Dillon Wallace

“ In this wild land no one knows when he will be called upon to meet adventure. The sea winds breathe it, it stalks boldly over the bleak wastes of the barrens, and in the dark and mysterious fastnesses of the forest it crouches, always ready for its chance to spring forward and meet you unawares. Adventure, ay, and grave danger too, are wont to show themselves unexpectedly. And so, one winter's evening, they came to Skipper Ed and Bobby and Jimmy. ”

“ There is no sweeter odour than that of the damp forest mingled with the smell of burning wood. Beyond the narrow circle of light a black wall rises, and behind the wall lies the wilderness with its unfathomed mysteries. Out in the darkness wild creatures move, silent, stealthy and unseen, behind a veil that human eyes cannot penetrate. But we know they are there going about the strange business of their life, and our imagination is awakened and our sensibilities quickened.
The camp fire is a shrine of comradeship and friendship. ”

“ The world that opened to Jamie after the long darkness was a more beautiful world than ever it had been before. His loved mountains had never seemed so big and brave as when he was permitted to look at them again, and he was quite sure that never before had the peaks, lighted by the setting sun, been so bright and glorious with heavenly beauty at the moment when God stooped down to kiss the world good night. ”

“ Bobby's face had assumed an unnatural, peaceful repose. The color had left the cheeks that had been fever flushed for so long. The lips were partly open, and there was no movement or sign of life.
Skipper Ed staggered to the tent front, and thrusting the flaps aside staggered out. The world lay quiet and serene, as though it held no grief. The waves lapped gently against the rocks. The sky was afire with radiant beauty. ”

“ That night in camp I cut up my canvas leggings and used pieces of the canvas to rebottom my moccasins, sewing it on with shoemaker's thread.
It was a glorious evening. A big moon rising over the bluffs beyond us transformed the river into a silvery thread stretching far down through the dark valley. Behind us the black spruce forest made our roaring fire seem more cheerful in contrast. A cold east wind had driven away the flies and the mosquitoes. Supper eaten, our cup of contentment was full to the brim. After all, the wilderness was not so inhospitable. ”

“ WE LOSE THE TRAIL
Saturday morning, August fifth, broke with a radiance and a glory seldom equaled even in that land of glorious sunrises and sunsets. A flame of red and orange in the east ushered in the rising sun, not a cloud marred the azure of the heavens, the moss was white with frost, and the crisp, clear atmosphere sweet with the scent of the new day. Labrador was in her most amiable mood, displaying to the best advantage her peculiar charms and beauties. ”

“ Over and over again he reviewed to himself every phase of Bob's life, from the time when, a wee lad, Bob climbed on his knee of an evening to beg for stories of bear hunts, and great gray wolves that harried the hunters, and how the animals were captured on the trail; and through the years into which the little lad grew into youth and approached manhood, down to the day that he left home, looking so noble and stalwart, to brave, for the sake of those he loved, the unknown dangers that lurked in the rude, wild wastes beyond the line of blue mysterious hills to the northward. ”

“ This was the first awakening in Paul of the primitive instinct which every human has inherited from prehistoric ancestors—an inborn love of the glorious freedom of the great wide wilderness where individual man stands supreme in his own right and where he may roam at will without restraint; where he feels that he is a person and not an atom; where he may meet nature face to face, and fearlessly match his human skill against her forces. ”

“ Manikawan, your skin was red, but your soul was as white as the driven snow that covers the desolate land of your people. Your features are shrunken with starvation and suffering, but still they are beautiful, for they reflect the beautiful, unselfish soul which they once sheltered. ”

“ Our ears are not attuned to hear their dear voices, our eyes have not the power to see their glorious presence.
Never since coming into the wilderness had the isolation of the great solitudes impressed David and Andy so deeply as now. Their imagination was awake. In fancy they could see, reaching away into unmeasured miles on every side of the little tilt which sheltered them, the silent, white, unpeopled wilderness. There was no one to turn to for companionship. Even Indian Jake, sleeping soundly, doubtless, in some far distant camp, seemed no part of their world. ”

“ He was out on the sea he loved, meeting adventure in fog and storm and gale. That was better than a gig on a country road. He was helping people to be happy. He prized that far more than the wealth he might have accumulated, or the reputation he might have gained at home, as a famous physician or surgeon. There is no happiness in the world to compare with the happiness that comes with the knowledge that one is making others happy and helping them to better living and contentment.
Without knowing it, Grenfell was building a world-fame. ”

“ In the distance beyond the Bay the high peaks of the Mealy Mountains rose out of the gloom, white with snow and looming above the dark forest at their base in cold and silent majesty. Behind the cabin stretched the vast, mysterious, unbounded wilderness which held, hidden in its unmeasured depths, rivers and lakes and mountains that no man, save the wandering Indian, had ever looked upon—great solitudes whose silence had remained unbroken through the ages. ”

“ Mid-April came, and Toby and Charley, with dogs and komatik, met Skipper Zeb at Black River tilt, when he appeared again out of the silent wilderness with the harvest of his labours, and his winter's trapping was ended.
How happy they were when Skipper Zeb was home again. It was pleasant to hear his big voice and his jolly laugh booming about the cabin. He was always an optimist, and he always made every one feel that everything was all right. ”

“ No sound broke the absolute silence save the crunch, crunch, crunch of our feet, the squeak of the komatik runners complaining as they slid reluctantly over the snow, and the “oo-isht-oo-isht, oksuit, oksuit” of the drivers, constantly urging the dogs to greater effort. Shimmering frost flakes, suspended in the air like a veil of thinnest gauze, half hid the sun when very timidly he raised his head above the southeastern horizon, as though afraid to venture into the domain of the indomitable ice king who had wrested the world from his last summer’s power and ruled it now so absolutely. ”

“ In all the earth there is no coast so barren, so desolate, so brutally inhospitable as the Labrador coast from Cape Charles, at the Strait of Belle Isle on the south, to Cape Chidley on the north. Along these eight hundred miles it is a constant succession of bare rocks scoured clean and smooth by the ice and storms of centuries, with not a green thing to be seen, save now and then a bunch of stunted shrubs that have found a foothold in some sheltered nook in the rocks, and perchance, on some distant hill, a glimpse of struggling spruce or fir trees. ”

“ Everywhere the great bay was frozen, and there was no longer the sound of lapping waves upon the beach. Very soon, too, the cheerful voice of Roaring Brook, tumbling headlong over the rocks, was hushed into silence.
Rime filled the air, and the cabin windows became thick-crusted with a frost that never melted that livelong winter. Before the end of November the snow lay a full fathom deep every where, and there was no going abroad now, save upon snowshoes. ”

“ A sickening nausea overtook Shad, and he sank upon his toboggan, faint and dizzy with an overpowering weakness. His imagination was getting the better of him.
It is always dangerous and sometimes fatal for one to permit the imagination to assert itself in seasons of peril. Will power to put away thoughts of to-morrow, to think only of to-day, to do to-day the thing which necessity requires, coupled with a determination never to abandon hope, is a paramount essential for the successful explorer to possess. ”

“ The Sands of Dee, the estuary and the hills of Wales made a fine school of this sort for Grenfell.
The out-of-doors clears the brain, and there a man learns to think straight and to the point. When he is on intimate terms with the woods and mountains, and can laugh at howling gales and the wind beating in his face, and can take care of himself and be happy without the effeminating comforts of steam heat and luxurious beds, a man will prove himself no coward when he comes some day face to face with grave danger. He has been trained in a school of courage. He has learned to depend upon himself. ”

“ God holds our destiny in His hands, and our destiny is His will. Perhaps He sent the lad here to mould his character upon the plan of the great wide wilderness and boundless sea, and to fit him for some noble part that he is to play some time in life."
Skipper Ed knocked the ashes from his pipe.
"Perhaps after all," he mused, "my life here has not been wasted. Perhaps my part in life was to teach these boys and help to broaden their life. Perhaps that was the reason I drifted here and remained here. Every misfortune and every sorrow is just a stepping stone to something higher and better." ”

“ On a clearing to the eastward of the post between the woods and water was an irregular cluster of deerskin wigwams, around which loitered dark-hued Indians puffing quietly at their pipes, while Indian women bent over kettles steaming at open fires, cooking the evening meal, and little Indian boys with bows shot harmless arrows at soaring gulls overhead, and laughed joyously at their sport as each arrow fell short of its mark. ”

“ The genial warmth of the fire was so in contrast to the chilly darkness of the tent that we sat long around it and talked of our travels and prospects and the lake and the wilderness before us that no white man had ever before seen, while the brook near by tumbling over its rocky bed roared a constant complaint at our intrusion into this land of solitude. ”

“ The Devil's Tea Kettle, with all its loud threats, was behind them. The boat shot down along the shore, David swung to port, and they were safe in the quiet waters to the lee of the island.
"Thank the Lord!" said David reverently, as he brought the little craft to and the sail flapped idly.
"'Twere a close shave," breathed Jamie.
"A wonderful close shave," echoed Andy.
"You had grit," said Jamie. "You has plenty o' grit, Davy—and a stout heart, like a man. 'Twere wonderful how you cracked her through! There's nary a man on the coast could have done better'n that!" ”

“ The distant shore line stood out in dark silhouette marking the boundary of the land of silence, where no man lived. A thousand miles of trackless, unknown wilderness lay beyond that dark forest boundary. Charley's imagination pictured it as another world, apart and different from anything he had ever seen. ”

“ I wanted the world to know Hubbard as he was, his noble character, his devotion to duty, and his faith, so strong that not even the severe hardships he endured in the desolate north, ending only with death, could make him for a moment forget the simple truths that he learned from his mother on the farm in old Michigan. I wanted the young men to know these things, for they could not fail to be the better for having learned them; and I wanted the mothers to know what men mothers can make of their sons. ”