'THE SILENT PLACES’

Southland Times, Issue 17619, 6 April 1914, Page 2

'THE SILENT PLACES’

S. E. WHITE’S STORY. The journeying of two man hunter* into the great white waste of snow and ice beyond the utmost forest through which the Hudson Bay Company sent its trappers is the simple burden about and around which Stewart Edward While weaves the story of “The Silent Places," which lias just been published in the cheap edition series by Hodder and Stoughton. The story opens upon an evening vista of a trading port on tho bank of the river Moose. Galen Albert has called two hunters to him. and these men listen without comment to the order which is to send them out into the silent places in the dead of winter upon the ( trail of a renegade Indian who has failed to account for his debt at the port, "Holil on.” lie says as the men move away to their preparations for the long journey, “1 want no doubt. If you accept this, you must not fail. Either you must come back with the Indian, or you need not come back at all. I won’t accept any excuses for failure. I won’t accept any failure. It does not matter if it taftes ten years. I want that man.” And so Dick Herron, a youth of enormous strength and endurance, and Sam Bolton, a veteran woodsman, launch their canoe and set off into the wilderness, over which grey, sullen winter is already muttering her dread ■warnings, Tiie early stages of their journey are fraught with a great deal of incident, and the hunting of game, the meeting with migrating Indians and the cunning subterfuges, to which the hunters have to resort in order that the nature of their mission may not be guessed by the suspicious braves, all go to give colour to the hardship and danger which lie ahead of the travellers. Then there is May-may-gwan. the Ojilway girl, who takes a fancy to the young hunter and follows him into the wilderness, exciting sullen resentment in his breast, for lie knows tbat when the time comes for hard and fast travelling over vast plains of snow the girl will be a burden too heavy for men on such a mission to bear. The elder hunter also sees the difficulty but he knows that it would be inhuman to turn even a dog adrift in such a threatening wilderness, and that the girl must perforce follow the long trail with them. Mr White has a singularly fine gift for descriptive writing, and his account of the eight months’ journeying into tiie wilderness is accordingly animate and real. Finally there comes a time when the food is almost exhausted and the trail of the fleeing renegade is clear upon the hard crust of the snows. But the Indian lias four dogs’, a start, and the track of his sledge shows thatit is heavily laden. The. trail which the two men, the girl and three dogs are following wavers towards the south where the tribe of the renegade would give him protection, and then turns abruptly north into the vast treeless waste of snow and ice where strange phantasmagoria haunt the starving travellers, and tiie struggle for supremacy in the chase reaches its height. It is here that the old woodman, Sam Bolton. goes down and is left rolled in his rugs beneath the snow while Dick Herron staggers forward, the Ojilway girl ever in his tracks; ii is here that (he girl dies in the arms of the young hunter, who gives himself over to the madness of the sileni places. But the story does not end in disaster. At the moment when Herron is preparing to die «ie renegade, snow-blind and lost, stumbles, upon hi* rude encampment, and at the same moment the single herd of caribou, which roams over a waste two thousand miloß wide, troops across the horizon. Then there is tiie feasting, the saving of Bolton. the return to tiie twrt with the prisoner. and finally the formal report to tho fad or. But Mr White adds an eloquent note to the story when lie pictures the factor’s daughter. Virginia, leaning in the doorway listening to the songs of trappers and murmuring softly “Tiie greatness of my people." It is a good story and is well told, and the cheap edition should give it heightened popularity.