His eyes shifted. Searchingly they traveled up the face of the crags
behind him. They hunted where the starlight made deep pits of gloom in
the twisting edge of the mountains. They went from rock to rock and
from tree to tree until at last they rested upon a giant spruce which
hung out over the precipitous wall of the ridge, its thick top
beckoning and sighing to the black rocks that shot up out of the snow
five hundred feet below.
It was a strange tree, weird and black, free of stub or bough for a
hundred feet, and from far out on the barrens those who traveled their
solitary ways east and west knew that it was a monument shaped by men.
Mukee had told Jan its story. In the first autumn of the woman's life
at Lac Bain, he and Per-ee had climbed the old spruce, lopping off its
branches until only the black cap remained; and after that it was
known far and wide as the "lobstick" of Cummins' wife. It was a
voiceless cenotaph which signified that all the honor and love known
to the wilderness people had been given to her.
To it went Jan, the papers still held in his hand. He had seen a pair
of whisky-jacks storing food in the butt of the tree, two or three
summers before, and now his fingers groped for the hole. When he found
it, he thrust in the papers, crowded them down, and filled the hole
with chunks of bark.
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