who had lived there all his life seemed to him to be little less than a bit of sheer imbecility. Ten days!
He must be quite near to Tavish's cabin, if it had not been destroyed. Even if it had been burned on account of the plague that had infested it, he would surely discover the charred ruins of it. It was three o'clock when he started up the creek, and he was inwardly much agitated. He grew more and more positive that he was close to the end of his adventure. He would soon come upon life human life.
He was accepting facts, and changes. He felt bigger to-night, as though his lungs were stretching themselves, and his chest expanding. His fears were gone. He no longer saw anything to dread in the white wilderness. He was eager to go on, eager to reach Tavish's. Ever since Father Roland had spoken of Tavish that desire had been growing within him.
"Of course they will do it," shot back Father Roland unhesitatingly. "Northern dogs always do it, and especially mine. They are accustomed to death. Twenty times in a winter, and sometimes more, I care for the dead. They always go with me, and they can smell death in the wind. But here why, it is absurd! There is nothing dead here unless it is that mouse, and Tavish's meat!"
Premeditated it with considerable precision, in fact, and yet in the end he had died with that stare of horror and madness in his face. Father Roland spread the blanket over him again after he had placed the packet in his own coat. He knew where Tavish's pick and shovel were hanging at the back of the cabin and he brought these tools and placed them beside the body.
He noticed that the chimney of the lamp was sooty and discoloured, and somewhat to the Missioner's amusement he took it off and cleaned it. The light was much more satisfactory then. He wandered about the cabin, scrutinizing, as if out of curiosity, Tavish's belongings. There was not much to discover. Close to the bunk there was a small battered chest with riveted steel ribs.
And then? He tried to dispel the unsteadiness of his emotions, the swiftly growing discomfort of a great anxiety. The first, of course, would be Tavish's cabin, or the ruins of it. He had taken it for granted that Tavish's location would be here, near the confluence of the two streams. A hunter or prospector would naturally choose such a position.
The exertion had sent his blood pounding through him furiously. He was still breathing deeply as he sat near the fire, tossing bits of meat out to Baree. They were sixty miles from Thoreau's cabin, straight north, and for the twentieth time Father Roland was telling him how well he had done. "And to-morrow," he added, "we'll reach Tavish's."
"There is Tavish's cabin. Come. We will see." Mukoki remained with the team. They could hear the dogs whining as they advanced. The cabin took shape in their faces grotesque, dark, lifeless. It was a foreboding thing, that cabin. He remembered in a flash all that the Missioner had told him about Tavish. His pulse was beating swiftly.
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