Running in cake-ice all the way, and several times escaping jams in the Yukon Flats, the barges made their hundreds of miles of progress farther into the north and froze up cheek by jowl with the grub-fleet.Here, inside the Arctic Circle, Old Tarwater settled down to pass the long winter.Several hours' work a day, chopping firewood for the steamboat companies, sufficed to keep him in food.For the rest of the time there was nothing to do but hibernate in his log cabin.
Warmth, rest, and plenty to eat, cured his hacking cough and put him in as good physical condition as was possible for his advanced years.But, even before Christmas, the lack of fresh vegetables caused scurvy to break out, and disappointed adventurer after disappointed adventurer took to his bunk in abject surrender to this culminating misfortune.Not so Tarwater.Even before the first symptoms appeared on him, he was putting into practice his one prescription, namely, exercise.From the junk of the old trading post he resurrected a number of rusty traps, and from one of the steamboat captains he borrowed a rifle.
Thus equipped, he ceased from wood-chopping, and began to makemore than a mere living.Nor was he downhearted when the scurvy broke out on his own body.Ever he ran his trap-lines and sang his ancient chant.Nor could the pessimist shake his surety of the three hundred thousand of Alaskan gold he as going to shake out of the moss- roots.
"But this ain't gold-country," they told him.
"Gold is where you find it, son, as I should know who was mining before you was born, 'way back in Forty-Nine," was his reply."What was Bonanza Creek but a moose-pasture? No miner'd look at it; yet they washed five-hundred-dollar pans and took out fifty million dollars.Eldorado was just as bad.For all you know, right under this here cabin, or right over the next hill, is millions just waiting for a lucky one like me to come and shake it out."At the end of January came his disaster.Some powerful animal that he decided was a bob-cat, managing to get caught in one of his smaller traps, dragged it away.A heavy snow-fall put a stop midway to his pursuit, losing the trail for him and losing himself.There were but several hours of daylight each day between the twenty hours of intervening darkness, and his efforts in the grey light and continually falling snow succeeded only in losing him more thoroughly.Fortunately, when winter snow falls in the Northland the thermometer invariably rises; so, instead of the customary forty and fifty and even sixty degrees below zero, the temperature remained fifteen below.Also, he was warmly clad and had a full matchbox.Further to mitigate his predicament, on the fifth day he killed a wounded moose that weighed over half a ton.Making his camp beside it on a spruce-bottom, he was prepared to last out the winter, unless a searching party found him or his scurvy grew worse.
But at the end of two weeks there had been no sign of search, while his scurvy had undeniably grown worse.Against his fire, banked from outer cold by a shelter-wall of spruce-boughs, he crouched long hours in sleep and long hours in waking.But the waking hours grew less, becoming semi-waking or half-dreaming hours as the process of hibernation worked their way with him.Slowly the sparkle point of consciousness and identity that was John Tarwater sank, deeper and deeper, into theprofounds of his being that had been compounded ere man was man, and while he was becoming man, when he, first of all animals, regarded himself with an introspective eye and laid the beginnings of morality in foundations of nightmare peopled by the monsters of his own ethic- thwarted desires.
Like a man in fever, waking to intervals of consciousness, so Old Tarwater awoke, cooked his moose-meat, and fed the fire; but more and more time he spent in his torpor, unaware of what was day-dream and what was sleep-dream in the content of his unconsciousness.And here, in the unforgetable crypts of man's unwritten history, unthinkable and unrealizable, like passages of nightmare or impossible adventures of lunacy, he encountered the monsters created of man's first morality that ever since have vexed him into the spinning of fantasies to elude them or do battle with them.
In short, weighted by his seventy years, in the vast and silent loneliness of the North, Old Tarwater, as in the delirium of drug or anaesthetic, recovered within himself, the infantile mind of the child-man of the early world.It was in the dusk of Death's fluttery wings that Tarwater thus crouched, and, like his remote forebear, the child-man, went to myth-making, and sun-heroizing, himself hero-maker and the hero in quest of the immemorable treasure difficult of attainment.
Either must he attain the treasure - for so ran the inexorable logic of the shadow-land of the unconscious - or else sink into the all-devouring sea, the blackness eater of the light that swallowed to extinction the sun each night...the sun that arose ever in rebirth next morning in the east, and that had become to man man's first symbol of immortality through rebirth.All this, in the deeps of his unconsciousness (the shadowy western land of descending light), was the near dusk of Death down into which he slowly ebbed.
But how to escape this monster of the dark that from within him slowly swallowed him? Too deep-sunk was he to dream of escape or feel the prod of desire to escape.For him reality had ceased.Nor from within the darkened chamber of himself could reality recrudesce.His years were too heavy upon him, the debility of disease and the lethargy andtorpor of the silence and the cold were too profound.Only from without could reality impact upon him and reawake within him an awareness of reality.Otherwise he would ooze down through the shadow-realm of the unconscious into the all- darkness of extinction.
