A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 30: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

i 30 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY of my poor bearer—wondered what had happened to him after he had fled from the dog’s vicious rush, and if he had suffered much before the snow and wind and cold finally did for him. I sat down and waited for another hour, and by the end of that time, I knew that I had lost my outlander.. Wherever he was outside of the house, unless he had managed to free his hands, he was dead by this time. There was no remorse in me for his sake, or very little. Because I told myself that whatever or wherever the Smoking Land, might be, it was a place from which this rascal had fled in order to escape from them, whoever they might be. That was why he had been so desperately eager to go south, that was why he was willing to take such low wages and throw in the services of his man-hunting dog. Yes, there must be crime behind him, a crime of such proportions that it had bounded him out of my hut and made him throw himself away in the storm. But how I cursed myself that I had not managed to tear his secrets out of his un- willing mouth. I knew now that there zas a Smoking Land to be reached. And noth- ing more. So far as I knew there were merely some islands to the north, none of them a Smoking Land, and the rest of the wide waste stretching to the Pole was sea-ice. What fool would adventure blindly out on that ice, on that shifting, cruel trail? The blizzard lasted another full day, When it ended, I went out and found, first and foremost, two of my dogs dead and half eaten; and near one of the car- casses, with the telltale red stain still about its muzzle and breast, was the manzhunt- ing dog of the lost Esquimau. I got out my gun, but at the sight of it the big dog simply ran a little distance and then stopped. I almost laughed, angry and fierce as I was at the dog’s idiotic notion that a gun eould not kill at that short distance. But while I hesitated, it came back, whining, and then turned away and jogged off in the direction it had taken before, plainly asking me to follow. So, after fastening on my snow shoes, I trekked along behind him. _ I guessed what the trail would be, and when the direction continued straight south, I knew that it was after the Esqui- mau that we were voyaging. We went two or three miles before the dog stopped and scratched at the snow. There I started digging, and a yard under the frozen upper crust, I found the man from Smoking Land lying peacefully asleep, and forever. There was no pain in his face, but a dreary, blurred, frozen expression. There was nothing I could do except to examine his clothes and find what I could that might help me afterwards. But I found nothing at all—there was only that magnificent suit of furs. So I took those furs. I’m afraid that it sounds ghoulish, but before me was a trail the mere thought of which stopped my heart. And if this man had come from the Smoking Land, prob- ably I would need just such body covering to keep me from freezing on the way. I took the furs, therefore, and when I had stripped him, I found, exactly in the cen- ter of his breast, a mark that looked like a rudely shaped M. It was not a very old scar. It was puckered blue, but it had the look of a cut that had been made within a few months at the outside. And I took to wondering what that letter could stand for. M could stand for month, or merry, or a-lot of other things. But in English speech it would generally stand for mur- der. And that fitted in with my own guesses about him. Go I went back to my team gloomy and grim. My problem was beginning to be more and more complicated. Had this man been branded for a crime—and driven out from the Smoking Land to perish? Was it only by chance that he had managed to make the mainland? But, if that was so, what manner of people were they in the Smoking Land— who practiced the use of the alphabet as civilized people know it? It was another puzzler, and perhaps be- cause it came on top of so much other mystery, it seemed to me the most con- fusing and heartbreaking problem of all. From where I was, it was about three days to Point Barrow. I harnessed up and Se rae rE Ae mr St de ga SOE tae ee gm comilcbooks:co me