The deep
snow was crisscrossed by the tracks of innumerable deer driven down
from the highlands by the deeper snow above.
For a time, in this shadowy temple of the pagan gods, Hollister was
forced to depend on a pocket compass to hold a course in the direction
he wished to go. But at last he came out in a slashing, a place where
loggers had been recently at work. Here a donkey engine stood black
and cold on its skids, half-buried in snow. Beyond this working a
clear field opened, and past the field he saw the outline of the
houses on the river bank and he bore straight for these to learn upon
what days the steamer touched the head of Toba and how he might best
gain that float upon which he had disembarked two months before.
CHAPTER VII
Hollister stowed his pack in the smoking room and stood outside by the
rail, watching the Toba Valley fall astern, a green fissure in the
white rampart of the Coast Range. Chance, the inscrutable arbiter of
human destinies, had directed him that morning to a man cutting wood
on the bank of the river close by that cluster of houses where other
men stirred about various tasks, where there must have been wives and
mothers, for he saw a dozen children at play by a snow fort.
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