A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 22: what you’re looking at

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

ee ee ee te Ty rae aa gee We ta a, 22 A. MERRITT’S FANTASY look over his shoulder and be secretly proud of my steadier writing. The thing took such a hold on me that I finally got hold of a handwriting ex- pert, and showed him the photograph, and asked him to compare it with a speci- men of Cleve’s mature hand from a letter to me. And then I told him my memory of Darrell’s schoolboy writing. The expert was a kind man, and a tolerant man, and he considered my idea very carefully and I guess honestly. But afterward, he told me that a prepossession had got hold of me; that it wasn’t strange, because of my terrible experience in Dar- rell’s laboratory. But, he said, prepos- sessions ought to be guarded against be- cause they were apt to turn into obses- sions, and he advised me to take a long fest: =. He clearly thought I was a little off in the head because of my belief that I recog- nized Darrell’s hand in the scratchings upon the piece of wood found in British Columbia. For one thing, had Darrell ever been in British Columbia? That was a reasonable question. And it should have knocked my crazy theory flatter than flat. But it didn’t. I couldn't think of anything else. It got so that) it came between me and everything I did or was or could be. Finally, I decided to give way to it utterly. Meantime, I had been asking everyone I knew about a “smoking land” lying to the north of Alaska. But no one had ever heard of stich a thing, although T talked to @ good number of goldrush veterans, and to others who had mushed from one end of Alaska to the other. I got héld of ‘books, too, and after someone told me that such a term might occur in some of the Esquimaux folk tales, I dug up some of those. I found a lot of weird yarns of witchcraft and so forth, but never one small reference to the “‘smoking land.” Now, when a fellow has embarked on a long road, he usually refuses to admit that he has come to the end of it and found a blank wall or a falling-off place. And it was so with me. I decided that in the original Esquimau, there might be phrases which had not been properly translated. And so, to my own amazement, I found myself sitting up at night grinding away at odd books that try to give a phonetic reproduction of the Esquimaux speech. It was a hard job, but I managed to pick up a good many words and phrases; some of them I was grateful for later on. Those early studied opened my ears and enabled the actual lingo to sink in on my mind more easily when the right time came. What I am driving toward is the mo- ment when iv preoccupation with the thought of Ci veland Darrell and the pic- ture of that infernal piece of wood that was not wood, made me sell the ranch and start north. You will say that I should have known it was impossible for Darrell not to have been blasted into the most in- tensely microscopic bits, but on that one night, I was given a fairly thorough intro- duction to the impossible. I had seen a thunderbolt thrown by a human hand, so to speak! Besides, I never was very logi- cal. and I think I was tired of ranching, anyway. At any rate, I cleaned up a handsome profit on the sale of my place. I packed my warbag and hit the trail to nowhere .. . ‘I have to take some long steps, now. It would be pleasant to talk a great deal about the great white North; and I could tell some longish tales about some of the ex- periences I had learning to punch dogs over the long northern trails, and the men T met. I kept at it for more than a year, but by the end of that time, I found myself at Point Barrow, back on a trail that I had been over before—so many times, in fact, that already the old-timers would grin when they saw me, and start passing re- marks. My job was hopeless and bad enough, anvway, but it got a great deal worse when I came among fellows who would say to me: “Why, of course I’ve heard of the ‘smoking land’ and the way I heard of it was like this—” And then would follow a long gag the en! of which was a big laugh at my ex- pense. They said that I won my _ nick- name of Smoky because I had been so long in the Smoking Land. They cracked a lot of other poor jokes about me and my foolish hobby, if you can call a hungry, driving passion like that a hobby. But nothing out of that year really mat- ters, down to the time when my Esquimau EComichbooks;com, :