But there were compensations. Two men cannot eat out of the same pot--figuratively speaking--sleep huddled close together for the warmth that is in their bodies, hear no voices but their own, exert a common effort to a common end day after day, until the days become weeks and the weeks marshal themselves into calendar months--no two men born of woman can sustain this enforced intimacy over a long period without acquiring a positive attitude toward each other. They achieve a contemptuous tolerance, or they achieve a rare and lasting friendship. It was the fortune of Tommy Ashe and Wesley Thompson to cultivate the latter. They arrived at it by degrees, in many forty-below-zero camps along the Peace, in the shadow of those towering mountains where the Peace cuts through the backbone of North America. It grew out of mutual respect, a wordless sense of understanding, a conviction that each did his best to play the game fair and square.
So that, as they worked westward and gave over their toboggan on the waters of a stream far beyond the Rockies, when Spring began to touch the North with her magic wand they grew merry, galvanized by the spirit of adventure. They could laugh, and sometimes they could sing. And they planned largely, with the sanguine air of youth. On the edges--not in the depths--of that wild and rugged land where manifold natural resources lay untouched, it seemed as if a man had but to try hard enough in order to succeed. They had conquered an ominous stretch of wilderness. They would conquer with equal facility whatever barriers they found between them and fortune.
The sweep of Spring's progress across the land found them west of the Coast Range by May, in a wild and forbidding region where three major streams--the Skeena, the Stikine, and the Naas--take their rise. For many days their advance was through grim canyons, over precipitous slopes, across glaciers, bearing always westward, until the maps with which Tommy Ashe was equipped showed them they were descending the Stikine. Here they rested in a country full of game animals and birds and fish, until the height of the spring torrents had passed. During this time they fashioned a canoe out of a cedar tree, big enough to carry them and the dogs which had served so faithfully as pack animals over that last mountainous stretch. The Stikine was swift and forbidding, but navigable. Thus at last, in the first days of the salmon run, they came out upon tidewater, down to Wrangel by the sea.