River of Ice

CHAPTER I Gale!

The three Indians were afraid. The one with the flat face and the pointed head kept sniffing around like an animal trying to catch a death scent.

The big one with the scar under his left ear was rolling his eyes and jumping whenever a twig cracked in the virgin fir forest that surrounded the group.

The third, a man so lined with age that he looked like a nut-brown monkey, yet with all a monkey’s lithe activity in spite of his years, was chattering something to the other two.

Indians don’t show fear. That is the legend, at least. They are stolid, concealing all their emotions. Maybe so. But these Indians weren’t concealing their emotions! They were scared stiff, and they showed it very plainly.

“What do you suppose it is?” said Brent Waller. Brent was a husky fellow in his middle twenties. He had black hair and snapping black eyes, and thick pads of fur on the backs of his fingers and hands. Dressed in high boots, mackinaw and woolen shirt, he looked like a chap who could take care of himself. Yet he found himself being a little uneasy too with Chinooks chattering around like a trio of frightened children.

“I can’t even guess what ails them,” answered his sister, Lini Waller. Lini was a very attractive brunette, on the small side, with a firm, round chin that hinted that she too could take care of herself. In most cases, anyway. Of course, if something was going to threaten them that had even the Indians buffaloed…

She and Brent were north in British Columbia, on the shore of the Pacific. They were scores of miles from any human being, in virgin groves of trees that towered over them like skyscrapers. They had come up here primarily on a vacation, but also to look over the timber situation. Brent worked for a lumber company and was a valued man.

The oldest of the three Indians, the little dried-up monkey of a man, chattered harder and grabbed the biggest Indian by the arm. He made gestures seeming to say: “Let’s get out of here.”

“I don’t understand this at all,” said Brent Waller to his sister. “It’s certainly quiet and peaceful enough.” It was quiet enough, surely. At the moment not even a breeze blew. The late sun sank as if into a sound-deadening blanket of fleecy cotton. High up, in the tips of the trees, there was a sort of constant moan, as a slight wind stirred through the giant firs.

“The sunset looks red enough for a good day tomorrow,” shrugged Lini. She was cute in pants and boots.

“And yet,” said Brent somberly, “there is something wrong, somewhere. There’s not one sign of it that you can put your finger on, but I smell a storm.”

“Maybe that’s what the Chinooks are worried about,” nodded Lini.

At that moment the biggest of the three came toward the brother and sister. Behind him trailed the monkeylike little old man and the fellow with the flat face and the pointed head. The big Indian had a few words of English. Through him, Brent had conducted the preparations necessary to retain the three as guides for their trip. “We go,” said the big Indian.

Not much trouble in understanding that. But its clarity didn’t make the brother and sister feel any better. “Go?” snapped Brent. “But our trip isn’t half done. We need you.”

“We go!” repeated the Indian, looking north, south, east and west, as if calling on all the spirits to back him up.

“Go where?” asked Lini, not unreasonably.

The Indian pointed. The direction of his none-too-clean index finger was south and east. Vaguely, it was pointing toward an Indian settlement about fifty miles down the coast and inland, the last sign of human habitation they’d seen.

“Why do you want to go?” demanded Brent. “Aren’t we paying you enough?”

“Bad danger here,” said the Indian. And the other two, sensing the meaning in spite of their lack of English, nodded vigorously.

“What danger?”

The big Indian rolled his shoulders uneasily.

“You mean, you think there’s a storm coming?” said Brent, feeling pretty important that he had sensed a weather change even before these natives had. But he was disillusioned by the response.

“Oh, storm,” said the Indian scornfully. “Sure, storm. Big storm he come. But we not care storm.”

“Hang it, what is the matter then?” said Brent in exasperation.

“Bad danger.” Lini and Brent stared at each other, baffled. From their right, a little up the coast, came a chill, dank breath like a breeze from the tomb. A small glacier was up there. It was tiny as glaciers go; but even a tiny glacier holds millions of tons of ice and can throw out a lot of cold air.

“Is it the river of ice you fear?” said Lini, inclining her pretty head toward the source of the tomblike chill.

The Indian showed indifference again. “No, not that.” The aged Indian was trying to break through the barrier of language. He screwed his face up hideously, half-raised his arms, and called: “Whooo. Whooo!”

“Owls?” said Brent politely.

“Spirits,” said the big Indian. There was a tone of triumph about it. He had evidently been trying a long time for that word. “Bad spirit. Old, old spirits.”

“He’s n-u-t-s,” said Lini impatiently, spelling it out to keep the meaning from Indian ears.

“Nevertheless, he’s in earnest,” said Brent.

“You really mean to go and leave us stranded up here?” Lini demanded angrily.

The Indian got the drift, if not the words. He nodded vigorously. Nothing, it appeared, would change him.

Brent looked at his sister. She was as good as a man in the woods. “Well?” he said.

“Well, yourself,” sniffed Lini.

“These duffers have some supernatural fear on the things they call their minds,” he said. “They’re going to beat it, all right. Do we get out too?”

“No!” said Lini. “We’re not children, and we’re not tenderfeet. We can get along by ourselves. Or, if we can’t, we can easily find our way back to that last Indian settlement. Let them go.”

Brent turned back to the Chinooks. “Make camp,” he said. “You can go in the morning if you like.”

The Indians grunted. The three of them efficiently and swiftly made camp. They pitched the tent, and Brent noticed that they secured it extra tightly. They started a fire. And then, suddenly, they were gone! Just like that. At one moment they were flitting around like red-brown gnomes among the giant tree trunks. Then there wasn’t anything flitting any more. “The dirty dogs,” said Lini indignantly.

Brent shook his head. “According to their principles, they were pretty fair about it. They fixed us up comfortably before they blew. Why do you suppose they were so scared? That flat-faced guy was positively green.”

“ ‘Old spirits,’ ” Lini thoughtfully repeated the words of the big Chinook. “Does that mean the spirits of old men? Or of a race that is old? Or just spirits themselves that have gotten old?”

“I think it’s the latter,” said Brent, laughing. “Spirits that have gotten old and maybe a little mildewed around the edges. They’re like children, these Chinooks — afraid of shadows.”

Lini cooked a camp meal. They had plenty of flour and salt and the rest they could get from the woods and ocean. The moaning they had heard in the treetops grew louder. And the motion of the air began to penetrate lower, so that gusts of wind kicked against the embers of their fire. “Sleep with your boots on,” said Brent. “There is a storm coming, all right. Just a squall, I think. But these short ones can be violent up here.”

It hit them about eleven o’clock and there was no sleeping after that. It was the heaviest wind Brent had ever experienced in the Northwest. It made mountains on the ocean so that they could hear the pound of the surf like a constant roaring in their ears. It bent the great fir trees like a child’s bow. The tent held, thanks to the extra precautions of the Indians. But the flapping would have ruined slumber even if the noisy majesty of the storm had not.

Along about midnight there was a sound that overtopped all the rest. And was different from all the rest. There was a gigantic boom, as if a hundred sixteen-inch guns had been fired in exact unison. Then there was a bellow like that of a million bulls. And finally a mighty spouting sound, as if about a square mile of ocean floor had risen from the bottom, looked around and sunk in a welter of tidal waves again. Brent looked toward Lini. He couldn’t see her, couldn’t see his hand before his face. “Earthquake?” he shouted above the wind.

“I don’t think so, or we’d have felt it,” she shouted back. “Landslide?”

“Maybe. Or maybe the glacier.”

In the morning, tired but otherwise unharmed, they looked on a wind-scoured world. Many of the trees were down. Scarred logs were washed a hundred feet above normal water level on the shore. They went to the glacier as soon as they’d eaten. It was a pretty impressive sight — a river of broken glass penned between two high hill ranges and opening onto the ocean. The two saw a field of great ice lumps over the ocean’s surface for what seemed miles. And across the foot of the glacier, there was a sharp cliff, as if someone had sliced the ice river off about four hundred yards from shore with a great knife.

“That was it,” nodded Brent. “A chunk of ice bigger than an ocean liner — bigger than fifty ocean liners — broke off in the gate— Hey! That’s funny.” Lini followed the direction of his gaze, her own brown eyes looking puzzled.

The height of the wall of ice at the foot of the glacier was a good twenty stories. Under it, as if it had been squeezed flat during countless centuries by the great weight, was a low cliff of black rock. “I’ll bet it’s the first time that rock has seen the light of day for a good many thousands of years,” Lini said. “The ice would normally come far over it. How square that one center part is, Brent.”

Brent Waller nodded. It was that squareness which had attracted his eyes too. Part of the low cliff was as smooth and flat as if hewed that way by human hands. They went to it. As they approached the low cliff, they instinctively cowered and looked up at the ice wall. The glacier’s foot seemed actually to lean over them a little, so sheer was the solid ice mass. It looked as if it would fall on them if they breathed hard! But the thing in the center of the flat section of the rock took their minds off the ice. “Looks like a door,” said Brent.

“It is a door!” gasped Lini. “Who would cut a door in there — in a place no man could get to for hundreds and hundreds of years?”

“Maybe the cliff hasn’t been buried as long as we thought,” said Brent. But both of them knew otherwise. They were sure that this cliff had not been exposed to daylight since long before the most ancient memory of tribal man. Yet what they were looking at was undeniably a door!

The cliff was perhaps twenty feet high, stretching from one of the glacier-confining hills to the other. And in the center, where the face of the cliff had been cut so that it was as smooth as a brick wall, was the eight-by-five slab, obviously separate from the surrounding rock.

A door — but with no convenient doorknob on it. “How would it open?” mused Lini.

“Woman’s curiosity,” said Brent, jeeringly, yet with an undertone of uneasiness. “Who would want to open it? What could it open on?”

“That’s what I’d like to find out,” said Lini. She bent close to the slab, set flush with the smooth black cliff. With sharp, young eyes she went over it. “Here’s a spot that’s smoothed inward, as if a lot of fingers had rubbed at it,” she announced. She pressed hard. Nothing happened.

“Silly,” said Brent. “Expecting some kind of secret spring when this door couldn’t have been built by any but ancient Indians without even Stone-Age knowledge—” He stopped. The door was swinging on a central pivot. Lini screamed. She had pressed at that smoothed spot with her right hand, and then her foot had slipped so that her left hand thrust, for support, against a section of the slab in about the same location on the left side. “Brent!” She was falling inward through the opening. Her left hand clutched at the edge of the door, slipped from it.

“Brent!” She banged her head. And it was lights out!