Books: Nomads Of The North
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James Oliver Curwood >> Nomads Of The North
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With the morning Noozak rose to her feet, and with a grunting
command for Neewa to follow she slowly climbed the sun-capped
ridge. She was in no mood for travel, but away back in her head
was an unexpressed fear that villainous old Makoos might return,
and she knew that another fight would do her up entirely, in which
event Makoos would make a breakfast of Neewa. So she urged herself
down the other side of the ridge, across a new valley, and through
a cut that opened like a wide door into a rolling plain that was
made up of meadows and lakes and great sweeps of spruce and cedar
forest. For a week Noozak had been making for a certain creek in
this plain, and now that the presence of Makoos threatened behind
she kept at her journeying until Neewa's short, fat legs could
scarcely hold up his body.
It was mid-afternoon when they reached the creek, and Neewa was so
exhausted that he had difficulty in climbing the spruce up which
his mother sent him to take a nap. Finding a comfortable crotch he
quickly fell asleep--while Noozak went fishing.
The creek was alive with suckers, trapped in the shallow pools
after spawning, and within an hour she had the shore strewn with
them. When Neewa came down out of his cradle, just at the edge of
dusk, it was to a feast at which Noozak had already stuffed
herself until she looked like a barrel. This was his first meal of
fish, and for a week thereafter he lived in a paradise of fish. He
ate them morning, noon, and night, and when he was too full to eat
he rolled in them. And Noozak stuffed herself until it seemed her
hide would burst. Wherever they moved they carried with them a
fishy smell that grew older day by day, and the older it became
the more delicious it was to Neewa and his mother. And Neewa grew
like a swelling pod. In that week he gained three pounds. He had
given up nursing entirely now, for Noozak--being an old bear--had
dried up to a point where she was hopelessly disappointing.
It was early in the evening of the eighth day that Neewa and his
mother lay down in the edge of a grassy knoll to sleep after their
day's feasting. Noozak was by all odds the happiest old bear in
all that part of the northland. Food was no longer a problem for
her. In the creek, penned up in the pools, were unlimited
quantities of it, and she had encountered no other bear to
challenge her possession of it. She looked ahead to uninterrupted
bliss in their happy hunting grounds until midsummer storms
emptied the pools, or the berries ripened. And Neewa, a happy
little gourmand, dreamed with her.
It was this day, just as the sun was setting, that a man on his
hands and knees was examining a damp patch of sand five or six
miles down the creek. His sleeves were rolled up, baring his brown
arms halfway to the shoulders and he wore no hat, so that the
evening breeze ruffled a ragged head of blond hair that for a
matter of eight or nine months had been cut with a hunting knife.
Close on one side of this individual was a tin pail, and on the
other, eying him with the keenest interest, one of the homeliest
and yet one of the most companionable-looking dog pups ever born
of a Mackenzie hound father and a mother half Airedale and half
Spitz.
With this tragedy of blood in his veins nothing in the world could
have made the pup anything more than "just dog." His tail,--
stretched out straight on the sand, was long and lean, with a knot
at every joint; his paws, like an overgrown boy's feet, looked
like small boxing-gloves; his head was three sizes too big for his
body, and accident had assisted Nature in the perfection of her
masterpiece by robbing him of a half of one of his ears. As he
watched his master this half of an ear stood up like a galvanized
stub, while the other--twice as long--was perked forward in the
deepest and most interested enquiry. Head, feet, and tail were
Mackenzie hound, but the ears and his lank, skinny body was a
battle royal between Spitz and Airedale. At his present
inharmonious stage of development he was the doggiest dog-pup
outside the alleys of a big city.
For the first time in several minutes his master spoke, and Miki
wiggled from stem to stern in appreciation of the fact that it was
directly to him the words were uttered.
"It's a mother and a cub, as sure as you're a week old, Miki," he
said. "And if I know anything about bears they were here some time
to-day!"
He rose to his feet, made note of the deepening shadows in the
edge of the timber, and filled his pail with water. For a few
moments the last rays of the sun lit up his face. It was a strong,
hopeful face. In it was the joy of life. And now it was lighted up
with a sudden inspiration, and a glow that was not of the forest
alone came into his eyes, as he added:
"Miki, I'm lugging your homely carcass down to the Girl because
you're an unpolished gem of good nature and beauty--and for those
two things I know she'll love you. She is my sister, you know.
Now, if I could only take that cub along with you----"
He began to whistle as he turned with his pail of water in the
direction of a thin fringe of balsams a hundred yards away.
Close at his heels followed Miki.
Challoner, who was a newly appointed factor of the Great Hudson's
Bay Company, had pitched his camp at tie edge of the lake dose to
the mouth of the creek. There was not much to it--a battered tent,
a still more battered canoe, and a small pile of dunnage. But in
the last glow of the sunset it would have spoken volumes to a man
with an eye trained to the wear and the turmoil of the forests. It
was the outfit of a man who had gone unfearing to the rough edge
of the world. And now what was left of it was returning with him.
To Challoner there was something of human comradeship in these
remnants of things that had gone through the greater part of a
year's fight with him. The canoe was warped and battered and
patched; smoke and storm had blackened his tent until it was the
colour of rusty char, and his grub sacks were next to empty.
Over a small fire title contents of a pan and a pot were brewing
when he returned with Miki at his heels, and close to the heat was
a battered and mended reflector in which a bannock of flour and
water was beginning to brown. In one of the pots was coffee, in
the other a boiling fish.
Miki sat down on his angular haunches so that the odour of the
fish filled his nostrils. This, he had discovered, was the next
thing to eating. His eyes, as they followed Challoner's final
preparatory movements, were as bright as garnets, and every third
or fourth breath he licked his chops, and swallowed hungrily.
That, in fact, was why Miki had got his name. He was always
hungry, and apparently always empty, no matter how much he ate.
Therefore his name, Miki, "The drum."
It was not until they had eaten the fish and the bannock, and
Challoner had lighted his pipe, that he spoke what was in his
mind.
"To-morrow I'm going after that bear," he said.
Miki, curled up near the dying embers, gave his tail a club-like
thump in evidence of the fact that he was listening.
"I'm going to pair you up with the cub, and tickle the Girl to
death."
Miki thumped his tail harder than before.
"Fine," he seemed to say.
"Just think of it," said Challoner, looking over Miki's head a
thousand miles away, "Fourteen months--and at last we're going
home. I'm going to train you and the cub for that sister of mine.
Eh, won't you like that? You don't know what she's like, you
homely little devil, or you wouldn't sit there staring at me like
a totem-pole pup! And it isn't in your stupid head to imagine how
pretty she is. You saw that sunset to-night? Well, she's prettier
than THAT if she is my sister. Got anything to add to that, Miki?
If not, let's say our prayers and go to bed!"
Challoner rose and stretched himself. His muscles cracked. He felt
life surging like a giant within him.
And Miki, thumping his tail until this moment, rose on his
overgrown legs and followed his master into their shelter.
It was in the gray light of the early summer dawn when Challoner
came forth again, and rekindled the fire. Miki followed a few
moments later, and his master fastened the end of a worn tent-rope
around his neck and tied the rope to a sapling. Another rope of
similar length Challoner tied to the corners of a grub sack so
that it could be carried over his shoulder like a game bag. With
the first rose-flush of the sun he was ready for the trail of
Neewa and his mother. Miki set up a melancholy wailing when he
found himself left behind, and when Challoner looked back the pup
was tugging and somersaulting at the end of his rope like a
jumping-jack. For a quarter of a mile up the creek he could hear
Miki's entreating protest.
To Challoner the business of the day was not a matter of personal
pleasure, nor was it inspired alone by his desire to possess a cub
along with Miki. He needed meat, and bear pork thus early in the
season would be exceedingly good; and above all else he needed a
supply of fat. If he bagged this bear, time would be saved all the
rest of the way down to civilization.
It was eight o'clock when he struck the first unmistakably fresh
signs of Noozak and Neewa. It was at the point where Noozak had
fished four or five days previously, and where they had returned
yesterday to feast on the "ripened" catch. Challoner was elated.
He was sure that he would find the pair along the creek, and not
far distant. The wind was in his favour, and he began to advance
with greater caution, his rifle ready for the anticipated moment.
For an hour he travelled steadily and quietly, marking every sound
and movement ahead of him, and wetting his finger now and then to
see if the wind had shifted. After all, it was not so much a
matter of human cunning. Everything was in Challoner's favour.
In a wide, flat part of the valley where the creek split itself
into a dozen little channels, and the water rippled between sandy
bars and over pebbly shallows, Neewa and his mother were nosing
about lazily for a breakfast of crawfish. The world had never
looked more beautiful to Neewa. The sun made the soft hair on his
back fluff up like that of a purring cat. He liked the plash of
wet sand under his feet and the singing gush of water against his
legs. He liked the sound that was all about him, the breath of the
wind, the whispers that came out of the spruce-tops and the
cedars, the murmur of water, the TWIT-TWIT of the rock rabbits,
the call of birds; and more than all else the low, grunting talk
of his mother.
It was in this sun-bathed sweep of the valley that Noozak caught
the first whiff of danger. It came to her in a sudden twist of the
wind--the smell of man!
Instantly she was turned into rock. There was still the deep scar
in her shoulder which had come, years before, with that same smell
of the one enemy she feared. For three summers she had not caught
the taint in her nostrils and she had almost forgotten its
existence. Now, so suddenly that it paralyzed her, it was warm and
terrible in the breath of the wind.
In this moment, too, Neewa seemed to sense the nearness of an
appalling danger. Two hundred yards from Challoner he stood a
motionless blotch of jet against the white of the sand about him,
his eyes on his mother, and his sensitive little nose trying to
catch the meaning of the menace in the air.
Then came a thing he had never heard before--a splitting, cracking
roar--something that was almost like thunder and yet unlike it;
and he saw his mother lurch where she stood and crumple down all
at once on her fore legs.
The next moment she was up, with a wild WHOOF in her voice that
was new to him--a warning for him to fly for his life.
Like all mothers who have known the comradeship and love of a
child, Noozak's first thought was of him. Reaching out a paw she
gave him a sudden shove, and Neewa legged it wildly for the near-
by shelter of the timber. Noozak followed. A second shot came, and
close over her head there sped a purring, terrible sound. But
Noozak did not hurry. She kept behind Neewa, urging him on even as
that pain of a red-hot iron in her groin filled her with agony.
They came to the edge of the timber as Challoner's third shot bit
under Noozak's feet.
A moment more and they were within the barricade of the timber.
Instinct guided Neewa into the thickest part of it, and close
behind him Noozak fought with the last of her dying strength to
urge him on. In her old brain there was growing a deep and
appalling shadow, something that was beginning to cloud her vision
so that she could not see, and she knew that at last she had come
to the uttermost end of her trail. With twenty years of life
behind her, she struggled now for a last few seconds. She stopped
Neewa close to a thick cedar, and as she had done many times
before she commanded him to climb it. Just once her hot tongue
touched his face in a final caress. Then she turned to fight her
last great fight.
Straight into the face of Challoner she dragged herself, and fifty
feet from the spruce she stopped and waited for him, her head
drooped between her shoulders, her sides heaving, her eyes dimming
more and more, until at last she sank down with a great sigh,
barring the trail of their enemy. For a space, it may be, she saw
once more the golden moons and the blazing suns of those twenty
years that were gone; it may be that the soft, sweet music of
spring came to her again, filled with the old, old song of life,
and that Something gracious and painless descended upon her as a
final reward for a glorious motherhood on earth.
When Challoner came up she was dead.
From his hiding place in a crotch of the spruce Neewa looked down
on the first great tragedy of his life, and the advent of man. The
two-legged beast made him cringe deeper into his refuge, and his
little heart was near breaking with the terror that had seized
upon him. He did not reason. It was by no miracle of mental
process that he knew something terrible had happened, and that
this tall, two-legged creature was the cause of it. His little
eyes were blazing, just over the level of the crotch. He wondered
why his mother did not get up and fight when this new enemy came.
Frightened as he was he was ready to snarl if she would only wake
up--ready to hurry down the tree and help her as he had helped her
in the defeat of Makoos, the old he-bear. But not a muscle of
Noozak's huge body moved as Challoner bent over her. She was stone
dead.
Challoner's face was flushed with exultation. Necessity had made
of him a killer. He saw in Noozak a splendid pelt, and a provision
of meat that would carry him all the rest of the way to the
southland. He leaned his rifle against a tree and began looking
about for the cub. Knowledge of the wild told him it would not be
far from its mother, and he began looking into the trees and the
near-by thickets.
In the shelter of his crotch, screened by the thick branches,
Neewa made himself as small as possible during the search. At the
end of half an hour Challoner disappointedly gave up his quest,
and went back to the creek for a drink before setting himself to
the task of skinning Noozak.
No sooner was he gone than Neewa's little head shot up alertly.
For a few moments he watched, and then slipped backward down the
trunk of the cedar to the ground. He gave his squealing call, but
his mother did not move. He went to her and stood beside her
motionless head, sniffing the man-tainted air. Then he muzzled her
jowl, butted his nose under her neck, and at last nipped her ear--
always his last resort in the awakening process. He was puzzled.
He whined softly, and climbed upon his mother's big, soft back,
and sat there. Into his whine there came a strange note, and then
out of his throat there rose a whimpering cry that was like the
cry of a child.
Challoner heard that cry as he came back, and something seemed to
grip hold of his heart suddenly, and choke him. He had heard
children crying like that; and it was the motherless cub!
Creeping up behind a dwarf spruce he looked where Noozak lay dead,
and saw Neewa perched on his mother's back. He had killed many
things in his time, for it was his business to kill, and to barter
in the pelts of creatures that others killed. But he had seen
nothing like this before, and he felt all at once as if he had
done murder.
"I'm sorry," he breathed softly, "you poor little devil; I'm
sorry!"
It was almost a prayer--for forgiveness. Yet there was but one
thing to do now. So quietly that Neewa failed to hear him he crept
around with the wind and stole up behind. He was within a dozen
feet of Neewa before the cub suspected danger. Then it was too
late. In a swift rush Challoner was upon him and, before Neewa
could leave the back of his mother, had smothered him in the folds
of the grub sack.
In all his life Challoner had never experienced a livelier five
minutes than the five that followed. Above Neewa's grief and his
fear there rose the savage fighting blood of old Soominitik, his
father. He clawed and bit and kicked and snarled. In those five
minutes he was five little devils all rolled into one, and by the
time Challoner had the rope fastened about Neewa's neck, and his
fat body chucked into the sack, his hands were scratched and
lacerated in a score of places.
In the sack Neewa continued to fight until he was exhausted, while
Challoner skinned Noozak and cut from her the meat and fats which
he wanted. The beauty of Noozak's pelt brought a glow into his
eyes. In it he rolled the meat and fats, and with babiche thong
bound the whole into a pack around which he belted the dunnage
ends of his shoulder straps. Weighted under the burden of sixty
pounds of pelt and meat he picked up his rifle--and Neewa. It had
been early afternoon when he left. It was almost sunset when he
reached camp. Every foot of the way, until the last half mile,
Neewa fought like a Spartan.
Now he lay limp and almost lifeless in his sack, and when Miki
came up to smell suspiciously of his prison he made no movement of
protest. All smells were alike to him now, and of sounds he made
no distinction. Challoner was nearly done for. Every muscle and
bone in his body had its ache. Yet in his face, sweaty and grimed,
was a grin of pride.
"You plucky little devil," he said, contemplating the limp sack as
he loaded his pipe for the first time that afternoon. "You--you
plucky little devil!"
He tied the end of Neewa's rope halter to a sapling, and began
cautiously to open the grub sack. Then he rolled Neewa out on the
ground, and stepped back. In that hour Neewa was willing to accept
a truce so far as Challoner was concerned. But it was not
Challoner that his half-blinded eyes saw first as he rolled from
his bag. It was Miki! And Miki, his awkward body wriggling with
the excitement of his curiosity, was almost on the point of
smelling of him!
Neewa's little eyes glared. Was that ill-jointed lop-eared
offspring of the man-beast an enemy, too? Were those twisting
convolutions of this new creature's body and the club-like swing
of his tail an invitation to fight? He judged so. Anyway, here was
something of his size, and like a flash he was at the end of his
rope and on the pup. Miki, a moment before bubbling over with
friendship and good cheer, was on his back in an instant, his
grotesque legs paddling the air and his yelping cries for help
rising in a wild clamour that filled the golden stillness of the
evening with an unutterable woe.
Challoner stood dumbfounded. In another moment he would have
separated the little fighters, but something happened that stopped
him. Neewa, standing squarely over Miki, with Miki's four over-
grown paws held aloft as if signalling an unqualified surrender,
slowly drew his teeth from the pup's loose hide. Again he saw the
man-beast. Instinct, keener than a clumsy reasoning, held him for
a few moments without movement, his beady eyes on Challoner. In
midair Miki wagged his paws; he whined softly; his hard tail
thumped the ground as he pleaded for mercy, and he licked his
chops and tried to wriggle, as if to tell Neewa that he had no
intention at all to do him harm. Neewa, facing Challoner, snarled
defiantly. He drew himself slowly from over Miki. And Miki, afraid
to move, still lay on his back with his paws in the air.
Very slowly, a look of wonder in his face, Challoner drew back
into the tent and peered through a rent in the canvas.
The snarl left Neewa's face. He looked at the pup. Perhaps away
back in some corner of his brain the heritage of instinct was
telling him of what he had lost because of brothers and sisters
unborn--the comradeship of babyhood, the play of children. And
Miki must have sensed the change in the furry little black
creature who a moment ago was his enemy. His tail thumped almost
frantically, and he swung out his front paws toward Neewa. Then, a
little fearful of what might happen, he rolled on his side. Still
Neewa did not move. Joyously Miki wriggled.
A moment later, looking through the slit in the canvas, Challoner
saw them cautiously smelling noses.
CHAPTER FOUR
That night came a cold and drizzling rain from out of the north
and the east. In the wet dawn Challoner came out to start a fire,
and in a hollow under a spruce root he found Miki and Neewa
cuddled together, sound asleep.
It was the cub who first saw the man-beast, and for a brief space
before the pup roused himself Neewa's shining eyes were fixed on
the strange enemy who had so utterly changed his world for him.
Exhaustion had made him sleep through the long hours of that first
night of captivity, and in sleep he had forgotten many things. But
now it all came back to him as he cringed deeper into his shelter
under the root, and so softly that only Miki heard him he
whimpered for his mother.
It was the whimper that roused Miki. Slowly he untangled himself
from the ball into which he had rolled, stretched his long and
overgrown legs, and yawned so loudly that the sound reached
Challoner's ears. The man turned and saw two pairs of eyes fixed
upon him from the sheltered hollow under the root. The pup's one
good ear and the other that was half gone stood up alertly, as he
greeted his master with the boundless good cheer of an
irrepressible comradeship. Challoner's face, wet with the drizzle
of the gray skies and bronzed by the wind and storm of fourteen
months in the northland, lighted up with a responsive grin, and
Miki wriggled forth weaving and twisting himself into grotesque
contortions expressive of happiness at being thus directly smiled
at by his master.
With all the room under the root left to him Neewa pulled himself
back until only his round head was showing, and from this fortress
of temporary safety his bright little eyes glared forth at his
mother's murderer.
Vividly the tragedy of yesterday was before him again--the warm,
sun-filled creek bottom in which he and Noozak, his mother, were
hunting a breakfast of crawfish when the man-beast came; the crash
of strange thunder, their flight into the timber, and the end of
it all when his mother turned to confront their enemy. And yet it
was not the death of his mother that remained with him most
poignantly this morning. It was the memory of his own terrific
fight with the white man, and his struggle afterward in the black
and suffocating depths of the bag in which Challoner had brought
him to his camp. Even now Challoner was looking at the scratches
on his hands. He advanced a few steps, and grinned down at Neewa,
just as he had grinned good-humouredly at Miki, the angular pup.
Neewa's little eyes blazed.
"I told you last night that I was sorry," said Challoner, speaking
as if to one of his own kind.
In several ways Challoner was unusual, an out-of-the-ordinary type
in the northland. He believed, for instance, in a certain specific
psychology of the animal mind, and had proven to his own
satisfaction that animals treated and conversed with in a matter-
of-fact human way frequently developed an understanding which he,
in his unscientific way, called reason.
"I told you I was sorry," he repeated, squatting on his heels
within a yard of the root from under which Neewa's eyes were
glaring at him, "and I am. I'm sorry I killed your mother. But we
had to have meat and fat. Besides, Miki and I are going to make it
up to you. We're going to take you along with us down to the Girl,
and if you don't learn to love her you're the meanest, lowest-down
little cuss in all creation and don't deserve a mother. You and
Miki are going to be brothers. His mother is dead, too--plum
starved to death, which is worse than dying with a bullet in your
lung. And I found Miki just as I found you, hugging up close to
her an' crying as if there wasn't any world left for him. So cheer
up, and give us your paw. Let's shake!"
Challoner held out his hand. Neewa was as motionless as a stone. A
few moments before he would have snarled and bared his teeth. But
now he was dead still. This was by all odds the strangest beast he
had ever seen. Yesterday it had not harmed him, except to put him
into the bag. And now it did not offer to harm him. More than
that, the talk it made was not unpleasant, or threatening. His
eyes took in Miki. The pup had squeezed himself squarely between
Challoner's knees and was looking at him in a puzzled, questioning
sort of way, as if to ask: "Why don't you come out from under that
root and help get breakfast?"
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