Books: Nomads Of The North
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James Oliver Curwood >> Nomads Of The North
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"My Gawd! Miki--I'VE GOT A FAM'LY!"
And Miki tried to understand.
That night, after supper, he saw Challoner unbraid Nanette's
glorious hair, and brush it. They laughed like two happy children.
Miki tried still harder to understand.
When Challoner went to go to his tent in the edge of the forest he
took Nanette in his arms, and kissed her, and stroked her shining
hair; and Nanette took his face between her hands and smiled and
almost cried in her joy.
After that Miki DID understand. He knew that happiness had come to
all who were in that cabin.
Now that his world was settled, Miki took once more to hunting.
The thrill of the trail came back to him, and wider and wider grew
his range from the cabin. Again he followed Le Beau's old
trapline. But the traps were sprung now. He had lost a great deal
of his old caution. He had grown fatter. He no longer scented
danger in every whiff of the wind. It was in the third week of
Challoner's stay at the cabin, the day which marked the end of the
cold spell and the beginning of warm weather, that Miki came upon
an old dead-fall in a swamp a full ten miles from the clearing. Le
Beau had set it for lynx, but nothing had touched the bait, which
was a chunk of caribou flesh, frozen solid as a rock. Curiously
Miki began smelling of it. He no longer feared danger. Menace had
gone out of his world. He nibbled. He pulled--and the log crashed
down to break his back. Only by a little did it fail. For twenty-
four hours it held him helpless and crippled. Then, fighting
through all those hours, he dragged himself out from under it.
With the rising temperature a soft snow had fallen, covering all
tracks and trails. Through this snow Miki dragged himself, leaving
a path like that of an otter in the mud, for his hind quarters
were helpless. His back was not broken; it was temporarily
paralyzed by the blow and the weight of the log.
He made in the direction of the cabin, but every foot that he
dragged himself was filled with agony, and his progress was so
slow that at the end of an hour he had not gone more than a
quarter of a mile. Another night found him less than two miles
from the deadfall. He pulled himself under a shelter of brush and
lay there until dawn. All through that day he did not move. The
next, which was the fourth since he had left the cabin to hunt,
the pain in his back was not so great. But he could pull himself
through the snow only a few yards at a time. Again the good spirit
of the forests favoured him for in the afternoon he came upon the
partly eaten carcass of a buck killed by the wolves. The flesh was
frozen but he gnawed at it ravenously. Then he found himself a
shelter under a mass of fallen tree-tops, and for ten days
thereafter he lay between life and death. He would have died had
it not been for the buck. To the carcass he managed to drag
himself, sometimes each day and sometimes every other day, and
kept himself from starving. It was the end of the second week
before he could stand well on his feet. The fifteenth day he
returned to the cabin.
In the edge of the clearing there fell upon him slowly a
foreboding of great change. The cabin was there. It was no
different than it had been fifteen days ago. But out of the
chimney there came no smoke, and the windows were white with
frost. About it the snow lay clean and white, like an unspotted
sheet. He made his way hesitatingly across the clearing to the
door. There were no tracks. Drifted snow was piled high over the
sill. He whined, and scratched at the door. There was no answer.
And he heard no sound.
He went back into the edge of the timber, and waited. He waited
all through that day, going occasionally to the cabin, and
smelling about it, to convince himself that he had not made a
mistake. When darkness came he hollowed himself out a bed in the
fresh snow close to the door and lay there all through the night.
Day came again, gray and empty and still there was no smoke from
the chimney or sound from within the log walls, and at last he
knew that Challoner and Nanette and the baby were gone. But he was
hopeful. He no longer listened for sound from within the cabin,
but watched and listened for them to come from out of the forest.
He made short quests, hunting now on this side and now on that of
the cabin, sniffing futilely at the fresh and trackless snow and
pointing the wind for minutes at a time. In the afternoon, with a
forlorn slouch to his body, he went deeper into the forest to hunt
for a rabbit. When he had killed and eaten his supper he returned
again and slept a second night in the burrow beside the door. A
third day and a third night he remained, and the third night he
heard the wolves howling under a clear and star-filled sky, and
from him there came his first cry--a yearning, grief-filled cry
that rose wailingly out of the clearing; the entreaty for his
master, for Nanette, and the baby. It was not an answer to the
wolves. In its note there was a trembling fear, the voicing of a
thing that had grown into hopelessness.
And now there settled upon him a loneliness greater than any
loneliness he had ever known. Something seemed to whisper to his
canine brain that all he had seen and felt had been but a dream,
and that he was face to face with his old world again, its
dangers, its vast and soul-breaking emptiness, its friendlessness,
its ceaseless strife for existence. His instincts, dulled by the
worship of what the cabin had held, became keenly alive. He sensed
again the sharp thrill of danger, which comes of ALONENESS, and
his old caution fell upon him, so that the fourth day he slunk
around the edge of the clearing like a wolf.
The fifth night he did not sleep in the clearing but found himself
a windfall a mile back in the forest. That night he had strange
and troubled dreams. They were not of Challoner, or of Nanette and
the baby, nor were they of the fight and the unforgettable things
he had seen at the Post. His dreams were of a high and barren
ridge smothered in deep snow, and of a cavern that was dark and
deep. Again he was with his brother and comrade of days that were
gone--Neewa the bear. He was trying to waken him, and he could
feel the warmth of his body and hear his sleepy, protesting
grunts. And then, later, he was fighting again in the paradise of
black currants, and with Neewa was running for his life from the
enraged she-bear who had invaded their coulee. When he awoke
suddenly from out of these dreams he was trembling and his muscles
were tense. He growled in the darkness. His eyes were round balls
of searching fire. He whined softly and yearningly in that pit of
gloom under the windfall, and for a moment or two he listened, for
he thought that Neewa might answer.
For a month after that night he remained near the cabin. At least
once each day, and sometimes at night, he would return to the
clearing. And more and more frequently he was thinking of Neewa.
Early in March came the Tiki-Swao--(the Big Thaw). For a week the
sun shone without a cloud in the sky. The air was warm. The snow
turned soft underfoot and on the sunny sides of slopes and ridges
it melted away into trickling streams or rolled down in "slides"
that were miniature avalanches. The world was vibrant with a new
thrill. It pulsed with the growing heart-beat of spring, and in
Miki's soul there arose slowly a new hope, a new impression a new
inspiration that was the thrilling urge of a wonderful instinct.
NEEWA WOULD BE WAKING NOW!
It came to him at last like a voice which he could understand. The
trickling music of the growing streams sang it to him; he heard it
in the warm winds that were no longer filled with the blast of
winter; he caught it in the new odours that were rising out of the
earth; he smelled it in the dank, sweet perfume of the black
woods-soil. The thing thrilled him. It called him. And he KNEW!
NEEWA WOULD BE WAKING NOW!
He responded to the call. It was in the nature of things that no
power less than physical force could hold him back. And yet he did
not travel as he had travelled from Challoner's camp to the cabin
of Nanette and the baby. There had been a definite object there,
something to achieve, something to spur him on to an immediate
fulfilment. Now the thing that drew him, at first, was an
overpowering impulse, not a reality. For two or three days his
trail westward was wandering and indefinite. Then it straightened
out, and early in the morning of the fifth day he came from a deep
forest into a plain, and across that plain he saw the ridge. For a
long time he gazed over the level space before he went on.
In his brain the pictures of Neewa were becoming clearer and
clearer. After all, it seemed only yesterday or the day before
that he had gone away from that ridge. Then it was smothered in
snow, and a gray, terrible gloom had settled upon the earth. Now
there was but little snow, and the sun was shining, and the sky
was blue again. He went on, and sniffed along the foot of the
ridge; he had not forgotten the way. He was not excited, because
time had ceased to have definite import for him. Yesterday he had
come down from that ridge, and to-day he was going back. He went
straight to the mouth of Neewa's den, which was uncovered now, and
thrust in his head and shoulders, and sniffed. Ah! but that lazy
rascal of a bear was a sleepy-head! He was still sleeping. Miki
could smell him. Listening hard, he could HEAR him.
He climbed over the low drift of snow that had packed itself in
the neck of the cavern and entered confidently into the darkness.
He heard a soft, sleepy grunt and a great sigh. He almost stumbled
over Neewa, who had changed his bed. Again Neewa grunted, and Miki
whined. He ran his muzzle into Neewa's fresh, new coat of spring
fur and smelled his way to Neewa's ear. After all, it was only
yesterday! And he remembered everything now! So he gave Neewa's
ear a sudden sharp nip with his teeth, and then he barked in that
low, throaty way that Neewa had always understood.
"Wake up, Neewa," it all said. "Wake up! The snow is gone, and
it's fine out to-day. WAKE UP!"
And Neewa, stretching himself, gave a great yawn.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Meshaba, the old Cree, sat on the sunny side of a rock on the
sunny side of a slope that looked up and down the valley. Meshaba
--who many, many years ago had been called The Giant--was very old.
He was so old that even the Factor's books over at Fort O' God had
no record of his birth; nor the "post logs" at Albany House, or
Cumberland House, or Norway House, or Fort Churchill. Perhaps
farther north, at Lac La Biche, at Old Fort Resolution, or at Fort
McPherson some trace of him might have been found. His skin was
crinkled and weather-worn, like dry buckskin, and over his brown,
thin face his hair fell to his shoulders, snow-white. His hands
were thin, even his nose was thin with the thinness of age. But
his eyes were still like dark garnets, and down through the
greater part of a century their vision had come undimmed.
They roved over the valley now. At Meshaba's back, a mile on the
other side of the ridge, was the old trapper's cabin, where he
lived alone. The winter had been long and cold, and in his
gladness at the coming of spring Meshaba had come up the ridge to
bask in the sun and look out over the changing world. For an hour
his eyes had travelled up and down the valley like the eyes of an
old and wary hawk. The dark spruce and cedar forest edged in the
far side of the valley; between that and the ridge rolled the
meadowy plain--still covered with melting snow in places, and in
others bare and glowing, a dull green in the sunlight. From where
he sat Meshaba could also see a rocky scarp of the ridge that
projected out into the plain a hundred yards away. But this did
not interest him, except that if it had not been in his line of
vision he could have seen a mile farther down the valley.
In that hour of Sphinx-like watching, while the smoke curled
slowly up from his black pipe, Meshaba had seen life. Half a mile
from where he was sitting a band of caribou had come out of the
timber and wandered into a less distant patch of low bush. They
had not thrilled his old blood with the desire to kill, for there
was already a fresh carcass hung up at the back of his cabin.
Still farther away he had seen a hornless moose, so grotesque in
its spring ugliness that the parchment-like skin of his face had
cracked for half an instant in a smile, and out of him had come a
low and appreciative grunt; for Meshaba, in spite of his age,
still had a sense of humour left. Once he had seen a wolf, and
twice a fox, and now his eyes were on an eagle high over his head.
Meshaba would not have shot that eagle, for year after year it had
come down through time with him, and it was always there soaring
in the sun when spring came. So Meshaba grunted as he watched it,
and was glad that Upisk had not died during the winter.
"Kata y ati sisew," he whispered to himself, a glow of
superstition in his fiery eyes. "We have lived long together, and
it is fated that we die together, Oh Upisk. The spring has come
for us many times, and soon the black winter will swallow us up
for ever."
His eyes shifted slowly, and then they rested on the scarp of the
ridge that shut out his vision. His heart gave a sudden thump in
his body. His pipe fell from his mouth to his hand; and he stared
without moving, stared like a thing of rock.
On a flat sunlit shelf not more than eighty or ninety yards away
stood a young black bear. In the warm glow of the sunlight the
bear's spring coat shone like polished jet. But it was not the
sudden appearance of the bear that amazed Meshaba. It was the fact
that another animal was standing shoulder to shoulder with
Wakayoo, and that it was not a brother bear, but a huge wolf.
Slowly one of his thin hands rose to his eyes and he wiped away
what he thought must surely be a strange something that was
fooling his vision. In all his eighty years and odd he had never
known a wolf to be thus friendly with a bear. Nature had made them
enemies. Nature had fore-doomed their hatred to be the deepest
hatred of the forests. Therefore, for a space, Meshaba doubted his
eyes. But in another moment he saw that the miracle had truly come
to pass. For the wolf turned broadside to him and it WAS a wolf! A
huge, big-boned beast that stood as high at the shoulders as
Wakayoo, the bear; a great beast, with a great head, and--
It was then that Meshaba's heart gave another thump, for the tail
of a wolf is big and bushy in the springtime, and the tail of this
beast was as bare of hair as a beaver's tail!
"Ohne moosh!" gasped Meshaba, under his breath--"a dog!"
He seemed to draw slowly into himself, slinking backward. His
rifle stood just out of reach on the other side of the rock.
At the other end of that eighty or ninety yards Neewa and Miki
stood blinking in the bright sunlight, with the mouth of the
cavern in which Neewa had slept so many months just behind them.
Miki was puzzled. Again it seemed to him that it was only
yesterday, and not months ago, that he had left Neewa in that den,
sleeping his lazy head off. And now that he had returned to him
after his own hard winter in the forests he was astonished to find
Neewa so big. For Neewa had grown steadily through his four
months' nap and he was half again as big as when he went to sleep.
Could Miki have spoken Cree, and had Meshaba given him the
opportunity, he might have explained the situation.
"You see, Mr. Indian"--he might have said--"this dub of a bear and
I have been pals from just about the time we were born. A man
named Challoner tied us together first when Neewa, there, was just
about as big as your head, and we did a lot of scrapping before we
got properly acquainted. Then we got lost, and after that we
hitched up like brothers; and we had a lot of fun and excitement
all through last summer, until at last, when the cold weather
came, Neewa hunted up this hole in the ground and the lazy cuss
went to sleep for all winter. I won't mention what happened to me
during the winter. It was a-plenty. So this spring I had a hunch
it was about time for Neewa to get the cobwebs out of his fool
head, and came back. And--here we are! But tell me this: WHAT
MAKES NEEWA SO BIG?"
It was at least that thought--the bigness of Neewa--that was
filling Miki's head at the present moment. And Meshaba, in place
of listening to an explanation, was reaching for his rifle--while
Neewa, with his brown muzzle sniffing the wind, was gathering in a
strange smell. Of the three, Neewa saw nothing to be wondered at
in the situation itself. When he had gone to sleep four and a half
months ago Miki was at his side; and to-day, when he awoke, Miki
was still at his side. The four and a half months meant nothing to
him. Many times he and Miki had gone to sleep, and had awakened
together. For all the knowledge he had of time it might have been
only last night that he had fallen asleep.
The one thing that made Neewa uneasy now was that strange odour he
had caught in the air. Instinctively he seized upon it as a
menace--at least as something that he would rather NOT smell than
smell. So he turned away with a warning WOOF to Miki. When Meshaba
peered around the edge of the rock, expecting an easy shot, he
caught only a flash of the two as they were disappearing. He fired
quickly.
To Miki and Neewa the report of the rifle and the moaning whirr of
the bullet over their backs recalled memories of a host of things,
and Neewa settled down to that hump-backed, flat-eared flight of
his that kept Miki pegging along at a brisk pace for at least a
mile. Then Neewa stopped, puffing audibly. Inasmuch as he had had
nothing to eat for a third of a year, and was weak from long
inactivity, the run came within an ace of putting him out of
business. It was several minutes before he could gather his wind
sufficiently to grunt. Miki, meanwhile, was carefully smelling of
him from his rump to his muzzle. There was apparently nothing
missing, for he gave a delighted little yap at the end, and, in
spite of his size and the dignity of increased age, he began
frisking about Neewa In a manner emphatically expressive of his
joy at his comrade's awakening.
"It's been a deuce of a lonely winter, Neewa, and I'm tickled to
death to see you on your feet again," his antics said. "What'll we
do? Go for a hunt?"
This seemed to be the thought in Neewa's mind, for he headed
straight up the valley until they came to an open fen where he
proceeded to quest about for a dinner of roots and grass; and as
he searched he grunted--grunted in his old, companionable, cubbish
way. And Miki, hunting with him, found that once more the
loneliness had gone out of his world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
To Miki and Neewa, especially Neewa, there seemed nothing
extraordinary in the fact that they were together again, and that
their comradeship was resumed. Although during his months of
hibernation Neewa's body had grown, his mind had not changed its
memories or its pictures. It had not passed through a mess of
stirring events such as had made the winter a thrilling one for
Miki, and so it was Neewa who accepted the new situation most
casually. He went on feeding as if nothing at all unusual had
happened during the past four months, and after the edge had gone
from his first hunger he fell into his old habit of looking to
Miki for leadership. And Miki fell into the old ways as though
only a day or a week and not four months had lapsed in their
brotherhood. It is possible that he tried mightily to tell Neewa
what had happened. At least he must have had that desire--to let
him know in what a strange way he had found his old master,
Challoner, and how he had lost him again. And also how he found
the woman, Nanette, and the little baby Nanette, and how for a
long time he had lived with them and loved them as he had never
loved anything else on earth.
It was the old cabin, far to the north and east, that drew him
now--the cabin in which Nanette and the baby had lived; and it was
toward this cabin that he lured Neewa during the first two weeks
of their hunting. They did not travel quickly, largely because of
Neewa's voracious spring appetite and the fact that it consumed
nine tenths of his waking hours to keep full on such provender as
roots and swelling buds and grass. During the first week Miki grew
either hopeless or disgusted in his hunting. One day he killed
five rabbits and Neewa ate four of them and grunted piggishly for
more.
If Miki had stood amazed and appalled at Neewa's appetite in the
days of their cubhood and puppyhood a year ago, he was more than
astounded now, for in the matter of food Neewa was a bottomless
pit. On the other hand he was jollier than ever, and in their
wrestling matches he was almost more than a match for Miki, being
nearly again as heavy. He very soon acquired the habit of taking
advantage of this superiority of weight, and at unexpected moments
he would hop on Miki and pin him to the ground, his fat body
smothering him like a huge soft cushion, and his arms holding him
until at times Miki could scarcely squirm. Now and then, hugging
him in this embrace, he would roll over and over, both of them
snarling and growling as though in deadly combat. This play,
though he was literally the under dog, delighted Miki until one
day they rolled over the edge of a deep ravine and crashed in a
dog-and-bear avalanche to the bottom. After that, for a long time,
Neewa did not roll with his victim. Whenever Miki wanted to end a
bout, however, all he had to do was to give Neewa a sharp nip with
his long fangs and the bear would uncoil himself and hop to his
feet like a spring. He had a most serious respect for Miki's
teeth.
But Miki's greatest moments of joy were where Neewa stood up man-
fashion. Then was a real tussle. And his greatest hours of disgust
were when Neewa stretched himself out in a tree for a nap.
It was the beginning of the third week before they came one day to
the cabin. There was no change in it, and Miki's body sagged
disconsolately as he and Neewa looked at it from the edge of the
clearing. No smoke, no sign of life, and the window was broken
now--probably by an inquisitive bear or a wolverine. Miki went to
the window and stood up to it, sniffing inside. The SMELL was
still there--so faint that he could only just detect it. But that
was all. The big room was empty except for the stove, a table and
a few bits of rude furniture. All else was gone. Three or four
times during the next half hour Miki stood up at the window, and
at last Neewa--urged by his curiosity--did likewise. He also
detected the faint odour that was left in the cabin. He sniffed at
it for a long time. It was like the smell he had caught the day he
came out of his den--and yet different. It was fainter, more
elusive, and not so unpleasant.
For a month thereafter Miki insisted on hunting in the vicinity of
the cabin, held there by the "pull" of the thing which he could
neither analyze nor quite understand. Neewa accepted the situation
good-naturedly for a time. Then he lost patience and surrendered
himself to a grouch for three whole days during which he wandered
at his own sweet will. To preserve the alliance Miki was compelled
to follow him. Berry time--early July--found them sixty miles
north and west of the cabin, in the edge of the country where
Neewa was born.
But there were few berries that summer of bebe nak um geda (the
summer of drought and fire). As early as the middle of July a
thin, gray film began to hover in palpitating waves over the
forests. For three weeks there had been no rain. Even the nights
were hot and dry. Each day the factors at their posts looked out
with anxious eyes over their domains, and by the first of August
every post had a score of halfbreeds and Indians patrolling the
trails on the watch for fire. In their cabins and teepees the
forest dwellers who had not gone to pass the summer at the posts
waited and watched; each morning and noon and night they climbed
tall trees and peered through that palpitating gray film for a
sign of smoke. For weeks the wind came steadily from the south and
west, parched as though swept over the burning sands of a desert.
Berries dried up on the bushes; the fruit of the mountain ash
shriveled on its stems; creeks ran dry; swamps turned into baked
peat, and the poplar leaves hung wilted and lifeless, too limp to
rustle in the breeze. Only once or twice in a lifetime does the
forest dweller see poplar leaves curl up and die like that, baked
to death in the summer sun. It is Kiskewahoon (the Danger Signal).
Not only the warning of possible death in a holocaust of fire, but
the omen of poor hunting and trapping in the winter to come.
Miki and Neewa were in a swamp country when the fifth of August
came. In the lowland it was sweltering. Neewa's tongue hung from
his mouth, and Miki was panting as they made their way along a
black and sluggish stream that was like a great ditch and as dead
as the day itself. There was no visible sun, but a red and lurid
glow filled the sky--the sun struggling to fight its way through
the smothering film that had grown thicker over the earth. Because
they were in a "pocket"--a sweep of tangled country lower than the
surrounding country--Neewa and Miki were not caught in this
blackening cloud. Five miles away they might have heard the
thunder of cloven hoofs and the crash of heavy bodies in their
flight before the deadly menace of fire. As it was they made their
way slowly through the parched swamp, so that it was midday when
they came out of the edge of it and up through a green fringe of
timber to the top of a ridge. Before this hour neither had passed
through the horror of a forest fire. But it seized upon them now.
It needed no past experience. The cumulative instinct of a
thousand generations leapt through their brains and bodies. Their
world was in the grip of Iskootao (the Fire Devil). To the south
and the east and the west it was buried in a pall like the
darkness of night, and out of the far edge of the swamp through
which they had come they caught the first livid spurts of flame.
From that direction, now that they were out of the "pocket," they
felt a hot wind, and with that wind came a dull and rumbling roar
that was like the distant moaning of a cataract. They waited, and
watched, struggling to get their bearings, their minds fighting
for a few moments in the gigantic process of changing instinct
into reasoning and understanding. Neewa, being a bear, was
afflicted with the near-sightedness of his breed, and he could see
neither the black tornado of smoke bearing down upon them nor the
flames leaping out of the swamp. But he could SMELL, and his nose
was twisted into a hundred wrinkles, and even ahead of Miki he was
ready for flight. But Miki, whose vision was like a hawk's, stood
as if fascinated.
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