Dark spruce trees stood on either side the frozen waterway. They had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other as if seeking common shelter in the fading light. A silence reigned overhead. The land itself was desolate and without movement and looked as unfamiliar as the formless drifts of snow moving at our feet. A faint high whistle blew through the tops of the bare branches feigning life, but there was none to be found here. We had stopped.
Looking down into the vast northern forest below we tried to swallow, but no moisture came to our mouths. We were lost. And now, without mercy, night was beginning to fall.
We stood motionless for a long time. Then from the very far end of the frozen waterway a dark speck emerged.
From over the horizon, something was moving towards us. It was small at first, but gained speed and took on form as it moved across the ice.After a few minutes it became a heavy gray line weaving in motion – which at first seemed somehow to be a train as its tail unerringly followed the path carved by itshead – but upon closer inspection it became something else.
When it stopped finally in front of us, the line became a string of dogs - their bristly fur rimmed with frost. As they took pause their breath froze in the air as it left their mouths, spouting forth in spumes of vapour that settled upon the hair of their bodies and formed into crystals of frost. Leather traces attached them to a sled which dragged along behind. It was made of stout birch-bark, and without runners, its full surface rested on the snow. The front end of the sled was turned up, like a scroll, in order to force down and under the bore of winter that surged like a wave before it. On the sled, securely lashed, was a long and narrow oblong box.
In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man. His eyelashes and cheeks and lips were so coated with the crystals from his frozen breath that his face was not discernible. This gave him the aura of a ghostly mask, an undertaker in a spectral world at the funeral of some lost traveler. At the rear of the sled toiled a second man, tall and equally frightening. On the sled, finally in the box, lay a third man whose toil was over, - a man whom the wild had conquered and beaten down until he would never move nor struggle again.
We did not need to speak. The tall man on the sled made motion for us to come over and we climbed aboard the back, settling near the rear of the oblong box. He did not say a word, only nodded. And with a bright crack of his whip, which seemed to split the darkness in two – we were moving towards the light.
- Adapted from Jack London’s “White Fang”
(S. Carter)