Books: Nomads Of The North

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

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"Wake up!" he might have said. "What's the sense of sleeping on a
day like this? Let's go down along the creek and hunt something."

Neewa roused himself, stretched his fat body, and yawned. Sleepily
his little eyes took in the valley. Miki got up and gave the low
and anxious whine which always told his companion that he wanted
to be on the move. Neewa responded, and they began making their
way down the green slope into the rich bottom between the two
ridges.

They were now almost six months of age, and in the matter of size
had nearly ceased to be a cub and a pup. They were almost a dog
and a bear. Miki's angular legs were getting their shape; his
chest had filled out; his neck had grown until it no longer seemed
too small for his big head and jaws, and his body had increased in
girth and length until he was twice as big as most ordinary dogs
of his age.

Neewa had lost his round, ball-like cubbishness, though he still
betrayed far more than Miki the fact that he was not many months
lost from his mother. But he was no longer filled with that
wholesome love of peace that had filled his earlier cubhood. The
blood of Soominitik was at last beginning to assert itself, and he
no longer sought a place of safety in time of battle--unless the
grimness of utter necessity made it unavoidable. In fact, unlike
most bears, he loved a fight. If there were a stronger term at
hand it might be applied to Miki, the true son of Hela. Youthful
as they were, they were already covered with scars that would have
made a veteran proud. Crows and owls, wolf-fang and fisher-claw
had all left their marks, and on Miki's side was a bare space
eight inches long left as a souvenir by a wolverine.

In Neewa's funny round head there had grown, during the course of
events, an ambition to have it out some day with a citizen of his
own kind; but the two opportunities that had come his way were
spoiled by the fact that the other cubs' mothers were with them.
So now, when Miki led off on his trips of adventure, Neewa always
followed with another thrill than that of getting something to
eat, which so long had been his one ambition. Which is not to say
that Neewa had lost his appetite. He could eat more in one day
than Miki could eat in three, mainly because Miki was satisfied
with two or three meals a day while Neewa preferred one--a
continuous one lasting from dawn until dark. On the trail he was
always eating something.

A quarter of a mile along the foot of the ridge, in a stony coulee
down which a tiny rivulet trickled, there grew the finest wild
currants in all the Shamattawa country. Big as cherries, black as
ink, and swelling almost to the bursting point with luscious
juice, they hung in clusters so thick that Neewa could gather them
by the mouthful. Nothing in all the wilderness is quite so good as
one of these dead-ripe black currants, and this coulee wherein
they grew so richly Neewa had preempted as his own personal
property. Miki, too, had learned to eat the currants; so to the
coulee they went this afternoon, for such currants as these one
can eat even when one is already full. Besides, the coulee was
fruitful for Miki in other ways. There were many young partridges
and rabbits in it--"fool hens" of tender flesh and delicious
flavour which he caught quite easily, and any number of gophers
and squirrels.

To-day they had scarcely taken their first mouthful of the big
juicy currants when an unmistakable sound came to them.
Unmistakable because each recognized instantly what it meant. It
was the tearing down of currant bushes twenty or thirty yards
higher up the coulee. Some robber had invaded their treasure-
house, and instantly Miki bared his fangs while Neewa wrinkled up
his nose in an ominous snarl. Soft-footed they advanced toward the
sound until they came to the edge of a small open space which was
as flat as a table. In the centre of this space was a clump of
currant bushes not more than a yard in girth, and black with
fruit; and squatted on his haunches there, gathering the laden
bushes in his arms, was a young black bear about four sizes larger
than Neewa.

In that moment of consternation and rage Neewa did not take size
into consideration. He was much in the frame of mind of a man
returning home to discover his domicile, and all it contained, in
full possession of another. At the same time here was his ambition
easily to be achieved--his ambition to lick the daylight out of a
member of his own kind. Miki seemed to sense this fact. Under
ordinary conditions he would have led in the fray, and before
Neewa had fairly got started, would have been at the impudent
interloper's throat. But now something held him back, and it was
Neewa who first shot out--like a black bolt--landing squarely in
the ribs of his unsuspecting enemy.

(Old Makoki, the Cree runner, had he seen that attack, would
instantly have found a name for the other bear--"Petoot-a-wapis-
kum," which means, literally: "Kicked-off-his-Feet." Perhaps he
would have called him "Pete" for short. For the Cree believes in
fitting names to fact, and Petoot-a-wapis-kum certainly fitted the
unknown bear like a glove.)

Taken utterly by surprise, with his mouth full of berries, he was
bowled over like an overfilled bag under the force of Neewa's
charge. So complete was his discomfiture for the moment that Miki,
watching the affair with a yearning interest, could not keep back
an excited yap of approbation. Before Pete could understand what
had happened, and while the berries were still oozing from his
mouth, Neewa was at his throat--and the fun began.

Now bears, and especially young bears, have a way of fighting that
is all their own. It reminds one of a hair-pulling contest between
two well-matched ladies. There are no rules to the game--
absolutely none. As Pete and Neewa clinched, their hind legs began
to do the fighting, and the fur began to fly. Pete, being already
on his back--a first-class battling position for a bear--would
have possessed an advantage had it not been for Neewa's ferocious
hold at his throat. As it was, Neewa sank his fangs in to their
full length, and scrubbed away for dear life with his sharp hind
claws. Miki drew nearer at sight of the flying fur, his soul
filled with joy. Then Pete got one leg into action, and then the
other, and Miki's jaws came together with a sudden click. Over and
over the two fighters rolled, Neewa holding to his throat-grip,
and not a squeal or a grunt came from either of them. Pebbles and
dirt flew along with hair and fur. Stones rolled with a clatter
down the coulee. The very air trembled with the thrill of combat.
In Miki's attitude of tense waiting there was something now of
suspicious anxiety. With eight furry legs scratching and tearing
furiously, and the two fighters rolling and twisting and
contorting themselves like a pair of windmills gone mad, it was
almost impossible for Miki to tell who was getting the worst of
it--Neewa or Pete; at least he was in doubt for a matter of three
or four minutes.

Then he recognized Neewa's voice. It was very faint, but for all
that it was an unmistakable bawl of pain.

Smothered under Pete's heavier body Neewa began to realize, at the
end of those three or four minutes, that he had tackled more than
was good for him. It was altogether Pete's size and not his
fighting qualities, for Neewa had him outpointed there. But he
fought on, hoping for some good turn of luck, until at last Pete
got him just where he wanted him and began raking him up and down
his sides until in another three minutes he would have been half
skinned if Miki hadn't judged the moment ripe for intervention.
Even then Neewa was taking his punishment without a howl.

In another instant Miki had Pete by the ear. It was a grim and
terrible hold. Old Soominitik himself would have bawled lustily in
the circumstances. Pete raised his voice in a howl of agony. He
forgot everything else but the terror and the pain of this new
SOMETHING that had him by the ear, and he rent the air with his
outcry. His lamentation poured in an unbroken spasm of sound from
his throat. Neewa knew that Miki was in action.

He pulled himself from under the young interloper's body--and not
a second too soon. Down the coulee, charging like a mad bull, came
Pete's mother. Neewa was off like a shot just as she made a
powerful swing at him. The blow missed, and the old bear turned
excitedly to her bawling offspring. Miki, hanging joyously to his
victim, was oblivious of his danger until Pete's mother was almost
upon him. He caught sight of her just as her long arm shot out
like a wooden beam. He dodged; and the blow intended for him
landed full against the side of the unfortunate Pete's head with a
force that took him clean off his feet and sent him flying like a
football twenty yards down the coulee.

Miki did not wait for further results. Quick as a flash he was in
a currant thicket tearing down the little gulch after Neewa. They
came out on the plain together, and for a good ten minutes they
did not halt in their flight long enough to look back. When they
did, the coulee was a mile away. They sat down, panting. Neewa's
red tongue was hanging out in his exhaustion. He was scratched and
bleeding; loose hair hung all over him. As he looked at Miki there
was something in the dolorous expression of Neewa's face which was
a confession of the fact that he realized Pete had licked him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

After the fight in the coulee there was no longer a thought on the
part of Neewa and Miki of returning to the Garden of Eden in which
the black currants grew so lusciously. From the tip of his tail to
the end of his nose Miki was an adventurer, and like the nomadic
rovers of old he was happiest when on the move. The wilderness had
claimed him now, body and soul, and it is probable that he would
have shunned a human camp at this stage of his life, even as Neewa
would have shunned it. But in the lives of beasts, as well as in
the lives of men, Fate plays her pranks and tricks, and even as
they turned into the vast and mystery-filled spaces of the great
lake and waterway-country, to the west, events were slowly shaping
themselves into what was to be perhaps the darkest hour of gloom
in the life of Miki, son of Hela.

Through six glorious and sun-filled weeks of late summer and early
autumn--until the middle of September--Miki and Neewa ranged the
country westward, always heading toward the setting sun, the
country of Jackson's Knee, of the Touchwood and the Clearwater,
and God's Lake. In this country they saw many things. It was a
region a hundred miles square which the handiwork of Nature had
made into a veritable kingdom of the wild. They came upon great
beaver colonies in the dark and silent places; they watched the
otter at play; they came upon moose and caribou so frequently that
they no longer feared or evaded them, but walked out openly into
the meadows or down to the edge of the swamps where they were
feeding. It was here that Miki learned the great lesson that claw
and fang were made to prey upon cloven hoof and horn, for the
wolves were thick, and a dozen times they came upon their kills,
and even more frequently heard the wild tongue of the hunting-
packs. Since his experience with Maheegun he no longer had the
desire to join them. And now Neewa no longer insisted on remaining
near meat when they found it. It was the beginning of the KWASKA-
HAO in Neewa--the instinctive sensing of the Big Change.

Until early in October Miki could see but little of this change in
his comrade. It was then that Neewa became more and more restless,
and this restlessness grew as the chill nights came, and autumn
breathed more heavily in the air. It was Neewa who took the lead
in their peregrinations now, and he seemed always to be questing
for something--a mysterious something which Miki could neither
smell nor see. He no longer slept for hours at a time. By mid-
October he slept scarcely at all, but roved through most of the
hours of night as well as day, eating, eating, eating, and always
smelling the wind for that elusive thing which Nature was
commanding him to seek and find. Ceaselessly he was nosing under
windfalls and among the rocks, and Miki was always near him,
always on the QUI VIVE for battle with the thing that Neewa was
hunting out. And it seemed to be never found.

Then Neewa turned back to the east, drawn by the instinct of his
forefathers; back toward the country of Noozak, his mother, and of
Soominitik, his father; and Miki followed. The nights grew more
and more chill. The stars seemed farther away, and no longer was
the forest moon red like blood. The cry of the loon had a moaning
note in it, a note of grief and lamentation. And in their shacks
and tepees the forest people sniffed the air of frosty mornings,
and soaked their traps in fish-oil and beaver-grease, and made
their moccasins, and mended snow-shoe and sledge, for the cry of
the loon said that winter was creeping down out of the North. And
the swamps grew silent. The cow moose no longer mooed to her
young. In place of it, from the open plain and "burn" rose the
defiant challenge of bull to bull and the deadly clash of horn
against horn under the stars of night. The wolf no longer howled
to hear his voice. In the travel of padded feet there came to be a
slinking, hunting caution. In all the forest world blood was
running red again.

And then--November.

Perhaps Miki would never forget that first day when the snow came.
At first he thought all the winged things in the world were
shedding their white feathers. Then he felt the fine, soft touch
of it under his feet, and the chill. It sent the blood rushing
like a new kind of fire through his body; a wild and thrilling
joy--the exultation that leaps through the veins of the wolf when
the winter comes.

With Neewa its effect was different--so different that even Miki
felt the oppression of it, and waited vaguely and anxiously for
what was to come. And then, on this day of the first snow, he saw
his comrade do a strange and unaccountable thing. He began to eat
things that he had never touched as food before. He lapped up soft
pine needles, and swallowed them. He ate of the dry, pulpy
substance of rotted logs. And then he went into a great cleft
broken into the heart of a rocky ridge, and found at last the
thing for which he had been seeking. It was a cavern--deep, and
dark, and warm.

Nature works in strange ways. She gives to the birds of the air
eyes which men may never have, and she gives to the beasts of the
earth an instinct which men may never know. For Neewa had come
back to sleep his first Long Sleep in the place of his birth--the
cavern in which Noozak, his mother, had brought him into the
world.

His old bed was still there, the wallow in the soft sand, the
blanket of hair Noozak had shed; but the smell of his mother was
gone. In the nest where he was born Neewa lay down, and for the
last time he grunted softly to Miki. It was as if he felt upon him
the touch of a hand, gentle but inevitable, which he could no
longer refuse to obey, and to Miki was saying, for the last time:
"Good-night!"

That night the PIPOO KESTIN--the first storm of
winter--came like an avalanche from out of the North. With it came
a wind that was like the roaring of a thousand bulls, and over all
the land of the wild there was nothing that moved. Even in the
depth of the cavern Miki heard the beat and the wail of it and the
swishing of the shot-like snow beyond the door through which they
had come, and he snuggled close to Neewa, content that they had
found shelter.

With the day he went to the slit in the face of the rock, and in
his astonishment he made no sound, but stared forth upon a world
that was no longer the world he had left last night. Everywhere it
was white--a dazzling, eye-blinding white. The sun had risen. It
shot a thousand flashing shafts of radiant light into Miki's eyes.
So far as his vision could reach the earth was as if covered with
a robe of diamonds. From rock and tree and shrub blazed the fire
of the sun; it quivered in the tree-tops, bent low with their
burden of snow; it was like a sea in the valley, so vivid that the
unfrozen stream running through the heart of it was black. Never
had Miki seen a day so magnificent. Never had his heart pounded at
the sight of the sun as it pounded now, and never had his blood
burned with a wilder exultation. He whined, and ran back to Neewa.
He barked in the gloom of the cavern and gave his comrade a nudge
with his nose. Neewa grunted sleepily. He stretched himself,
raised his head for an instant, and then curled himself into a
ball again. Vainly Miki protested that it was day, and time for
them to be moving. Neewa made no response, and after a while Miki
returned to the mouth of the cavern, and looked back to see if
Neewa was following him. Then, disappointed, he went out into the
snow. For an hour he did not move farther than ten feet away from
the den. Three times he returned to Neewa and urged him to get up
and come out where it was light. In that far corner of the cavern
it was dark, and it was as if he were trying to tell Neewa that he
was a dunce to lie there still thinking it was night when the sun
was up outside. But he failed. Neewa was in the edge of his Long
Sleep--the beginning of USKE-POW-A-MEW, the dream land of the
bears.

Annoyance, the desire almost to sink his teeth in Neewa's ear,
gave place slowly to another thing in Miki. The instinct that
between beasts is like the spoken reason of men stirred in a
strange and disquieting way within him. He became more and more
uneasy. There was almost distress in his restlessness as he
hovered about the mouth of the cavern. A last time he went to
Neewa, and then he started alone down into the valley.

He was hungry, but on this first day after the storm there was
small chance of him finding anything to eat. The snowshoe rabbits
were completely buried under their windfalls and shelters, and lay
quietly in their warm nests. Nothing had moved during the hours of
the storm. There were no trails of living things for him to
follow, and in places he sank to his shoulders in the soft snow.
He made his way to the creek. It was no longer the creek he had
known. It was edged with ice. There was something dark and
brooding about it now. The sound it made was no longer the
rippling song of summer and golden autumn. There was a threat in
its gurgling monotone--a new voice, as if a black and forbidding
spirit had taken possession of it and was warning him that the
times had changed, and that new laws and a new force had come to
claim sovereignty in the land of his birth.

He drank of the water cautiously. It was cold--ice-cold. Slowly it
was being impinged upon him that in the beauty of this new world
that was his there was no longer the warm and pulsing beat of the
heart that was life. He was alone. ALONE! Everything else was
covered up; everything else seemed dead.

He went back to Neewa and lay close to him all through the day.
And through the night that followed he did not move again from the
cavern. He went only as far as the door and saw celestial spaces
ablaze with stars and a moon that rode up into the heavens like a
white sun. They, too, seemed no longer like the moon and stars he
had known. They were terribly still and cold. And under them the
earth was terribly white and silent.

With the coming of dawn he tried once more to awaken Neewa. But
this time he was not so insistent. Nor did he have the desire to
nip Neewa with his teeth. Something had happened--something which
he could not understand. He sensed the thing, but he could not
reason it. And he was filled with a strange and foreboding fear.

He went down again to hunt. Under the glory of the moon and stars
it had been a wild night of carnival for the rabbits, and in the
edge of the timber Miki found the snow beaten hard in places with
their tracks. It was not difficult for him to stalk his breakfast
this morning. He made his kill, and feasted. He killed again after
that, and still again. He could have gone on killing, for now that
the snow betrayed them, the hiding-places of the rabbits were so
many traps for them. Miki's courage returned. He was fired again
with the joy of life. Never had he known such hunting, never had
he found such a treasure-house before--not even in the coulee
where the currants grew. He ate until he could eat no more, and
then he went back to Neewa, carrying with him one of the rabbits
he had slain. He dropped it in front of his comrade, and whined.
Even then Neewa did not respond, except to draw a deeper breath,
and change his position a little.

That afternoon, for the first time in many hours, Neewa rose to
his feet, stretched himself, and sniffed of the dead rabbit. But
he did not eat. To Miki's consternation he rolled himself round
and round in his nest of sand and went to sleep again.

The next day, at about the same time, Neewa roused himself once
more. This time he went as far as the mouth of the den, and lapped
up a few mouthfuls of snow. But he still refused to eat the
rabbit. Again it was Nature telling him that he must not disturb
the pine needles and dry bark with which he had padded his stomach
and intestines. And he went to sleep again. He did not get up
after that.

Day followed day, and, growing lonelier as the winter deepened,
Miki hunted alone. All through November he came back each night
and slept with Neewa. And Neewa was as if dead, except that his
body was warm, and he breathed, and made little sounds now and
then in his throat. But this did not satisfy the great yearning
that was becoming more and more insistent in Miki's soul, the
overwhelming desire for company, for a brotherhood on the trail.
He loved Neewa. Through the first long weeks of winter he returned
to him faithfully; he brought him meat. He was filled with a
strange grief--even greater than if Neewa had been dead. For Miki
knew that he was alive, and he could not account for the thing
that had happened. Death he would have understood, and FROM death
he would have gone away--for good.

So it came that one night, having hunted far, Miki remained away
from the den for the first time, and slept under a deep windfall.
After that it was still harder for him to resist the CALL. A
second and a third night he went away; and then came the time--
inevitable as the coming and going of the moon and stars--when
understanding at last broke its way through his hope and his fear,
and something told him that Neewa would never again travel with
him as through those glorious days of old, when shoulder to
shoulder they had faced together the comedies and tragedies of
life in a world that was no longer soft and green and warm with a
golden sun, but white, and still, and filled with death.

Neewa did not know when Miki went away from the den for the last
time. And yet it may be that even in his slumber the Beneficent
Spirit may have whispered that Miki was going, for there were
restlessness and disquiet in Neewa's dreamland for many days
thereafter.

"Be quiet--and sleep!" the Spirit may have whispered. "The Winter
is long. The rivers are black and chill, the lakes are covered
with floors of ice, and the waterfalls are frozen like great white
giants. Sleep! For Miki must go his way, just as the waters of the
streams must go their way to the sea. For he is Dog. And you are
Bear. SLEEP!"

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In many years there had not been such a storm in all the Northland
as that which followed swiftly in the trail of the first snows
that had driven Neewa into his den--the late November storm of
that year which will long be remembered as KUSKETA PIPPOON (the
Black Year), the year of great and sudden cold, of starvation and
of death.

It came a week after Miki had left the cavern wherein Neewa was
sleeping so soundly. Preceding that, when all the forest world lay
under its mantle of white, the sun shone day after day, and the
moon and stars were as clear as golden fires in the night skies.
The wind was out of the west. The rabbits were so numerous they
made hard floors of the snow in thicket and swamp. Caribou and
moose were plentiful, and the early cry of wolves on the hunt was
like music in the ears of a thousand trappers in shack and teepee.

With appalling suddenness came the unexpected. There was no
warning. The day had dawned with a clear sky, and a bright sun
followed the dawn. Then the world darkened so swiftly that men on
their traplines paused in amazement. With the deepening gloom came
a strange moaning, and there was something in that sound that
seemed like the rolling of a great drum--the knell of an impending
doom. It was THUNDER. The warning was too late. Before men could
turn back to safety, or build themselves shelters, the Big Storm
was upon them. For three days and three nights it raged like a mad
bull from out of the north. In the open barrens no living creature
could stand upon its feet. The forests were broken, and all the
earth was smothered. All things that breathed buried themselves--
or died; for the snow that piled itself up in windrows and
mountains was round and hard as leaden shot, and with it came an
intense cold.

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