The air was wet, cool, refreshing. I looked about. In places the slopes
were visible as far as the timberline and even before. In others the
gray pall remained. Somewhere out of it I heard a voice calling my
name, more loudly with each repetition. My eyes tried to bore through
the haze and shortly a stocky figure detached itself from it, coming
towards me. It was Johnny Eagle, his eyes more luminous than I had ever
seen them.
"I've found the Twins," he said simply and plunged back into the mist
with me close behind.
I stumbled eagerly up the slope for nearly two hundred yards. Johnny
Eagle was standing on a boulder, pointing north through a great break
in the low ceiling of cloud. I looked, my heart racing wildly. There
they were towering in the sky, the Twins, as similar as though they
were a double image seen in a badly focussed lens. I judged them to be
three miles off.
I yelled for Johnny to stay put while I scrambled down the slope,
ripping my pants and scraping my knees as my legs gave way under me in
a patch of loose scree. Back at the plane I found the pilot putting up
a makeshift antenna.
"Get Burns Lake quick," I ordered between gasps. "Ask for Armstrong."
Armstrong was elated but grimly realistic. "This must be it, Arnold; it
has to be."
I knew what he meant. This was our last lead; there wouldn't be time
for more.
Armstrong asked whether I could move out up to the peaks and radio
a report to him. I looked out of the cabin ports. Night had fallen
quickly, but in the cloud blankets the clefts were widening to let
feeble patches of starlight show through.
"I'll start right away," I assured Armstrong. "It's clearing here."
Johnny Eagle scouted around the lake till he found a stream flowing
from the direction of the Twin Peaks. With it as a guide we set
off, panting as we stumbled, slipped, crawled along and wincing as
needle-pointed evergreens stung our faces.
Sometimes the stream twisted out of sight, but Johnny pushed on
with the ancient woodland canniness of the great Frog tribe. There
were times, though, when this mystic sense deserted him and we stood
perplexed and barely visible to each other a foot away. We waited,
then, for some sudden glimmer to reveal our guiding stream.
* * * * *
My weary legs soon told me my estimate of four miles to the Twins was
way off. About midnight we broke out of the forest wilderness high
up on the timber line. The night was brilliantly clear by this time;
sharply etched shadows of dark pines lay about us. Towering into the
starry skies were our Peaks, their upper reaches capped with snow,
with here and there a thick dark scar where a fissure lay in shadow.
For the first time I saw the Twins were joined, Siamese-wise, by a low
truncated mass.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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