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.

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 TeSys 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 I talked to @ good number of goldrush veterans, and to others who had mushed from one end of Alaska to the other. I got hdld 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 varns 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 1v 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 cogs over the long northern trails, and the men I 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, anyway, 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 endl 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 Eomichooks:com «<