Books: Nomads Of The North

J >> James Oliver Curwood >> Nomads Of The North

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Six feet away Miki's blazing eyes saw his comrade smothered under
a gray mass, and for a moment or two he was held appalled and
lifeless by the thunderous beat of the gargantuan wings. No sound
came from Neewa. Flung on his back, he was digging his claws into
feathers so thick and soft that they seemed to have no heart or
flesh. He felt upon him the presence of the Thing that was death.
The beat of the wings was like the beat of clubs: they drove the
breath out of his body, they blinded his senses, yet he continued
to tear fiercely with his claws into a fleshless breast.

In his first savage swoop Oohoomisew, whose great wings measured
five feet from tip to tip, had missed his death-grip by the
fraction of an inch. His powerful talons that would have buried
themselves like knives in Neewa's vitals closed too soon, and were
filled with the cub's thick hair and loose hide. Now he was
beating his prey down with his wings until the right moment came
for him to finish the killing with the terrific stabbing of his
beak. Half a minute of that and Neewa's face would be torn into
pieces.

It was the fact that Neewa made no sound, that no cry came from
him, that brought Miki to his feet with his lips drawn back and a
snarl in his throat. All at once fear went out of him and in its
place came a wild and almost joyous exultation. He recognized
their enemy--A BIRD. To him birds were a prey, and not a menace. A
dozen times in their journey down from the Upper Country Challoner
had shot big Canada geese and huge-winged cranes. Miki had eaten
their flesh. Twice he had pursued wounded cranes, yapping at the
top of his voice, AND THEY HAD RUN FROM HIM. He did not bark or
yelp now. Like a flash he launched himself into the feathered mass
of the owl. His fourteen pounds of flesh and bone landed with the
force of a stone, and Oohoomisew was torn from his hold and flung
with a great flutter of wings upon his side.

Before he could recover his balance Miki was at him again,
striking full at his head, where he had struck at the wounded
crane. Oohoomisew went flat on his back--and for the first time
Miki let out of his throat a series of savage and snarling yelps.
It was a new sound to Oohoomisew and his blood-thirsty brethren
watching the struggle from out of the gloom. The snapping beaks
drifted farther away, and Oohoomisew, with a, sudden sweep of
wings, vaulted into the air.

With his big forefeet planted firmly and his snarling face turned
up to the black wall of the tree-tops Miki continued to bark and
howl defiantly. He wanted the bird to come back. He wanted to tear
and rip at its feathers, and as he sent out his frantic challenge
Neewa rolled over, got on his feet, and with a warning squeal to
Miki once more set off in flight. If Miki was ignorant in the
matter, HE at least understood the situation. Again it was the
instinct born of countless generations. He knew that in the black
pits about them hovered death--and he ran as he had never run
before in his life. As Miki followed, the shadows were beginning
to float nearer again.

Ahead of them they saw a glimmer of sunshine. The trees grew
taller, and soon the day began breaking through so that there were
no longer the cavernous hollows of gloom about them. If they had
gone on another hundred yards they would have come to the edge of
the big plain, the hunting grounds of the owls. But the flame of
self-preservation was hot in Neewa's head; he was still dazed by
the thunderous beat of wings; his sides burned where Oohoomisew's
talons had scarred his flesh; so, when he saw in his path a
tangled windfall of tree trunks he dived into the security of it
so swiftly that for a moment or two Miki wondered where he had
gone.

Crawling into the windfall after him Miki turned and poked out his
head. He was not satisfied. His lips were still drawn back, and he
continued to growl. He had beaten his enemy. He had knocked it
over fairly, and had filled his jaws with its feathers. In the
face of that triumph he sensed the fact that he had run away in
following Neewa, and he was possessed with the desire to go back
and have it out to a finish. It was the blood of the Airedale and
the Spitz growing stronger in him, fearless of defeat; the blood
of his father, the giant hunting-hound Hela. It was the demand of
his breed, with its mixture of wolfish courage and fox-like
persistency backed by the powerful jaws and Herculean strength of
the Mackenzie hound, and if Neewa had not drawn deeper under the
windfall he would have gone out again and yelped his challenge to
the feathered things from which they had fled.

Neewa was smarting under the red-hot stab of Oohoomisew's talons,
and he wanted no more of the fight that came out of the air. He
began licking his wounds, and after a while Miki went back to him
and smelled of the fresh, warm blood. It made him growl. He knew
that it was Neewa's blood, and his eyes glowed like twin balls of
fire as they watched the opening through which they had entered
into the dark tangle of fallen trees.

For an hour he did not move, and in that hour, as in the hour
after the killing of the rabbit, he GREW. When at last he crept
out cautiously from under the windfall the sun was sinking behind
the western forests. He peered about him, watching for movement
and listening for sound. The sagging and apologetic posture of
puppyhood was gone from him. His overgrown feet stood squarely on
the ground; his angular legs were as hard as if carven out of
knotty wood; his body was tense, his ears stood up, his head was
rigidly set between the bony shoulders that already gave evidence
of gigantic strength to come. About him he knew was the Big
Adventure. The world was no longer a world of play and of
snuggling under the hands of a master. Something vastly more
thrilling had come into it now.

After a time he dropped on his belly close to the opening under
the windfall and began chewing at the end of rope which dragged
from about his neck. The sun sank lower. It disappeared. Still he
waited for Neewa to come out and lie with him in the open. As the
twilight thickened into deeper gloom he drew himself into the edge
of the door under the windfall and found Neewa there. Together
they peered forth into the mysterious night.

For a time there was the utter stillness of the first hour of
darkness in the northland. Up in the clear sky the stars came out
in twos and then in glowing constellations. There was an early
moon. It was already over the edge of the forests, flooding the
world with a golden glow, and in that glow the night was filled
with grotesque black shadows that had neither movement nor sound.
Then the silence was broken. From out of the owl-infested pits
came a strange and hollow sound. Miki had heard the shrill
screeching and the TU-WHO-O-O, TU-WHO-O-O, TU-WHO-O-O of the
little owls, the trap-pirates, but never this voice of the strong-
winged Jezebels and Frankensteins of the deeper forests--the real
butchers of the night. It was a hollow, throaty sound--more a moan
than a cry; a moan so short and low that it seemed born of
caution, or of fear that it would frighten possible prey. For a
few minutes pit after pit gave forth each its signal of life, and
then there was a silence of voice, broken at intervals by the
faint, crashing sweep of great wings in the spruce and balsam tops
as the hunters launched themselves up and over them in the
direction of the plain.

The going forth of the owls was only the beginning of the night
carnival for Neewa and Miki. For a long time they lay side by
side, sleepless, and listening. Past the windfall went the padded
feet of a fisher-cat, and they caught the scent of it; to them
came the far cry of a loon, the yapping of a restless fox, and the
MOOING of a cow moose feeding in the edge of a lake on the farther
side of the plain. And then, at last, came the thing that made
their blood run faster and sent a deeper thrill into their hearts.

It seemed a vast distance away at first--the hot throated cry of
wolves on the trail of meat. It was swinging northward into the
plain, and this shortly brought the cry with the wind, which was
out of the north and the west. The howling of the pack was very
distinct after that, and in Miki's brain nebulous visions and
almost unintelligible memories were swiftly wakening into life. It
was not Challoner's voice that he heard, but it was A VOICE THAT
HE KNEW. It was the voice of Hela, his giant father; the voice of
Numa, his mother; the voice of his kind for a hundred and a
thousand generations before him, and it was the instinct of those
generations and the hazy memory of his earliest puppyhood that
were impinging the thing upon him. A little later it would take
both intelligence and experience to make him discriminate the
hair-breadth difference between wolf and dog. And this voice of
his blood was COMING! It bore down upon them swiftly, fierce and
filled with the blood-lust of hunger. He forgot Neewa. He did not
observe the cub when he slunk back deeper under the windfall. He
rose up on his feet and stood stiff and tense, unconscious of all
things but that thrilling tongue of the hunt-pack.

Wind-broken, his strength failing him, and his eyes wildly
searching the night ahead for the gleam of water that might save
him, Ahtik, the young caribou bull, raced for his life a hundred
yards ahead of the wolves. The pack had already flung itself out
in the form of a horse-shoe, and the two ends were beginning to
creep up abreast of Ahtik, ready to close in for the hamstring--
and the kill. In these last minutes every throat was silent, and
the young bull sensed the beginning of the end. Desperately he
turned to the right and plunged into the forest.

Miki heard the crash of his body and he hugged close to the
windfall. Ten seconds later Ahtik passed within fifty feet of him,
a huge and grotesque form in the moonlight, his coughing breath
filled with the agony and hopelessness of approaching death. As
swiftly as he had come he was gone, and in his place followed half
a score of noiseless shadows passing so quickly that to Miki they
were like the coming and the going of the wind.

For many minutes after that he stood and listened but again
silence had fallen upon the night. After a little he went back
into the windfall and lay down beside Neewa.

Hours that followed he passed in restless snatches of slumber. He
dreamed of things that he had forgotten. He dreamed of Challoner.
He dreamed of chill nights and the big fires; he heard his
master's voice and he felt again the touch of his hand; but over
it all and through it all ran that wild hunting voice of his own
kind.

In the early dawn he came out from under the windfall and smelled
of the trail where the wolves and the caribou had passed.
Heretofore it was Neewa who had led in their wandering; now it was
Neewa that followed. His nostrils filled with the heavy scent of
the pack, Miki travelled steadily in the direction of the plain.
It took him half an hour to reach the edge of it. After that he
came to a wide and stony out-cropping of the earth over which he
nosed the spoor to a low and abrupt descent into the wider range
of the valley.

Here he stopped.

Twenty feet under him and fifty feet away lay the partly devoured
carcass of the young bull. It was not this fact that thrilled him
until his heart stood still. From out of the bushy plain had come
Maheegun, a renegade she-wolf, to fill herself of the meat which
she had not helped to kill. She was a slinking, hollow-backed,
quick-fanged creature, still rib-thin from the sickness that had
come of eating a poison-bait; a beast shunned by her own kind--a
coward, a murderess even of her own whelps. But she was none of
these things to Miki. In her he saw in living flesh and bone what
his memory and his instinct recalled to him of his mother. And his
mother had come before Challoner, his master.

For a minute or two he lay trembling, and then he went down, as he
would have gone to Challoner; with great caution, with a wilder
suspense, but with a strange yearning within him that the man's
presence would have failed to rouse. He was very close to Maheegun
before she was conscious that he was near. The Mother-smell was
warm in his nose now; it filled him with a great joy; and yet--he
was afraid. But it was not a physical fear. Flattened on the
ground, with his head between his fore-paws, he whined.

Like a flash the she-wolf turned, her fangs bared the length of
her jaws and her bloodshot eyes aglow with menace and suspicion.
Miki had no time to make a move or another sound. With the
suddenness of a cat the outcast creature was upon him. Her fangs
slashed him just once--and she was gone. Her teeth had drawn blood
from his shoulder, but it was not the smart of the wound that held
him for many moments as still as if dead. The Mother-smell was
still where Maheegun had been. But his dreams had crumbled. The
thing that had been Memory died away at last in a deep breath that
was broken by a whimper of pain. For him, even as for Neewa, there
was no more a Challoner, and no longer a mother. But there
remained--the world! In it the sun was rising. Out of it came the
thrill and the perfume of life. And close to him--very close--was
the rich, sweet smell of meat.

He sniffed hungrily. Then he turned, and saw Neewa's black and
pudgy body tumbling down the slope of the dip to join him in the
feast.

CHAPTER NINE

Had Makoki, the leather-faced old Cree runner between God's Lake
and Fort Churchill, known the history of Miki and Neewa up to the
point where they came to feast on the fat and partly devoured
carcass of the young caribou bull, he would have said that Iskoo
Wapoo, the Good Spirit of the beasts, was watching over them most
carefully. For Makoki had great faith in the forest gods as well
as in those of his own tepee. He would have given the story his
own picturesque version, and would have told it to the little
children of his son's children; and his son's children would have
kept it in their memory for their own children later on.

It was not in the ordained nature of things that a black bear cub
and a Mackenzie hound pup with a dash of Airedale and Spitz in him
should "chum up" together as Neewa and Miki had done. Therefore,
he would have said, the Beneficent Spirit who watched over the
affairs of four-legged beasts must have had an eye on them from
the beginning. It was she--Iskoo Wapoo was a goddess and not a god
--who had made Challoner kill Neewa's mother, the big black bear;
and it was she who had induced him to tie the pup and the cub
together on the same piece of rope, so that when they fell out of
the white man's canoe into the rapids they would not die, but
would be company and salvation for each other. NESWA-PAWUK ("two
little brothers") Makoki would have called them; and had it come
to the test he would have cut off a finger before harming either
of them. But Makoki knew nothing of their adventures, and on this
morning when they came down to the feast he was a hundred miles
away, haggling with a white man who wanted a guide. He would never
know that Iskoo Wapoo was at his side that very moment, planning
the thing that was to mean so much in the lives of Neewa and Miki.

Meanwhile Neewa and Miki went at their breakfast as if starved.
They were immensely practical. They did not look back on what had
happened, but for the moment submerged themselves completely in
the present. The few days of thrill and adventure through which
they had gone seemed like a year. Neewa's yearning for his mother
had grown less and less insistent, and Miki's lost master counted
for nothing now, as things were going with him. Last night was the
big, vivid thing in their memories--their fight for life with the
monster owls, their flight, the killing of the young caribou bull
by the wolves, and (with Miki) the short, bitter experience with
Maheegun, the renegade she-wolf. His shoulder burned where she had
torn at him with her teeth. But this did not lessen his appetite.
Growling as he ate, he filled himself until he could hold no more.

Then he sat back on his haunches and looked in the direction
Maheegun had taken.

It was eastward, toward Hudson Bay, over a great plain that lay
between two ridges that were like forest walls, yellow and gold in
the morning sun. He had never seen the world as it looked to him
now. The wolves had overtaken the caribou on a scarp on the high
ground that thrust itself out like a short fat thumb from the
black and owl-infested forest, and the carcass lay in a meadowy
dip that overhung the plain. From the edge of this dip Miki could
look down--and so far away that the wonder of what he saw
dissolved itself at last into the shimmer of the sun and the blue
of the sky. Within his vision lay a paradise of marvellous
promise; wide stretches of soft, green meadow; clumps of timber,
park-like until they merged into the deeper forest that began with
the farther ridge; great patches of bush radiant with the
colouring of June; here and there the gleam of water, and half a
mile away a lake that was like a giant mirror set in a purplish-
green frame of balsam and spruce.

Into these things Maheegun, the she-wolf, had gone. He wondered
whether she would come back. He sniffed the air for her. But there
was no longer the mother-yearning in his heart. Something had
already begun to tell him of the vast difference between the dog
and the wolf. For a few moments, still hopeful that the world held
a mother for him, he had mistaken her for the one he had lost. But
he understood now. A little more and Maheegun's teeth would have
snapped his shoulder, or slashed his throat to the jugular. TEBAH-
GONE-GAWIN (the One Great Law) was impinging itself upon him, the
implacable law of the survival of the fittest. To live was to
fight--to kill; to beat everything that had feet or wings. The
earth and the air held menace for him. Nowhere, since he had lost
Challoner, had he found friendship except in the heart of Neewa,
the motherless cub. And he turned toward Neewa now, growling at a
gay-plumaged moose-bird that was hovering about for a morsel of
meat.

A few minutes before, Neewa had weighed a dozen pounds; now he
weighed fourteen or fifteen. His stomach was puffed out like the
sides of an overfilled bag, and he sat humped up in a pool of warm
sunshine licking his chops and vastly contented with himself and
the world. Miki rubbed up to him, and Neewa gave a chummy grunt.
Then he rolled over on his fat back and invited Miki to play. It
was the first time; and with a joyous yelp Miki jumped into him.
Scratching and biting and kicking, and interjecting their friendly
scrimmage with ferocious growling on Miki's part and pig-like
grunts and squeals on Neewa's, they rolled to the edge of the dip.
It was a good hundred feet to the bottom--a steep, grassy slope
that ran to the plain--and like two balls they catapulted the
length of it. For Neewa it was not so bad. He was round and fat,
and went easily.

With Miki it was different. He was all legs and skin and angular
bone, and he went down twisting and somersaulting and tying
himself into knots until by the time he struck the hard strip of
shale at the edge of the plain he was drunk with dizziness and the
breath was out of his body. He staggered to his feet with a gasp.
For a space the world was whirling round and round in a sickening
circle. Then he pulled himself together, and made out Neewa a
dozen feet away.

Neewa was just awakening to the truth of an exhilarating
discovery. Next to a boy on a sled, or a beaver on its tail, no
one enjoys a "slide" more than a black bear cub, and as Miki
rearranged his scattered wits Neewa climbed twenty or thirty feet
up the slope and deliberately rolled down again! Miki's jaws fell
apart in amazement. Again Neewa climbed up and rolled down--and
Miki ceased to breathe altogether. Five times he watched Neewa go
that twenty or thirty feet up the grassy slope and tumble down.
The fifth time he waded into Neewa and gave him a rough-and-tumble
that almost ended in a fight.

After that Miki began exploring along the foot of the slope, and
for a scant hundred yards Neewa humoured him by following, but
beyond that point he flatly refused to go. In the fourth month of
his exciting young life Neewa was satisfied that Nature had given
him birth that he might have the endless pleasure of filling his
stomach. For him, eating was the one and only excuse for existing.
In the next few months he had a big job on his hands if he kept up
the record of his family, and the fact that Miki was apparently
abandoning the fat and juicy carcass of the young bull filled him
with alarm and rebellion. Straightway he forgot all thought of
play and started back up the slope on a mission that was 100 per
cent. business.

Observing this, Miki gave up his idea of exploration and joined
him. They reached the shelf of the dip twenty yards from the
carcass of the bull, and from a clutter of big stones looked forth
upon their meat. In that moment they stood dumb and paralyzed. Two
gigantic owls were tearing at the carcass. To Miki and Neewa these
were the monsters of the black forest out of which they had
escaped so narrowly with their lives. But as a matter of fact they
were not of Oohoomisew's breed of night-seeing pirates. They were
Snowy Owls, unlike all others of their kind in that their vision
was as keen as a hawk's in the light of broad day. Mispoon, the
big male, was immaculately white. His mate, a size or two smaller,
was barred with brownish-slate colour--and their heads were round
and terrible looking because they had no ear-tufts. Mispoon, with
his splendid wings spread half over the carcass of Ahtik, the dead
bull, was rending flesh so ravenously with his powerful beak that
Neewa and Miki could hear the sound of it. Newish, his mate, had
her head almost buried in Ahtik's bowels. The sight of them and
the sound of their eating were enough to disturb the nerves of an
older bear than Neewa, and he crouched behind a stone, with just
his head sticking out.

In Miki's throat was a sullen growl. But he held it back, and
flattened himself on the ground. The blood of the giant hunter
that was his father rose in him again like fire. The carcass was
his meat, and he was ready to fight for it. Besides, had he not
whipped the big owl in the forest? But here there were two. The
fact held him flattened on his belly a moment or two longer, and
in that brief space the unexpected happened.

Slinking up out of the low growth of bush at the far edge of the
dip lie saw Maheegun, the renegade she-wolf. Hollow-backed, red-
eyed, her bushy tail hanging with the sneaky droop of the
murderess, she advanced over the bit of open, a gray and vengeful
shadow. Furtive as she was, she at least acted with great
swiftness. Straight at Mispoon she launched herself with a snarl
and snap of fangs that made Miki hug the ground still closer.

Deep into Mispoon's four-inch armour of feathers Maheegun buried
her fangs. Taken at a disadvantage Mispoon's head would have been
torn from his body before he could have gathered himself for
battle had it not been for Newish. Pulling her blood stained head
from Ahtik's flesh and blood she drove at Maheegun with a throaty,
wheezing scream--a cry that was like the cry of no other thing
that lived. Into the she-wolf's back she sank her beak and talons
and Maheegun gave up her grip on Mispoon and tore ferociously at
her new assailant. For a space Mispoon was saved, but it was at a
terrible sacrifice to Newish. With a single lucky slash of her
long-fanged jaws, Maheegun literally tore one of Newish's great
wings from her body. The croak of agony that came out of her may
have held the death-note for Mispoon, her mate; for he rose on his
wings, poised himself for an instant, and launched himself at the
she-wolf's back with a force that drove Maheegun off her feet.

Deep into her loins the great owl sank his talons, gripping at the
renegade's vitals with an avenging and ferocious tenacity. In that
hold Maheegun felt the sting of death. She flung herself on her
back; she rolled over and over, snarling and snapping and clawing
the air in her efforts to free herself of the burning knives that
were sinking still deeper into her bowels. Mispoon hung on,
rolling as she rolled, beating with his giant wings, fastening his
talons in that clutch that death could not shake loose. On the
ground his mate was dying. Her life's blood was pouring out of the
hole in her side, but with the dimming vision of death she made a
last effort to help Mispoon. And Mispoon, a hero to the last, kept
his grip until he was dead.

Into the edge of the bush Maheegun dragged herself. There she
freed herself of the big owl. But the deep wounds were still in
her sides. The blood dripped from her belly as she made her way
down into the thicker cover, leaving a red trail behind her. A
quarter of a mile away she lay down under a clump of dwarf spruce;
and there, a little later, she died.

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