It was early in the afternoon that for the third or fourth time Baree walked out on the dam. This dam was fully two hundred feet in length, but at no point did the water run over it, the overflow finding its way through narrow sluices. A week or two ago Baree could have crossed to the opposite side of the pond on this dam, but now–at the far end–Beaver Tooth and his engineers were adding a new section of dam, and in order to accomplish their work more easily, they had flooded fully fifty yards of the low ground on which they were working.
The main dam held a strange fascination for Baree. It was strong with the smell of beaver. The top of it was high and dry, and there were dozens of smoothly worn little hollows in which the beavers had taken their sun baths. In one of these hollows Baree stretched himself out, with his eyes on the pond. Not a ripple stirred its velvety smoothness. Not a sound broke the drowsy stillness of the afternoon. The beavers might have been dead or asleep, for all the stir they made. And yet they knew that Baree was on the dam. Where he lay, the sun fell in a warm flood, and it was so comfortable that after a time he had difficulty in keeping his eyes open to watch the pond. Then he fell asleep.
Just how Beaver Tooth sensed this fact is a mystery. Five minutes later he came up quietly, without a splash or a sound, within fifty yards of Baree. For a few moments he scarcely moved in the water. Then he swam very slowly parallel with the dam across the pond. At the other side he drew himself ashore, and for another minute sat as motionless as a stone, with his eyes on that part of the dam where Baree was lying. Not another beaver was moving, and it was very soon apparent that Beaver Tooth had but one object in mind–getting a closer observation of Baree. When he entered the water again, he swam along close to the dam. Ten feet beyond Baree he began to climb out. He did this with great slowness and caution. At last he reached the top of the dam.
A few yards away Baree was almost hidden in his hollow, only the top of his shiny black body appearing to Beaver Tooth’s scrutiny. To get a better look, the old beaver spread his flat tail out beyond him and rose to a sitting posture on his hindquarters, his two front paws held squirrel-like over his breast. In this pose he was fully three feet tall. He probably weighed forty pounds, and in some ways he resembled one of those fat, good-natured, silly-looking dogs that go largely to stomach. But his brain was working with amazing celerity. Suddenly he gave the hard mud of the dam a single slap with his tail–and Baree sat up. Instantly he saw Beaver Tooth, and stared. Beaver Tooth stared. For a full half-minute neither moved the thousandth part of an inch. Then Baree stood up and wagged his tail.
That was enough. Dropping to his forefeet. Beaver Tooth waddled leisurely to the edge of the dam and dived over. He was neither cautious nor in very great haste now. He made a great commotion in the water and swam boldly back and forth under Baree. When he had done this several times, he cut straight up the pond to the largest of the three houses and disappeared. Five minutes after Beaver Tooth’s exploit word was passing quickly among the colony. The stranger–Baree–was not a lynx. He was not a fox. He was not a wolf. Moreover, he was very young–and harmless. Work could be resumed. Play could be resumed. There was no danger. Such was Beaver Tooth’s verdict.
If someone had shouted these facts in beaver language through a megaphone, the response could not have been quicker. All at once it seemed to Baree, who was still standing on the edge of the dam, that the pond was alive with beavers. He had never seen so many at one time before. They were popping up everywhere, and some of them swam up within a dozen feet of him and looked him over in a leisurely and curious way. For perhaps five minutes the beavers seemed to have no particular object in view. Then Beaver Tooth himself struck straight for the shore and climbed out. Others followed him. Half a dozen workers disappeared in the canals. As many more waddled out among the alders and willows. Eagerly Baree watched for Umisk and his chums. At last he saw them, swimming forth from one of the smaller houses. They climbed out on their playground–the smooth bar above the shore of mud. Baree wagged his tail so hard that his whole body shook, and hurried along the dam.
When he came out on the level strip of shore, Umisk was there alone, nibbling his supper from a long, freshly cut willow. The other little beavers had gone into a thick clump of young alders.
This time Umisk did not run. He looked up from his stick. Baree squatted himself, wiggling in a most friendly and ingratiating manner. For a few seconds Umisk regarded him.
Then, very coolly, he resumed his supper.
CHAPTER 10
Just as in the life of every man there is one big, controlling influence, either for good or bad, so in the life of Baree the beaver pond was largely an arbiter of destiny. Where he might have gone if he had not discovered it, and what might have happened to him, are matters of conjecture. But it held him. It began to take the place of the old windfall, and in the beavers themselves he found a companionship which made up, in a way, for his loss of the protection and friendship of Kazan and Gray Wolf.
This companionship, if it could be called that, went just so far and no farther. With each day that passed the older beavers became more accustomed to seeing Baree. At the end of two weeks, if Baree had gone away, they would have missed him–but not in the same way that Baree would have missed the beavers. It was a matter of good-natured toleration on their part. With Baree it was different. He was still uskahis, as Nepeese would have said. He still wanted mothering; he was still moved by the puppyish yearnings which he had not yet had the time to outgrow; and when night came–to speak that yearning quite plainly–he had the desire to go into the big beaver house with Umisk and his chums and sleep.
During this fortnight that followed Beaver Tooth’s exploit on the dam Baree ate his meals a mile up the creek, where there were plenty of crayfish. But the pond was home. Night always found him there, and a large part of his day. He slept at the end of the dam, or on top of it on particularly clear nights, and the beavers accepted him as a permanent guest. They worked in his presence as if he did not exist.
Baree was fascinated by this work, and he never grew tired of watching it. It puzzled and bewildered him. Day after day he saw them float timber and brush through the water for the new dam. He saw this dam growing steadily under their efforts. One day he lay within a dozen feet of an old beaver who was cutting down a tree six inches through. When the tree fell, and the old beaver scurried away, Baree scurried, too. Then he came back and smelled of the cutting, wondering what it was all about, and why Umisk’s uncle or grandfather or aunt had gone to all that trouble.
He still could not induce Umisk and the other young beavers to join him in play, and after the first week or so he gave up his efforts. In fact, their play puzzled him almost as much as the dam-building operations of the older beavers. Umisk, for instance, was fond of playing in the mud at the edge of the pond. He was like a very small boy. Where his elders floated timbers from three inches to a foot in diameter to the big dam, Umisk brought small sticks and twigs no larger around than a lead pencil to his playground, and built a make-believe dam of his own.
Umisk would work an hour at a time on this play dam as industriously as his father and mother were working on the big dam, and Baree would lie flat on his belly a few feet away, watching him and wondering mightily. And through this half-dry mud Umisk would also dig his miniature canals, just as a small boy might have dug his Mississippi River and pirate-infested oceans in the outflow of some back-lot spring. With his sharp little teeth he cut down his big timber–willow sprouts never more than an inch in diameter; and when one of these four or five-foot sprouts toppled down, he undoubtedly felt as great a satisfaction as Beaver Tooth felt when he sent a seventy-foot birch crashing into the edge of the pond. Baree could not understand the fun of all this. He could see some reason for nibbling at sticks–he liked to sharpen his teeth on sticks himself; but it puzzled him to explain why Umisk so painstakingly stripped the bark from the sticks and swallowed it.
Another method of play still further discouraged Baree’s advances. A short distance from the spot where he had first seen Umisk there was a shelving bank that rose ten or twelve feet from the water, and this bank was used by the young beavers as a slide. It was worn smooth and hard. Umisk would climb up the bank at a point where it was not so steep. At the top of the slide he would put his tail out flat behind him and give himself a shove, shooting down the toboggan and landing in the water with a big splash. At times there were from six to ten young beavers engaged in this sport, and now and then one of the older beavers would waddle to the top of the slide and take a turn with the youngsters.
One afternoon, when the toboggan was particularly wet and slippery from recent use, Baree went up the beaver path to the top of the bank, and began investigating. Nowhere had he found the beaver smell so strong as on the slide. He began sniffing and incautiously went too far. In an instant his feet shot out from under him, and with a single wild yelp he went shooting down the toboggan. For the second time in his life he found himself struggling under water, and when a minute or two later he dragged himself up through the soft mud to the firmer footing of the shore, he had at last a very well-defined opinion of beaver play.
It may be that Umisk saw him. It may be that very soon the story of his adventure was known by all the inhabitants of Beaver Town. For when Baree came upon Umisk eating his supper of alder bark that evening, Umisk stood his ground to the last inch, and for the first time they smelled noses. At least Baree sniffed audibly, and plucky little Umisk sat like a rolled-up sphinx. That was the final cementing of their friendship–on Baree’s part. He capered about extravagantly for a few moments, telling Umisk how much he liked him, and that they’d be great chums. Umisk didn’t talk. He didn’t make a move until he resumed his supper. But he was a companionable-looking little fellow, for all that, and Baree was happier than he had been since the day he left the old windfall.
This friendship, even though it outwardly appeared to be quite one-sided, was decidedly fortunate for Umisk. When Baree was at the pond, he always kept as near to Umisk as possible, when he could find him. One day he was lying in a patch of grass, half asleep, while Umisk busied himself in a clump of alder shoots a few yards away. It was the warning crack of a beaver tail that fully roused Baree; and then another and another, like pistol shots. He jumped up. Everywhere beavers were scurrying for the pond.
Just then Umisk came out of the alders and hurried as fast as his short, fat legs would carry him toward the water. He had almost reached the mud when a lightning flash of red passed before Baree’s eyes in the afternoon sun, and in another instant Napakasew–the he-fox–had fastened his sharp fangs in Umisk’s throat. Baree heard his little friend’s agonized cry; he heard the frenzied flap-flap-flap of many tails–and his blood pounded suddenly with the thrill of excitement and rage.
As swiftly as the red fox himself, Baree darted to the rescue. He was as big and as heavy as the fox, and when he struck Napakasew, it was with a ferocious snarl that Pierrot might have heard on the farther side of the pond, and his teeth sank like knives into the shoulder of Umisk’s assailant. The fox was of a breed of forest highwaymen which kills from behind. He was not a fighter when it came fang-to-fang, unless cornered–and so fierce and sudden was Baree’s assault that Napakasew took to flight almost as quickly as he had begun his attack on Umisk.
Baree did not follow him, but went to Umisk, who lay half in the mud, whimpering and snuffling in a curious sort of way. Gently Baree nosed him, and after a moment or two Umisk got up on his webbed feet, while fully twenty or thirty beavers were making a tremendous fuss in the water near the shore.
After this the beaver pond seemed more than ever like home to Baree.
CHAPTER 11
While lovely Nepeese was still shuddering over her thrilling experience under the rock–while Pierrot still offered grateful thanks in his prayers for her deliverance and Baree was becoming more and more a fixture at the beaver pond–Bush McTaggart was perfecting a little scheme of his own up at Post Lac Bain, about forty miles north and west. McTaggart had been factor at Lac Bain for seven years. In the company’s books down in Winnipeg he was counted a remarkably successful man. The expense of his post was below the average, and his semiannual report of furs always ranked among the first. After his name, kept on file in the main office, was one notation which said: “Gets more out of a dollar than any other man north of God’s Lake.”
The Indians knew why this was so. They called him Napao Wetikoo–the man-devil. This was under their breath–a name whispered sinisterly in the glow of tepee fires, or spoken softly where not even the winds might carry it to the ears of Bush McTaggart. They feared him; they hated him. They died of starvation and sickness, and the tighter Bush McTaggart clenched the fingers of his iron rule, the more meekly, it seemed to him, did they respond to his mastery. His was a small soul, hidden in the hulk of a brute, which rejoiced in power. And here–with the raw wilderness on four sides of him–his power knew no end. The big company was behind him. It had made him king of a domain in which there was little law except his own. And in return he gave back to the company bales and bundles of furs beyond their expectation. It was not for them to have suspicions. They were a thousand or more miles away–and dollars were what counted.
Gregson might have told. Gregson was the investigating agent of that district, who visited McTaggart once each year. He might have reported that the Indians called McTaggart Napao Wetikoo because he gave them only half price for their furs. He might have told the company quite plainly that he kept the people of the trap lines at the edge of starvation through every month of the winter, that he had them on their knees with his hands at their throats–putting the truth in a mild and pretty way–and that he always had a woman or a girl, Indian or half-breed, living with him at the Post. But Gregson enjoyed his visits too much at Lac Bain. Always he could count on two weeks of coarse pleasures. And in addition to that, his own womenfolk at home wore a rich treasure of fur that came to them from McTaggart.
One evening, a week after the adventure of Nepeese and Baree under the rock, McTaggart sat under the glow of an oil lamp in his “store.” He had sent his little pippin-faced English clerk to bed, and he was alone. For six weeks there had been in him a great unrest. It was just six weeks ago that Pierrot had brought Nepeese on her first visit to Lac Bain since McTaggart had been factor there. She had taken his breath away. Since then he had been able to think of nothing but her. Twice in that six weeks he had gone down to Pierrot’s cabin. Tomorrow he was going again. Marie, the slim Cree girl over in his cabin, he had forgotten–just as a dozen others before Marie had slipped out of his memory. It was Nepeese now. He had never seen anything quite so beautiful as Pierrot’s girl.
Audibly he cursed Pierrot as he looked at a sheet of paper under his hand, on which for an hour or more he had been making notes out of worn and dusty company ledgers. It was Pierrot who stood in his way. Pierrot’s father, according to those notes, had been a full-blooded Frenchman. Therefore Pierrot was half French, and Nepeese was quarter French–though she was so beautiful he could have sworn there was not more than a drop or two of Indian blood in her veins. If they had been all Indian–Chipewyan, Cree, Ojibway, Dog Rib–anything–there would have been no trouble at all in the matter. He would have bent them to his power, and Nepeese would have come to his cabin, as Marie had come six months ago. But there was the accursed French of it! Pierrot and Nepeese were different. And yet–
He smiled grimly, and his hands clenched tighter. After all, was not his power sufficient? Would even Pierrot dare stand up against that? If Pierrot objected, he would drive him from the country–from the trapping regions that had come down to him as heritage from father and grandfather, and even before their day. He would make of Pierrot a wanderer and an outcast, as he had made wanderers and outcasts of a score of others who had lost his favor. No other Post would sell to or buy from Pierrot if Le Bete–the black cross–was put after his name. That was his power–a law of the factors that had come down through the centuries. It was a tremendous power for evil. It had brought him Marie, the slim, dark-eyed Cree girl, who hated him–and who in spite of her hatred “kept house for him.”
That was the polite way of explaining her presence if explanations were ever necessary. McTaggart looked again at the notes he had made on the sheet of paper. Pierrot’s trapping country, his own property according to the common law of the wilderness, was very valuable. During the last seven years he had received an average of a thousand dollars a year for his furs, for McTaggart had been unable to cheat Pierrot quite as completely as he had cheated the Indians. A thousand dollars a year! Pierrot would think twice before he gave that up. McTaggart chuckled as he crumpled the paper in his hand and prepared to put out the light. Under his close-cropped beard his reddish face blazed with the fire that was in his blood. It was an unpleasant face–like iron, merciless, filled with the look that gave him his name of Napao Wetikoo. His eyes gleamed, and he drew a quick breath as he put out the light.
He chuckled again as he made his way through the darkness to the door. Nepeese as good as belonged to him. He, would have her if it cost–PIERROT’S LIFE. And–WHY NOT? It was all so easy. A shot on a lonely trap line, a single knife thrust–and who would know? Who would guess where Pierrot had gone? And it would all be Pierrot’s fault. For the last time he had seen Pierrot, he had made an honest proposition: he would marry Nepeese. Yes, even that. He had told Pierrot so. He had told Pierrot that when the latter was his father-in-law, he would pay him double price for furs.
And Pierrot had stared–had stared with that strange, stunned look in his face, like a man dazed by a blow from a club. And so if he did not get Nepeese without trouble it would all be Pierrot’s fault. Tomorrow McTaggart would start again for the half-breed’s country. And the next day Pierrot would have an answer for him. Bush McTaggart chuckled again as he went to bed.
Until the next to the last day Pierrot said nothing to Nepeese about what had passed between him and the factor at Lac Bain. Then he told her.
“He is a beast–a man-devil,” he said, when he had finished. “I would rather see you out there–with her–dead.” And he pointed to the tall spruce under which the princess mother lay.
Nepeese had not uttered a sound. But her eyes had grown bigger and darker, and there was a flush in her cheeks which Pierrot had never seen there before. She stood up when he had finished, and she seemed taller to him. Never had she looked quite so much like a woman, and Pierrot’s eyes were deep-shadowed with fear and uneasiness as he watched her while she gazed off into the northwest–toward Lac Bain.
She was wonderful, this slip of a girl-woman. Her beauty troubled him. He had seen the look in Bush McTaggart’s eyes. He had heard the thrill in McTaggart’s voice. He had caught the desire of a beast in McTaggart’s face. It had frightened him at first. But now–he was not frightened. He was uneasy, but his hands were clenched. In his heart there was a smoldering fire. At last Nepeese turned and came and sat down beside him again, at his feet.
“He is coming tomorrow, ma cherie,” he said. “What shall I tell him?”
The Willow’s lips were red. Her eyes shone. But she did not look up at her father.
“Nothing, Nootawe–except that you are to say to him that I am the one to whom he must come–for what he seeks.”
Pierrot bent over and caught her smiling. The sun went down. His heart sank with it, like cold lead.
From Lac Bain to Pierrot’s cabin the trail cut within half a mile of the beaver pond, a dozen miles from where Pierrot lived. And it was here, on a twist of the creek in which Wakayoo had caught fish for Baree, that Bush McTaggart made his camp for the night. Only twenty miles of the journey could be made by canoe, and as McTaggart was traveling the last stretch afoot, his camp was a simple affair–a few cut balsams, a light blanket, a small fire. Before he prepared his supper, the factor drew a number of copper wire snares from his small pack and spent half an hour in setting them in rabbit runways. This method of securing meat was far less arduous than carrying a gun in hot weather, and it was certain. Half a dozen snares were good for at least three rabbits, and one of these three was sure to be young and tender enough for the frying pan. After he had placed his snares McTaggart set a skillet of bacon over the coals and boiled his coffee.
Of all the odors of a camp, the smell of bacon reaches farthest in the forest. It needs no wind. It drifts on its own wings. On a still night a fox will sniff it a mile away–twice that far if the air is moving in the right direction. It was this smell of bacon that came to Baree where he lay in his hollow on top of the beaver dam.
Since his experience in the canyon and the death of Wakayoo, he had not fared particularly well. Caution had kept him near the pond, and he had lived almost entirely on crayfish. This new aroma that came with the night wind roused his hunger. But it was elusive: now he could smell it–the next instant it was gone. He left the dam and began questing for the source of it in the forest, until after a time he lost it altogether. McTaggart had finished frying his bacon and was eating it.
It was a splendid night that followed. Perhaps Baree would have slept through it in his nest on the top of the dam if the bacon smell had not stirred the new hunger in him. Since his adventure in the canyon, the deeper forest had held a dread for him, especially at night. But this night was like a pale, golden day. It was moonless; but the stars shone like a billion distant lamps, flooding the world in a soft and billowy sea of light. A gentle whisper of wind made pleasant sounds in the treetops. Beyond that it was very quiet, for it was Puskowepesim–the Molting Moon–and the wolves were not hunting, the owls had lost their voice, the foxes slunk with the silence of shadows, and even the beavers had begun to cease their labors. The horns of the moose, the deer, and the caribou were in tender velvet, and they moved but little and fought not at all. It was late July, Molting Moon of the Cree, Moon of Silence for the Chipewyan.
In this silence Baree began to hunt. He stirred up a family of half-grown partridges, but they escaped him. He pursued a rabbit that was swifter than he. For an hour he had no luck. Then he heard a sound that made every drop of blood in him thrill. He was close to McTaggart’s camp, and what he had heard was a rabbit in one of McTaggart’s snares. He came out into a little starlit open and there he saw the rabbit going through a most marvelous pantomime. It amazed him for a moment, and he stopped in his tracks.
Wapoos, the rabbit, had run his furry head into the snare, and his first frightened jump had “shot” the sapling to which the copper wire was attached so that he was now hung half in mid-air, with only his hind feet touching the ground. And there he was dancing madly while the noose about his neck slowly choked him to death.
Baree gave a sort of gasp. He could understand nothing of the part that the wire and the sapling were playing in this curious game. All he could see was that Wapoos was hopping and dancing about on his hind legs in a most puzzling and unrabbitlike fashion. It may be that he thought it some sort of play. In this instance, however, he did not regard Wapoos as he had looked on Umisk the beaver. He knew that Wapoos made mighty fine eating, and after another moment or two of hesitation he darted upon his prey.
Wapoos, half gone already, made almost no struggle, and in the glow of the stars Baree finished him, and for half an hour afterward he feasted.
McTaggart had heard no sound, for the snare into which Wapoos had run his head was the one set farthest from his camp. Beside the smoldering coals of his fire he sat with his back to a tree, smoking his black pipe and dreaming covetously of Nepeese, while Baree continued his night wandering. Baree no longer had the desire to hunt. He was too full. But he nosed in and out of the starlit spaces, enjoying immensely the stillness and the golden glow of the night. He was following a rabbit-run when he came to a place where two fallen logs left a trail no wider than his body. He squeezed through; something tightened about his neck. There was a sudden snap–a swish as the sapling was released from its “trigger”–and Baree was jerked off his feet so suddenly that he had no time to conjecture as to what was happening.
The yelp in his throat died in a gurgle, and the next moment he was going through the pantomimic actions of Wapoos, who was having his vengeance inside him. For the life of him Baree could not keep from dancing about, while the wire grew tighter and tighter about his neck. When he snapped at the wire and flung the weight of his body to the ground, the sapling would bend obligingly, and then–in its rebound–would yank him for an instant completely off the earth. Furiously he struggled. It was a miracle that the fine wire held him. In a few moments more it must have broken–but McTaggart had heard him! The factor caught up his blanket and a heavy stick as he hurried toward the snare. It was not a rabbit making those sounds–he knew that. Perhaps a fishercat–a lynx, a fox, a young wolf–
It was the wolf he thought of first when he saw Baree at the end of the wire. He dropped the blanket and raised the club. If there had been clouds overhead, or the stars had been less brilliant, Baree would have died as surely as Wapoos had died. With the club raised over his head McTaggart saw in time the white star, the white-tipped ear, and the jet black of Baree’s coat.
With a swift movement he exchanged the club for the blanket.
In that hour, could McTaggart have looked ahead to the days that were to come, he would have used the club. Could he have foreseen the great tragedy in which Baree was to play a vital part, wrecking his hopes and destroying his world, he would have beaten him to a pulp there under the light of the stars. And Baree, could he have foreseen what was to happen between this brute with a white skin and the most beautiful thing in the forests, would have fought even more bitterly before he surrendered himself to the smothering embrace of the factor’s blanket. On this night Fate had played a strange hand for them both, and only that Fate, and perhaps the stars above, held a knowledge of what its outcome was to be.
CHAPTER 12
Half an hour later Bush McTaggart’s fire was burning brightly again. In the glow of it Baree lay trussed up like an Indian papoose, tied into a balloon-shaped ball with babiche thong, his head alone showing where his captor had cut a hole for it in the blanket. He was hopelessly caught–so closely imprisoned in the blanket that he could scarcely move a muscle of his body. A few feet away from him McTaggart was bathing a bleeding hand in a basin of water. There was also a red streak down the side of McTaggart’s bullish neck.
“You little devil!” he snarled at Baree. “You little devil!”
He reached over suddenly and gave Baree’s head a vicious blow with his heavy hand.
“I ought to beat your brains out, and–I believe I will!”
Baree watched him as he picked up a stick close at his side–a bit of firewood. Pierrot had chased him, but this was the first time he had been near enough to the man-monster to see the red glow in his eyes. They were not like the eyes of the wonderful creature who had almost caught him in the web of her hair, and who had crawled after him under the rock. They were the eyes of a beast. They made him shrink and try to draw his head back into the blanket as the stick was raised. At the same time he snarled. His white fangs gleamed in the firelight. His ears were flat. He wanted to sink his teeth in the red throat where he had already drawn blood.
The stick fell. It fell again and again, and when McTaggart was done, Baree lay half stunned, his eyes partly closed by the blows, and his mouth bleeding.
“That’s the way we take the devil out of a wild dog,” snarled McTaggart. “I guess you won’t try the biting game again, eh, youngster? A thousand devils–but you went almost to the bone of this hand!”
He began washing the wound again. Baree’s teeth had sunk deep, and there was a troubled look in the factor’s face. It was July–a bad month for bites. From his kit he got a small flask of whisky and turned a bit of the raw liquor on the wound, cursing Baree as it burned into his flesh.
Baree’s half-shut eyes were fixed on him steadily. He knew that at last he had met the deadliest of all his enemies. And yet he was not afraid. The club in Bush McTaggart’s hand had not killed his spirit. It had killed his fear. It had roused in him a hatred such as he had never known–not even when he was fighting Oohoomisew, the outlaw owl. The vengeful animosity of the wolf was burning in him now, along with the savage courage of the dog. He did not flinch when McTaggart approached him again. He made an effort to raise himself, that he might spring at this man-monster. In the effort, swaddled as he was in the blanket. he rolled over in a helpless and ludicrous heap.
The sight of it touched McTaggart’s risibilities, and he laughed. He sat down with his back to the tree again and filled his pipe.
Baree did not take his eyes from McTaggart as he smoked. He watched the man when the latter stretched himself out on the bare ground and went to sleep. He listened, still later, to the man-monster’s heinous snoring. Again and again during the long night he struggled to free himself. He would never forget that night. It was terrible. In the thick, hot folds of the blanket his limbs and body were suffocated until the blood almost stood still in his veins. Yet he did not whine.
They began to journey before the sun was up, for if Baree’s blood was almost dead within him, Bush McTaggart’s was scorching his body. He made his last plans as he walked swiftly through the forest with Baree under his arm. He would send Pierrot at once for Father Grotin at his mission seventy miles to the west. He would marry Nepeese–yes, marry her! That would tickle Pierrot. And he would be alone with Nepeese while Pierrot was gone for the missioner.
This thought flamed McTaggart’s blood like strong whisky. There was no thought in his hot and unreasoning brain of what Nepeese might say–of what she might think. His hand clenched, and he laughed harshly as there flashed on him for an instant the thought that perhaps Pierrot would not want to give her up. Pierrot! Bah! It would not be the first time he had killed a man–or the second.
McTaggart laughed again, and he walked still faster. There was no chance of his losing–no chance for Nepeese to get away from him. He–Bush McTaggart–was lord of this wilderness, master of its people, arbiter of their destinies. He was power–and the law.
The sun was well up when Pierrot, standing in front of his cabin with Nepeese, pointed to a rise in the trail three or four hundred yards away, over which McTaggart had just appeared.
“He is coming.”
With a face which had aged since last night he looked at Nepeese. Again he saw the dark glow in her eyes and the deepening red of her parted lips, and his heart was sick again with dread. Was it possible-
She turned on him, her eyes shining, her voice trembling.
“Remember, Nootawe–you must send him to me for his answer,” she cried quickly, and she darted into the cabin. With a cold, gray face Pierrot faced Bush McTaggart.
CHAPTER 13
From the window, her face screened by the folds of the curtain which she had made for it, the Willow could see what happened outside. She was not smiling now. She was breathing quickly, and her body was tense. Bush McTaggart paused not a dozen feet from the window and shook hands with Pierrot, her father. She heard McTaggart’s coarse voice, his boisterous greeting, and then she saw him showing Pierrot what he carried under his arm. There came to her distinctly his explanation of how he had caught his captive in a rabbit snare. He unwrapped the blanket. Nepeese gave a cry of amazement. In an instant she was out beside them. She did not look at McTaggart’s red face, blazing in its joy and exultation.
“It is Baree!” she cried.
She took the bundle from McTaggart and turned to Pierrot.
“Tell him that Baree belongs to me,” she said.
She hurried into the cabin. McTaggart looked after her, stunned and amazed. Then he looked at Pierrot. A man half blind could have seen that Pierrot was as amazed as he.
Nepeese had not spoken to him–the factor of Lac Bain! She had not LOOKED at him! And she had taken the dog from him with as little concern as though he had been a wooden man. The red in his face deepened as he stared from Pierrot to the door through which she had gone, and which she had closed behind her.
On the floor of the cabin Nepeese dropped on her knees and finished unwrapping the blanket. She was not afraid of Baree. She had forgotten McTaggart. And then, as Baree rolled in a limp heap on the floor, she saw his half-closed eyes and the dry blood on his jaws, and the light left her face as swiftly as the sun is shadowed by a cloud. “Baree,” she cried softly. “Baree–Baree!”
She partly lifted him in her two hands. Baree’s head sagged. His body was numbed until he was powerless to move. His legs were without feeling. He could scarcely see. But he heard her voice! It was the same voice that had come to him that day he had felt the sting of the bullet, the voice that had pleaded with him under the rock!
The voice of the Willow thrilled Baree. It seemed to stir the sluggish blood in his veins, and he opened his eyes wider and saw again the wonderful stars that had glowed at him so softly the day of Wakayoo’s death. One of the Willow’s long braids fell over her shoulder, and he smelled again the sweet scent of her hair as her hand caressed him and her voice talked to him. Then she got up suddenly and left him, and he did not move while he waited for her. In a moment she was back with a basin of water and a cloth. Gently she washed the blood from his eyes and mouth. And still Baree made no move. He scarcely breathed. But Nepeese saw the little quivers that shot through his body when her hand touched him, like electric shocks.
“He beat you with a club,” she was saying, her dark eyes within a foot of Baree’s. “He beat you! That man-beast!”
There came an interruption. The door opened, and the man-beast stood looking down on them, a grin on his red face. Instantly Baree showed that he was alive. He sprang back from under the Willow’s hand with a sudden snarl and faced McTaggart. The hair of his spine stood up like a brush; his fangs gleamed menacingly, and his eyes burned like living coals.
“There is a devil in him,” said McTaggart. “He is wild–born of the wolf. You must be careful or he will take off a hand, kit sakahet.” It was the first time he had called her that lover’s name in Cree–SWEETHEART! Her heart pounded. She bent her head for a moment over her clenched hands, and McTaggart–looking down on what he thought was her confusion–laid his hand caressingly on her hair. From the door Pierrot had heard the word, and now he saw the caress, and he raised a hand as if to shut out the sight of a sacrilege.
“Mon Dieu!” he breathed.
In the next instant he had given a sharp cry of wonder that mingled with a sudden yell of pain from McTaggart. Like a flash Baree had darted across the floor and fastened his teeth in the factor’s leg. They had bitten deep before McTaggart freed himself with a powerful kick. With an oath he snatched his revolver from its holster. The Willow was ahead of him. With a little cry she darted to Baree and caught him in her arms. As she looked up at McTaggart, her soft, bare throat was within a few inches of Baree’s naked fangs. Her eyes blazed.
“You beat him!” she cried. “He hates you–hates you–“
“Let him go!” called Pierrot in an agony of fear.
“Mon Dieu! I say let him go, or he will tear the life from you!”
“He hates you–hates you–hates you–” the Willow was repeating over and over again into McTaggart’s startled face. Then suddenly she turned to her father. “No, he will not tear the life from me,” she cried. “See! It is Baree. Did I not tell you that? It is Baree! Is it not proof that he defended me–“
“From me!” gasped McTaggart, his face darkening.
Pierrot advanced and laid a hand on McTaggart’s arm. He was smiling.
“Let us leave them to fight it out between themselves, m’sieu,” he said. “They are two little firebrands, and we are not safe. If she is bitten–“
He shrugged his shoulders. A great load had been lifted from them suddenly. His voice was soft and persuasive. And now the anger had gone out of the Willow’s face. A coquettish uplift of her eyes caught McTaggart, and she looked straight at him half smiling, as she spoke to her father:
“I will join you soon, mon pere–you and M’sieu the Factor from Lac Bain!”
There were undeniable little devils in her eyes, McTaggart thought–little devils laughing full at him as she spoke, setting his brain afire and his blood to throbbing wildly. Those eyes–full of dancing witches! How he would take pleasure in taming them–very soon now! He followed Pierrot outside. In his exultation he no longer felt the smart of Baree’s teeth.
“I will show you my new cariole that I have made for winter, m’sieu,” said Pierrot as the door closed behind them.
Half an hour later Nepeese came out of the cabin. She could see that Pierrot and the factor had been talking about something that had not been pleasant to her father. His face was strained. She caught in his eyes the smolder of fire which he was trying to smother, as one might smother flames under a blanket. McTaggart’s jaws were set, but his eyes lighted up with pleasure when he saw her. She knew what it was about. The factor from Lac Bain had been demanding his answer of Pierrot, and Pierrot had been telling him what she had insisted upon–that he must come to her. And he was coming! She turned with a quick beating of the heart and hurried down a little path. She heard McTaggart’s footsteps behind her, and threw the flash of a smile over her shoulder. But her teeth were set tight. The nails of her fingers were cutting into the palms of her hands.
Pierrot stood without moving. He watched them as they disappeared into the edge of the forest, Nepeese still a few steps ahead of McTaggart. Out of his breast rose a sharp breath.
“Par les mills cornes du diable!” he swore softly. “Is it possible–that she smiles from her heart at that beast? Non! It is impossible. And yet–if it is so–“
One of his brown hands tightened convulsively about the handle of the knife in his belt, and slowly he began to follow them.
McTaggart did not hurry to overtake Nepeese. She was following the narrow path deeper into the forest, and he was glad of that. They would be alone–away from Pierrot. He was ten steps behind her, and again the Willow smiled at him over her shoulder. Her body moved sinuously and swiftly. She was keeping accurate measurement of the distance between them–but McTaggart did not guess that this was why she looked back every now and then. He was satisfied to let her go on. When she turned from the narrow trail into a side path that scarcely bore the mark of travel, his heart gave an exultant jump. If she kept on, he would very soon have her alone–a good distance from the cabin. The blood ran hot in his face. He did not speak to her, through fear that she would stop. Ahead of them he heard the rumble of water. It was the creek running through the chasm.
Nepeese was making straight for that sound. With a little laugh she started to run, and when she stood at the edge of the chasm, McTaggart was fully fifty yards behind her. Twenty feet sheer down there was a deep pool between the rock walls, a pool so deep that the water was the color of blue ink. She turned to face the factor from Lac Bain. He had never looked more like a red beast to her. Until this moment she had been unafraid. But now–in an instant–he terrified her. Before she could speak what she had planned to say, he was at her side, and had taken her face between his two great hands, his coarse fingers twining in the silken strands of her thick braids where they fell over her shoulders at the neck.
“Ka sakahet!” he cried passionately. “Pierrot said you would have an answer for me. But I need no answer now. You are mine! Mine!”
She gave a cry. It was a gasping, broken cry. His arms were about her like bands of iron, crushing her slender body, shutting off her breath, turning the world almost black before her eyes. She could neither struggle nor cry out. She felt the hot passion of his lips on her face, heard his voice–and then came a moment’s freedom, and air into her strangled lungs. Pierrot was calling! He had come to the fork in the trail, and he was calling the Willow’s name!
McTaggart’s hot hand came over her mouth.
“Don’t answer,” she heard him say.
Strength–anger–hatred flared up in her, and fiercely she struck the hand down. Something in her wonderful eyes held McTaggart. They blazed into his very soul.
“Bete noir!” she panted at him, freeing herself from the last touch of his hands. “Beast–black beast!” Her voice trembled, and her face flamed. “See–I came to show you my pool–and tell you what you wanted to hear–and you–you–have crushed me like a beast–like a great rock– See! down there–it is my pool!”
She had not planned it like this. She had intended to be smiling, even laughing, in this moment. But McTaggart had spoiled them–her carefully made plans! And yet, as she pointed, the factor from Lac Bain looked for an instant over the edge of the chasm. And then she laughed–laughed as she gave him a sudden shove from behind.
“And that is my answer, M’sieu le Facteur from Lac Bain!” she cried tauntingly as he plunged headlong into the deep pool between the rock walls.
CHAPTER 14
From the edge of the open Pierrot saw what had happened, and he gave a great gasp of horror. He drew back among the balsams. This was not a moment for him to show himself. While his heart drummed like a hammer, his face was filled with joy.
On her hands and knees the Willow was peering over the edge. Bush McTaggart had disappeared. He had gone down like the great clod he was. The water of her pool had closed over him with a dull splash that was like a chuckle of triumph. He appeared now, beating out with his arms and legs to keep himself afloat, while the Willow’s voice came to him in taunting cries.
“Bete noir! Bete noir! Beast! Beast–“
Savagely she flung small sticks and tufts of earth down at him; and McTaggart, looking up as he gained his equilibrium, saw her leaning so far over that she seemed almost about to fall. Her long braids hung down into the chasm, gleaming in the sun. Her eyes were laughing while her lips taunted him. He could see the flash of her white teeth.
“Beast! Beast!”
He began swimming, still looking up at her. It was a hundred yards down the slow-going current to the beach of shale where he could climb out, and a half of that distance she followed him, laughing and taunting him, and flinging down sticks and pebbles. He noted that none of the sticks or stones was large enough to hurt him. When at last his feet touched bottom, she was gone.
Swiftly Nepeese ran back over the trail, and almost into Pierrot’s arms. She was panting and laughing when for a moment she stopped.
“I have given him the answer, Nootawe! He is in the pool!”
Into the balsams she disappeared like a bird. Pierrot made no effort to stop her or to follow.
“Tonnerre de Dieu,” he chuckled–and cut straight across for the other trail.
Nepeese was out of breath when she reached the cabin. Baree, fastened to a table leg by a babiche thong, heard her pause for a moment at the door. Then she entered and came straight to him. During the half-hour of her absence Baree had scarcely moved. That half-hour, and the few minutes that had preceded it, had made tremendous impressions upon him. Nature, heredity, and instinct were at work, clashing and readjusting, impinging on him a new intelligence–the beginning of a new understanding. A swift and savage impulse had made him leap at Bush McTaggart when the factor put his hand on the Willow’s head. It was not reason. It was a hearkening back of the dog to that day long ago when Kazan, his father, had lulled the man-brute in the tent, the man-brute who had dared to molest Thorpe’s wife, whom Kazan worshiped. Then it had been the dog–and the woman.
And here again it was the woman. She had appealed to the great hidden passion that was in Baree and that had come to him from Kazan. Of all the living things in the world, he knew that he must not hurt this creature that appeared to him through the door. He trembled as she knelt before him again, and up through the years came the wild and glorious surge of Kazan’s blood, overwhelming the wolf, submerging the savagery of his birth–and with his head flat on the floor he whined softly, and WAGGED HIS TAIL.
Nepeese gave a cry of joy.
“Baree!” she whispered, taking his head in her hands. “Baree!”
Her touch thrilled him. It sent little throbs through his body, a tremulous quivering which she could feel and which deepened the glow in her eyes. Gently her hand stroked his head and his back. It seemed to Nepeese that he did not breathe. Under the caress of her hand his eyes closed. In another moment she was talking to him, and at the sound of her voice his eyes shot open.
“He will come here–that beast–and he will kill us,” she was saying. “He will kill you because you bit him, Baree. Ugh, I wish you were bigger, and stronger, so that you could take off his head for me!”
She was untying the babiche from about the table leg, and under her breath she laughed. She was not frightened. It was a tremendous adventure–and she throbbed with exultation at the thought of having beaten the man-beast in her own way. She could see him in the pool struggling and beating about like a great fish. He was just about crawling out of the chasm now–and she laughed again as she caught Baree up under her arm.
“Oh–oopi-nao–but you are heavy!” she gasped, “And yet I must carry you–because I am going to run!”
She hurried outside. Pierrot had not come, and she darted swiftly into the balsams back of the cabin, with Baree hung in the crook of her arm, like a sack filled at both ends and tied in the middle. He felt like that, too. But he still had no inclination to wriggle himself free. Nepeese ran with him until her arm ached. Then she stopped and put him down on his feet, holding to the end of the caribou-skin thong that was tied about his neck. She was prepared for any lunge he might make to escape. She expected that he would make an attempt, and for a few moments she watched him closely, while Baree, with his feet on earth once more, looked about him. And then the Willow spoke to him softly.
“You are not going to run away, Baree. Non, you are going to stay with me, and we will kill that man-beast if he dares do to me again what he did back there.” She flung back the loose hair from about her flushed face, and for a moment she forgot Baree as she thought of that half-minute at the edge of the chasm. He was looking straight up at her when her glance fell on him again. “Non, you are not going to run away–you are going to follow me,” she whispered. “Come.”
The babiche string tightened about Baree’s neck as she urged him to follow. It was like another rabbit snare, and he braced his forefeet and bared his fangs just a little. The Willow did not pull. Fearlessly she put her hand on his head again. From the direction of the cabin came a shout, and at the sound of it she took Baree up under her arm once more.
“Bete noir–bete noir!” she called back tauntingly, but only loud enough to be heard a few yards away. “Go back to Lac Bain–owases–you wild beast!”
Nepeese began to make her way swiftly through the forest. It grew deeper and darker, and there were no trails. Three times in the next half-hour she stopped to put Baree down and rest her arm. Each time she pleaded with him coaxingly to follow her. The second and third times Baree wriggled and wagged his tail, but beyond those demonstrations of his satisfaction with the turn his affairs had taken he would not go. When the string tightened around his neck, he braced himself; once he growled–again he snapped viciously at the babiche. So Nepeese continued to carry him.
They came at last into a clearing. It was a tiny meadow in the heart of the forest, not more than three or four times as big as the cabin. Underfoot the grass was soft and green, and thickly strewn with flowers. Straight through the heart of this little oasis trickled a streamlet across which the Willow jumped with Baree under her arm, and on the edge of the rill was a small wigwam made of freshly cut spruce and balsam boughs. Into her diminutive mekewap the Willow thrust her head to see that things were as she had left them yesterday. Then, with a long breath of relief, she put down her four-legged burden and fastened the end of the babiche to one of the cut spruce limbs.
Baree burrowed himself back into the wall of the wigwam, and with head alert–and eyes wide open–watched his companion attentively. Not a movement of the Willow escaped him. She was radiant–and happy. Her laugh, sweet and wild as a bird’s trill, set Baree’s heart throbbing with a desire to jump about with her among the flowers.
For a time Nepeese seemed to forget Baree. Her wild blood raced with the joy of her triumph over the factor from Lac Bain. She saw him again, floundering about in the pool–pictured him at the cabin now, soaked and angry, demanding of mon pere where she had gone. And mon pere, with a shrug of his shoulders, was telling him that he didn’t know–that probably she had run off into the forest. It did not enter into her head that in tricking Bush McTaggart in that way she was playing with dynamite. She did not foresee the peril that in an instant would have stamped the wild flush from her face and curdled the blood in her veins–she did not guess that McTaggart had become for her a deadlier menace than ever.
Nepeese knew that he must be angry. But what had she to fear? Mon pere would be angry, too, if she told him what had happened at the edge of the chasm. But she would not tell him. He might kill the man from Lac Bain. A factor was great. But Pierrot, her father, was greater. It was an unlimited faith in her, born of her mother. Perhaps even now Pierrot was sending him back to Lac Bain, telling him that his business was there. But she would not return to the cabin to see. She would wait here. Mon pere would understand–and he knew where to find her when the man was gone. But it would have been such fun to throw sticks at him as he went!
After a little Nepeese returned to Baree. She brought him water and gave him a piece of raw fish. For hours they were alone, and with each hour there grew stronger in Baree the desire to follow the girl in every movement she made, to crawl close to her when she sat down, to feel the touch of her dress, of her hand–and to hear her voice. But he did not show this desire. He was still a little savage of the forests–a four-footed barbarian born half of a wolf and half of a dog; and he lay still. With Umisk he would have played. With Oohoomisew he would have fought. At Bush McTaggart he would have bared his fangs, and buried them deep when the chance came. But the girl was different. Like the Kazan of old, he had begun to worship. If the Willow had freed Baree, he would not have run away. If she had left him, he would possibly have followed her–at a distance. His eyes were never away from her. He watched her build a small fire and cook a piece of the fish. He watched her eat her dinner.
It was quite late in the afternoon when she came and sat down close to him, with her lap full of flowers which she twined in the long, shining braids of her hair. Then, playfully, she began beating Baree with the end of one of these braids. He shrank under the soft blows, and with that low, birdlike laughter in her throat, Nepeese drew his head into her lap where the scatter of flowers lay. She talked to him. Her hand stroked his head. Then it remained still, so near that he wanted to thrust out his warm red tongue and caress it. He breathed in the flower-scented perfume of it–and lay as if dead. It was a glorious moment. Nepeese, looking down on him, could not see that he was breathing.
There came an interruption. It was the snapping of a dry stick. Through the forest Pierrot had come with the stealth of a cat, and when they looked up, he stood at the edge of the open. Baree knew that it was not Bush McTaggart. But it was a man-beast! Instantly his body stiffened under the Willow’s hand. He drew back slowly and cautiously from her lap, and as Pierrot advanced, Baree snarled. The next instant Nepeese had risen and had run to Pierrot. The look in her father’s face alarmed her.
“What has happened, man pere?” she cried.
Pierrot shrugged his shoulders.
“Nothing, ma Nepeese–except that you have roused a thousand devils in the heart of the factor from Lac Barn, and that–“
He stopped as he saw Baree, and pointed at him.
“Last night when M’sieu the Factor caught him in a snare, he bit m’sieu’s hand. M’sieu’s hand is swollen twice its size, and I can see his blood turning black. It is pechipoo.”
“Pechipoo!” gasped Nepeese.
She looked into Pierrot’s eyes. They were dark, and filled with a sinister gleam–a flash of exultation, she thought.
“Yes, it is the blood poison,” said Pierrot. A gleam of cunning shot into his eyes as he looked over his shoulder, and nodded. “I have hidden the medicine–and told him there is no time to lose in getting back to Lac Bain. And he is afraid–that devil! He is waiting. With that blackening hand, he is afraid to start back alone–and so I go with him. And–listen, ma Nepeese. We will be away by sundown, and there is something you must know before I go.”
Baree saw them there, close together in the shadows thrown by the tall spruce trees. He heard the low murmur of their voices–chiefly of Pierrot’s, and at last he saw Nepeese put her two arms up around the man-beast’s neck, and then Pierrot went away again into the forest. He thought that the Willow would never turn her face toward him after that. For a long time she stood looking in the direction which Pierrot had taken. And when after a time she turned and came back to Baree, she did not look like the Nepeese who had been twining flowers in her hair. The laughter was gone from her face and eyes. She knelt down beside him and with sudden fierceness she cried:
“It is pechipoo, Baree! It was you–you–who put the poison in his blood. And I hope he dies! For I am afraid–afraid!”
She shivered.
Perhaps it was in this moment that the Great Spirit of things meant Baree to understand–that at last it was given him to comprehend that his day had dawned, that the rising and the setting of his sun no longer existed in the sky but in this girl whose hand rested on his head. He whined softly, and inch by inch he dragged himself nearer to her until again his head rested in the hollow of her lap.
CHAPTER 15
For a long time after Pierrot left them the Willow did not move from the spot where she had seated herself beside Baree. It was at last the deepening shadows and a low rumble in the sky that roused her from the fear of the things Pierrot had told her. When she looked up, black clouds were massing slowly over the open space above the spruce tops. Darkness was falling. In the whisper of the wind and the dead stillness of the thickening gloom there was the sullen brewing of storm. Tonight there would be no glorious sunset. There would be no twilight hour in which to follow the trail, no moon, no stars–and unless Pierrot and the factor were already on their way, they would not start in the face of the pitch blackness that would soon shroud the forest.
Nepeese shivered and rose to her feet. For the first time Baree got up, and he stood close at her side. Above them a flash of lightning cut the clouds like a knife of fire, followed in an instant by a terrific crash of thunder. Baree shrank back as if struck a blow. He would have slunk into the shelter of the brush wall of the wigwam, but there was something about the Willow as he looked at her which gave him confidence. The thunder crashed again. But he retreated no farther. His eyes were fixed on Nepeese.
She stood straight and slim in that gathering gloom riven by the lightning, her beautiful head thrown back, her lips parted, and her eyes glowing with an almost eager anticipation–a sculptured goddess welcoming with bated breath the onrushing forces of the heavens. Perhaps it was because she was born during a night of storm. Many times Pierrot and the dead princess mother had told her that–how on the night she had come into the world the crash of thunder and the flare of lightning had made the hours an inferno, how the streams had burst over their banks and the stems of ten thousand forest trees had snapped in its fury–and the beat of the deluge on their cabin roof had drowned the sound of her mother’s pain, and of her own first babyish cries.
On that night, it may be, the Spirit of Storm was born in Nepeese. She loved to face it, as she was facing it now. It made her forget all things but the splendid might of nature. Her half-wild soul thrilled to the crash and fire of it. Often she had reached up her bare arms and laughed with joy as the deluge burst about her. Even now she might have stood there in the little open until the rain fell, if a whine from Baree had not caused her to turn. As the first big drops struck with the dull thud of leaden bullets about them, she went with him into the balsam shelter.
Once before Baree had passed through a night of terrible storm–the night he had hidden himself under a root and had seen the tree riven by lightning; but now he had company, and the warmth and soft pressure of the Willow’s hand on his head and neck filled him with a strange courage. He growled softly at the crashing thunder. He wanted to snap at the lightning flashes. Under her hand Nepeese felt the stiffening of his body, and in a moment of uncanny stillness she heard the sharp, uneasy click of his teeth. Then the rain fell.
It was not like other rains Baree had known. It was an inundation sweeping down out of the blackness of the skies. Within five minutes the interior of the balsam shelter was a shower bath. After half an hour of that torrential downpour, Nepeese was soaked to the skin. The water ran in little rivulets down her body. It trickled in tiny streams from her drenched braids and dropped from her long lashes, and the blanket under her became wet as a mop. To Baree it was almost as bad as his near-drowning in the stream after his fight with Papayuchisew, and he snuggled closer and closer under the sheltering arm of the Willow. It seemed an interminable time before the thunder rolled far to the east, and the lightning died away into distant and intermittent flashings. Even after that the rain fell for another hour. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
With a laughing gasp Nepeese rose to her feet. The water gurgled in her moccasins as she walked out into the open. She paid no attention to Baree–and he followed her. Across the open in the treetops the last of the storm clouds were drifting away. A star shone–then another; and the Willow stood watching them as they appeared until there were so many she could not count. It was no longer black. A wonderful starlight flooded the open after the inky gloom of the storm.
Nepeese looked down and saw Baree. He was standing quietly and unleashed, with freedom on all sides of him. Yet he did not run. He was waiting, wet as a water rat, with his eyes fixed on her expectantly. Nepeese made a movement toward him, and hesitated.
“No, you will not run away, Baree. I will leave you free. And now we must have a fire!”
A fire! Anyone but Pierrot might have said that she was crazy. Not a stem or twig in the forest that was not dripping! They could hear the trickle of running water all about them.
“A fire,” she said again. “Let us hunt for the wuskisi, Baree.”
With her wet clothes clinging to her lightly, she was like a slim shadow as she crossed the soggy clearing and lost herself among the forest trees. Baree still followed. She went straight to a birch tree that she had located that day and began tearing off the loose bark. An armful of this bark she carried close to the wigwam, and on it she heaped load after load of wet wood until she had a great pile. From a bottle in the wigwam she secured a dry match, and at the first touch of its tiny flame the birch bark flared up like paper soaked in oil. Half an hour later the Willow’s fire–if there had been no forest walls to hide it–could have been seen at the cabin a mile away. Not until it was blazing a dozen feet into the air did she cease piling wood on it. Then she drove sticks into the soft ground and over these sticks she stretched the blanket out to dry.
So their first night passed–storm, the cool, deep pool, the big fire; and later, when the Willow’s clothes and the blanket had dried, a few hours’ sleep. At dawn they returned to the cabin. It was a cautious approach. There was no smoke coming from the chimney. The door was closed. Pierrot and Bush McTaggart were gone.
CHAPTER 16
It was the beginning of August–the Flying-up Moon–when Pierrot returned from Lac Bain, and in three days more it would be the Willow’s seventeenth birthday. He brought back with him many things for Nepeese–ribbons for her hair, real shoes, which she wore at times like the two Englishwomen at Nelson House, and chief glory of all, some wonderful red cloth for a dress. In the three winters she had spent at the mission these women had made much of Nepeese. They had taught her to sew as well as to spell and read and pray, and at times there came to the Willow a compelling desire to do as they did.
So for three days Nepeese worked hard on her new dress and on her birthday she stood before Pierrot in a fashion that took his breath away. She had piled her hair in great coils on the crown of her head, as Yvonne, the younger of the Englishwomen, had taught her, and in the rich jet of it had half buried a vivid sprig of the crimson fireflower. Under this, and the glow in her eyes, and the red flush of her lips and cheeks came the wonderful red dress, fitted to the slim and sinuous beauty of her form–as the style had been two winters ago at Nelson House. And below the dress, which reached just below the knees–Nepeese had quite forgotten the proper length, or else her material had run out–came the coup de maitre of her toilet, real stockings and the gay shoes with high heels! She was a vision before which the gods of the forests might have felt their hearts stop beating. Pierrot turned her round and round without a word, but smiling. When she left him, however, followed by Baree, and limping a little because of the tightness of her shoes, the smile faded from his face, leaving it cold and bleak.
“Mon Dieu,” he whispered to himself in French, with a thought that was like a sharp stab at his heart, “she is not of her mother’s blood–non. It is French. She is–yes–like an angel.”
A change had come over Pierrot. During the three days she had been engaged in her dressmaking, Nepeese had been quite too excited to notice this change, and Pierrot had tried to keep it from her. He had been away ten days on the trip to Lac Bain, and he brought back to Nepeese the joyous news that M’sieu McTaggart was very sick with pechipoo–the blood poison–news that made the Willow clap her hands and laugh happily. But he knew that the factor would get well, and that he would come again to their cabin on the Gray Loon. And when next time he came–
It was while he was thinking of this that his face grew cold and hard, and his eyes burned. And he was thinking of it on this her birthday, even as her laughter floated to him like a song. dim, in spite of her seventeen years, she was nothing but a child–a baby! She could not guess his horrible visions. And the dread of awakening her for all time from that beautiful childhood kept him from telling her the whole truth so that she might have understood fully and completely. Non, it should not be that. His soul beat with a great and gentle love. He, Pierrot Du Quesne, would do the watching. And she should laugh and sing and play–and have no share in the black forebodings that had come to spoil his life.
On this day there came up from the south MacDonald, the government map maker. He was gray and grizzled, with a great, free laugh and a clean heart. Two days he remained with Pierrot. He told Nepeese of his daughters at home, of their mother, whom he worshiped more than anything else on earth–and before he went on in his quest of the last timber line of Banksian pine, he took pictures of the Willow as he had first seen her on her birthday: her hair piled in glossy coils, her red dress, the high-heeled shoes. He carried the negatives on with him, promising Pierrot that he would get a picture back in some way. Thus fate works in its strange and apparently innocent ways as it spins its webs of tragedy.
For many weeks after MacDonald’s visit there followed tranquil days on the Gray Loon. They were wonderful days for Baree. At first he was suspicious of Pierrot. After a little he tolerated him, and at last accepted him as a part of the cabin–and Nepeese. It was the Willow whose shadow he became. Pierrot noted the attachment with the deepest satisfaction.
“Ah, in a few months more, if he should leap at the throat of M’sieu the Factor,” he said to himself one day.
In September, when he was six months old, Baree was almost as large as Gray Wolf–big-boned, long-fanged, with a deep chest, and jaws that could already crack a bone as if it were a stick. He was with Nepeese whenever and wherever she moved. They swam together in the two pools–the pool in the forest and the pool between the chasm walls. At first it alarmed Baree to see Nepeese dive from the rock wall over which she had pushed McTaggart, but at the end of a month she had taught him to plunge after her through that twenty feet of space.
It was late in August when Baree saw the first of his kind outside of Kazan and Gray Wolf. During the summer Pierrot allowed his dogs to run at large on a small island in the center of a lake two or three miles away, and twice a week he netted fish for them. On one of these trips Nepeese accompanied him and took Baree with her. Pierrot carried his long caribou-gut whip. He expected a fight. But there was none. Baree joined the pack in their rush for fish, and ate with them. This pleased Pierrot more than ever.
“He will make a great sledge dog,” he chuckled. “It is best to leave him for a week with the pack, ma Nepeese.”
Reluctantly Nepeese gave her consent. While the dogs were still at their fish, they started homeward. Their canoe had slipped away before Baree discovered the trick they had played on him. Instantly he leaped into the water and swam after them–and the Willow helped him into his canoe.
Early in September a passing Indian brought Pierrot word of Bush McTaggart. The factor had been very sick. He had almost died from the blood poison, but he was well now. With the first exhilarating tang of autumn in the air a new dread oppressed Pierrot. But at present he said nothing of what was in his mind to Nepeese. The Willow had almost forgotten the factor from Lac Bain, for the glory and thrill of wilderness autumn was in her blood. She went on long trips with Pierrot, helping him to blaze out the new trap lines that would be used when the first snows came, and on these journeys she was always accompanied by Baree.
Most of Nepeese’s spare hours she spent in training him for the sledge. She began with a babiche string and a stick. It was a whole day before she could induce Baree to drag this stick without turning at every other step to snap and growl at it. Then she fastened another length of babiche to him, and made him drag two sticks. Thus little by little she trained him to the sledge harness, until at the end of a fortnight he was tugging heroically at anything she had a mind to fasten him to. Pierrot brought home two of the dogs from the island, and Baree was put into training with these, and helped to drag the empty sledge. Nepeese was delighted. On the day the first light snow fell she clapped her hands and cried to Pierrot:
“By midwinter I will have him the finest dog in the pack, mon pere!”
This was the time for Pierrot to say what was in his mind. He smiled. Diantre–would not that beast the factor fall into the very devil of a rage when he found how he had been cheated! And yet–
He tried to make his voice quiet and commonplace.
“I am going to send you down to the school at Nelson House again this winter, ma cherie,” he said. “Baree will help draw you down on the first good snow.”
The Willow was tying a knot in Baree’s babiche, and she rose slowly to her feet and looked at Pierrot. Her eyes were big and dark and steady.
“I am not going, mon pere!”
It was the first time Nepeese had ever said that to Pierrot–in just that way. It thrilled him. And he could scarcely face the look in her eyes. He was not good at bluffing. She saw what was in his face; it seemed to him that she was reading what was in his mind, and that she grew a little taller as she stood there. Certainly her breath came quicker, and he could see the throb of her breast. Nepeese did not wait for him to gather speech.
“I am not going!” she repeated with even greater finality, and bent again over Baree.
With a shrug of his shoulders Pierrot watched her. After all, was he not glad? Would his heart not have turned sick if she had been happy at the thought of leaving him? He moved to her side and with great gentleness laid a hand on her glossy head. Up from under it the Willow smiled at him. Between them they heard the click of Baree’s jaws as he rested his muzzle on the Willow’s arm. For the first time in weeks the world seemed suddenly filled with sunshine for Pierrot. When he went back to the cabin he held his head higher. Nepeese would not leave him! He laughed softly. He rubbed his hands together. His fear of the factor from Lac Bain was gone. From the cabin door he looked back at Nepeese and Baree.
“The Saints be blessed!” he murmured. “Now–now–it is Pierrot Du Quesne who knows what to do!”
CHAPTER 17
Back to Lac Bain, late in September, came MacDonald the map maker. For ten days Gregson, the investigating agent, had been Bush McTaggart’s guest at the Post, and twice in that time it had come into Marie’s mind to creep upon him while he slept and kill him. The factor himself paid little attention to her now, a fact which would have made her happy if it had not been for Gregson. He was enraptured with the wild, sinuous beauty of the Cree girl, and McTaggart, without jealousy, encouraged him. He was tired of Marie.
McTaggart told Gregson this. He wanted to get rid of her, and if he–Gregson–could possibly take her along with him it would be a great favor. He explained why. A little later, when the deep snows came, he was going to bring the daughter of Pierrot Du Quesne to the Post. In the rottenness of their brotherhood he told of his visit, of the manner of his reception, and of the incident at the chasm. In spite of all this, he assured Gregson, Pierrot’s girl would soon be at Lac Bain.
It was at this time that MacDonald came. He remained only one night, and without knowing that he was adding fuel to a fire already dangerously blazing, he gave the photograph he had taken of Nepeese to the factor. It was a splendid picture.
“If you can get it down to that girl some day I’ll be mightily obliged,” he said to McTaggart. “I promised her one. Her father’s name is Du Quesne–Pierrot Du Quesne. You probably know them. And the girl–“
His blood warmed as he described to McTaggart how beautiful she was that day in her red dress, which appeared black in the photograph. He did not guess how near McTaggart’s blood was to the boiling point.
The next day MacDonald started for Norway House. McTaggart did not show Gregson the picture. He kept it to himself and at night, under the glow of his lamp, he looked at it with thoughts that filled him with a growing resolution. There was but one way. The scheme had been in his mind for weeks–and the picture determined him. He dared not whisper his secret even to Gregson. But it was the one way. It would give him Nepeese. Only–he must wait for the deep snows, the midwinter snows. They buried their tragedies deepest.
McTaggart was glad when Gregson followed the map maker to Norway House. Out of courtesy he accompanied him a day’s journey on his way. When he returned to the Post, Marie was gone. He was glad. He sent off a runner with a load of presents for her people, and the message: “Don’t beat her. Keep her. She is free.”
Along with the bustle and stir of the beginning of the trapping season McTaggart began to prepare his house for the coming of Nepeese. He knew what she liked in the way of cleanliness and a few other things. He had the log walls painted white with the lead and oil that were intended for his York boats. Certain partitions were torn down, and new ones were built. The Indian wife of his chief runner made curtains for the windows, and he confiscated a small phonograph that should have gone on to Lac la Biche. He had no doubts, and he counted the days as they passed.
Down on the Gray Loon Pierrot and Nepeese were busy at many things, so busy that at times Pierrot’s fears of the factor at Lac Bain were almost forgotten, and they slipped out of the Willow’s mind entirely. It was the Red Moon, and both thrilled with the anticipation and excitement of the winter hunt. Nepeese carefully dipped a hundred traps in boiling caribou fat mixed with beaver grease, while Pierrot made fresh deadfalls ready for setting on his trails. When he was gone more than a day from the cabin, she was always with him.
But at the cabin there was much to do, for Pierrot, like all his Northern brotherhood, did not begin to prepare until the keen tang of autumn was in the air. There were snowshoes to be rewebbed with new babiche; there was wood to be cut in readiness for the winter storms. The cabin had to be banked, a new harness made, skinning knives sharpened and winter moccasins to be manufactured –a hundred and one affairs to be attended to, even to the repairing of the meat rack at the back of the cabin, where, from the beginning of cold weather until the end, would hang the haunches of deer, caribou, and moose for the family larder and, when fish were scarce, the dogs’ rations.
In the bustle of all these preparations Nepeese was compelled to give less attention to Baree than she had during the preceding weeks. They did not play so much; they no longer swam, for with the mornings there was deep frost on the ground, and the water was turning icy cold. They no longer wandered deep in the forest after flowers and berries. For hours at a time Baree would now lie at the Willow’s feet, watching her slender fingers as they weaved swiftly in and out with her snowshoe babiche. And now and then Nepeese would pause to lean over and put her hand on his head, and talk to him for a moment–sometimes in her soft Cree, sometimes in English or her father’s French.
It was the Willow’s voice which Baree had learned to understand, and the movement of her lips, her gestures, the poise of her body, the changing moods which brought shadow or sunlight into her face. He knew what it meant when she smiled. He would shake himself, and often jump about her in sympathetic rejoicing, when she laughed. Her happiness was such a part of him that a stern word from her was worse than a blow. Twice Pierrot had struck him, and twice Baree had leaped back and faced him with bared fangs and an angry snarl, the crest along his back standing up like a brush. Had one of the other dogs done this, Pierrot would have half-killed him. It would have been mutiny, and the man must be master. But Baree was always safe. A touch of the Willow’s hand, a word from her lips, and the crest slowly settled and the snarl went out of his throat.
Pierrot was not at all displeased.
“Dieu. I will never go so far as to try and whip that out of him,” he told himself. “He is a barbarian–a wild beast–and her slave. For her he would kill!”
So it turned out, through Pierrot himself–and without telling his reason for it–that Baree did not become a sledge dog. He was allowed his freedom, and was never tied, like the others. Nepeese was glad, but did not guess the thought that was in Pierrot’s mind. To himself Pierrot chuckled. She would never know why he kept Baree always suspicious of him, even to the point of hating him.
It required considerable skill and cunning on his part. With himself he reasoned:
“If I make him hate me, he will hate all men. Mey-oo! That is good.”
So he looked into the future–for Nepeese.
Now the tonic-filled days and cold, frosty nights of the Red Moon brought about the big change in Baree. It was inevitable. Pierrot knew that it would come, and the first night that Baree settled back on his haunches and howled up at the Red Moon, Pierrot prepared Nepeese for it.
“He is a wild dog, ma Nepeese,” he said to her. “He is half wolf, and the Call will come to him strong. He will go into the forests. He will disappear at times. But we must not fasten him. He will come back. Ka, he will come back!” And he rubbed his hands in the moonglow until his knuckles cracked.
The Call came to Baree like a thief entering slowly and cautiously into a forbidden place. He did not understand it at first. It made him nervous and uneasy, so restless that Nepeese frequently heard him whine softly in his sleep. He was waiting for something. What was it? Pierrot knew, and smiled in his inscrutable way.
And then it came. It was night, a glorious night filled with moon and stars, under which the earth was whitening with a film of frost, when they heard the first hunt call of the wolves. Now and then during the summer there had come the lone wolf howl, but this was the tonguing of the pack; and as it floated through the vast silence and mystery of the night, a song of savagery that had come with each Red Moon down through unending ages, Pierrot knew that at last had come that for which Baree had been waiting.
In an instant Baree had sensed it. His muscles grew taut as pieces of stretched rope as he stood up in the moonlight, facing the direction from which floated the mystery and thrill of the sound. They could hear him whining softly; and Pierrot, bending down so that he caught the light of the night properly, could see him trembling.
“It is Mee-Koo!” he said in a whisper to Nepeese.
That was it, the call of the blood that was running swift in Baree’s veins–not alone the call of his species, but the call of Kazan and Gray Wolf and of his forbears for generations unnumbered. It was the voice of his people. So Pierrot had whispered, and he was right. In the golden night the Willow was waiting, for it was she who had gambled most, and it was she who must lose or win. She uttered no sound, replied not to the low voice of Pierrot, but held her breath and watched Baree as he slowly faded away, step by step, into the shadows. In a few moments more he was gone. It was then that she stood straight, and flung back her head, with eyes that glowed in rivalry with the stars.
“Baree!” she called. “Baree! Baree! Baree!”
He must have been near the edge of the forest, for she had drawn a slow, waiting breath or two before he was and he whined up into her face. Nepeese put her hands to his head.
“You are right, mon pere,” she said. “He will go to the wolves, but he will come back. He will never leave me for long.” With one hand still on Baree’s head, she pointed with the other into the pitlike blackness of the forest. “Go to them, Baree!” she whispered. “But you must come back. You must. Cheamao!”
With Pierrot she went into the cabin; the door closed silence. In it he could hear the soft night sounds: the clinking of the chains to which the dogs were fastened, the restless movement of their bodies, the throbbing whir of a pair of wings, the breath of the night itself. For to him this night, even in its stillness, seemed alive. Again he went into it, and close to the forest once more he stopped to listen. The wind had turned, and on it rode the wailing, blood-thrilling cry of the pack. Far off to the west a lone wolf turned his muzzle to the sky and answered that gathering call of his clan. And then out of the east came a voice, so far beyond the cabin that it was like an echo dying away in the vastness of the night.
A choking note gathered in Baree’s throat. He threw up his head. Straight above him was the Red Moon, inviting him to the thrill and mystery of the open world.
The sound grew in his throat, and slowly it rose in volume until his answer was rising to the stars. In their cabin Pierrot and the Willow heard it. Pierrot shrugged his shoulders.
“He is gone,” he said.
“Oui, he is gone, mon pere” replied Nepeese, peering through the window.
CHAPTER 18
No longer, as in the days of old, did the darkness of the forests hold a fear for Baree. This night his hunt cry had risen to the stars and the moon, and in that cry he had, for the first time, sent forth his defiance of night and space, his warning to all the wild, and his acceptance of the Brotherhood. In that cry, and the answers that came back to him, he sensed a new power–the final triumph of nature in telling him that the forests and the creatures they held were no longer to be feared, but that all things feared him. Off there, beyond the pale of the cabin and the influence of Nepeese, were all the things that the wolf blood in him found now most desirable: companionship of his kind, the lure of adventure, the red, sweet blood of the chase–and matehood. This last, after all, was the dominant mystery that was urging him, and yet least of all did he understand it.
He ran straight into the darkness to the north and west, slinking low under the bushes, his tail drooping, his ears aslant–the wolf as the wolf runs on the night trail. The pack had swung due north, and was traveling faster than he, so that at the end of half an hour he could no longer hear it. But the lone wolf howl to the west was nearer, and three times Baree gave answer to it.
At the end of an hour he heard the pack again, swinging southward. Pierrot would easily have understood. Their quarry had found safety beyond water, or in a lake, and the muhekuns were on a fresh trail. By this time not more than a quarter of a mile of the forest separated Baree from the lone wolf, but the lone wolf was also an old wolf, and with the directness and precision of long experience, he swerved in the direction of the hunters, compassing his trail so that he was heading for a point half or three-quarters of a mile in advance of the pack.
This was a trick of the Brotherhood which Baree had yet to learn; and the result of his ignorance, and lack of skill, was that twice within the next half-hour he found himself near to the pack without being able to join it. Then came a long and final silence. The pack had pulled down its kill, and in their feasting they made no sound.
The rest of the night Baree wandered alone, or at least until the moon was well on the wane. He was a long way from the cabin, and his trail had been an uncertain and twisting one, but he was no longer possessed with the discomforting sensation of being lost. The last two or three months had been developing strongly in him the sense of orientation, that “sixth sense” which guides the pigeon unerringly on its way and takes a bear straight as a bird might fly to its last year’s denning place.
Baree had not forgotten Nepeese. A dozen times he turned his head back and whined, and always he picked out accurately the direction in which the cabin lay. But he did not turn back. As the night lengthened, his search for that mysterious something which he had not found continued. His hunger, even with the fading-out of the moon and the coming of the gray dawn, was not sufficiently keen to make him hunt for food.
It was cold, and it seemed colder when the glow of the moon and stars died out. Under his padded feet, especially in the open spaces, was a thick white frost in which he left clearly at times the imprint of his toes and claws. He had traveled steadily for hours, a great many miles in all, and he was tired when the first light of the day came. And then there came the time when, with a sudden sharp click of his jaws, he stopped like a shot in his tracks.
At last it had come–the meeting with that for which he had been seeking. It was in a clearing, lighted by the cold dawn–a tiny amphitheater that lay on the side of a ridge, facing the east. With her head toward him, and waiting for him as he came out of the shadows, his scent strong in her keen nose, stood Maheegun, the young wolf. Baree had not smelled her, but he saw her directly he came out of the rim of young balsams that fringed the clearing. It was then that he stopped, and for a full minute neither of them moved a muscle or seemed to breathe.
There was not a fortnight’s difference in their age and yet Maheegun was much the smaller of the two. Her body was as long, but she was slimmer; she stood on slender legs that were almost like the legs of a fox, and the curve of her back was that of a slightly bent bow, a sign of swiftness almost equal to the wind. She stood poised for flight even as Baree advanced his first step toward her, and then very slowly her body relaxed, and in a direct ratio as he drew nearer her ears lost their alertness and dropped aslant.
Baree whined. His own ears were up, his head alert, his tail aloft and bushy. Cleverness, if not strategy, had already become a part of his masculine superiority, and he did not immediately press the affair. He was within five feet of Maheegun when he casually turned away from her and faced the cast, where a faint penciling of red and gold was heralding the day. For a few moments he sniffed and looked around and pointed the wind with much seriousness, as though impressing on his fair acquaintance–as many a two-legged animal has done before him–his tremendous importance in the world at large.
And Maheegun was properly impressed. Baree’s bluff worked as beautifully as the bluffs of the two-legged animals. He sniffed the air with such thrilling and suspicious zeal that Maheegun’s ears sprang alert, and she sniffed it with him. He turned his head from point to point so sharply and alertly that her feminine curiosity, if not anxiety, made her turn her own head in questioning conjunction. And when he whined, as though in the air he had caught a mystery which she could not possibly understand, a responsive note gathered in her throat, but smothered and low as a woman’s exclamation when she is not quite sure whether she should interrupt her lord or not. At this sound, which Baree’s sharp ears caught, he swung up to her with a light and mincing step, and in another moment they were smelling noses.
When the sun rose, half an hour later, it found them still in the small clearing on the side of the ridge, with a deep fringe of forest under them, and beyond that a wide, timbered plain which looked like a ghostly shroud in its mantle of frost. Up over this came the first red glow of the day, filling the clearing with a warmth that grew more and more comfortable as the sun crept higher.
Neither Baree nor Maheegun were inclined to move for a while, and for an hour or two they lay basking in a cup of the slope, looking down with questing and wide-awake eyes upon the wooded plain that stretched away under them like a great sea.
Maheegun, too, had sought the hunt pack, and like Baree had failed to catch it. They were tired, a little discouraged for the time, and hungry–but still alive with the fine thrill of anticipation, and restlessly sensitive to the new and mysterious consciousness of companionship. Half a dozen times Baree got up and nosed about Maheegun as the lay in the sun, whining to her softly and touching her soft coat with his muzzle, but for a long time she paid little attention to him. At last she followed him. All that day they wandered and rested together. Once more the night came.
It was without moon or stars. Gray masses of clouds swept slowly down out of the north and east, and in the treetops there was scarcely a whisper of wind as night gathered in. The snow began to fall at dusk, thickly, heavily, without a breath of sound. It was not cold, but it was still–so still that Baree and Maheegun traveled only a few yards at a time, and then stopped to listen. In this way all the night prowlers of the forest were traveling, if they were moving at all. It was the first of the Big Snow.
To the flesh-eating wild things of the forests, clawed and winged, the Big Snow was the beginning of the winter carnival of slaughter and feasting, of wild adventure in the long nights, of merciless warfare on the frozen trails. The days of breeding, of motherhood–the peace of spring and summer–were over. Out of the sky came the wakening of the Northland, the call of all flesh-eating creatures to the long hunt, and in the first thrill of it living things were moving but little this night, and that watchfully and with suspicion. Youth made it all new to Baree and Maheegun. Their blood ran swiftly; their feet fell softly; their ears were attuned to catch the slightest sounds.
In this first of the Big Snow they felt the exciting pulse of a new life. It lured them on. It invited them to adventure into the white mystery of the silent storm; and inspired by that restlessness of youth and its desires, they went on.
The snow grew deeper under their feet. In the open spaces they waded through it to their knees, and it continued to fall in a vast white cloud that descended steadily out of the sky. It was near midnight when it stopped. The clouds drifted away from under the stars and the moon, and for a long time Baree and Maheegun stood without moving, looking down from the bald crest of a ridge upon a wonderful world.
Never had they been able to see so far, except in the light of day. Under them was a plain. They could make out forests, lone trees that stood up like shadows out of the snow, a stream–still unfrozen–shimmering like glass with the flicker of firelight on it. Toward this stream Baree led the way. He no longer thought of Nepeese, and he whined with pent-up happiness as he stopped halfway down and turned to muzzle Maheegun. He wanted to roll in the snow and frisk about with his companion; he wanted to bark, to put up his head and howl as he had howled at the Red Moon back at the cabin.
Something held him from doing any of these things. Perhaps it was Maheegun’s demeanor. She accepted his attentions rigidly. Once or twice she had seemed almost frightened; twice Baree had heard the sharp clicking of her teeth. The previous night, and all through tonight’s storm, their companionship had grown more intimate, but now there was taking its place a mysterious aloofness on the part of Maheegun. Pierrot could have explained. With moon and stars above him, Baree, like the night, had undergone a transformation which even the sunlight of day had not made in him before. His coat was like polished jet. Every hair in his body glistened black. BLACK! That was it. And Nature was trying to tell Maheegun that of all the creatures hated by her kind, the creature which they feared and hated most was black. With her it was not experience, but instinct–telling her of the age-old feud between the gray wolf and the black bear. And Baree’s coat, in the moonlight and the snow, was blacker than Wakayoo’s had ever been in the fish-fattening days of May. Until they struck the broad openings of the plain, the young she-wolf had followed Baree without hesitation; now there was a gathering strangeness and indecision in her manner, and twice she stopped and would have let Baree go on without her.
An hour after they entered the plain there came suddenly out of the west the tonguing of the wolf pack. It was not far distant, probably not more than a mile along the foot of the ridge, and the sharp, quick yapping that followed the first outburst was evidence that the long-fanged hunters had put up sudden game, a caribou or young moose, and were close at its heels. At the voice of her own people Maheegun laid her ears close to her head and was off like an arrow from a bow.
The unexpectedness of her movement and the swiftness of her flight put Baree well behind her in the race over the plain. She was running blindly, favored by luck. For an interval of perhaps five minutes the pack were so near to their game that they made no sound, and the chase swung full into the face of Maheegun and Baree. The latter was not half a dozen lengths behind the young wolf when a crashing in the brush directly ahead stopped them so sharply that they tore up the snow with their braced forefeet and squat haunches. Ten seconds later a caribou burst through and flashed across a clearing not more than twenty yards from where they stood. They could hear its swift panting as it disappeared. And then came the pack.
At sight of those swiftly moving gray bodies Baree’s heart leaped for an instant into his throat. He forgot Maheegun, and that she had run away from him. The moon and the stars went out of existence for him. He no longer sensed the chill of the snow under his feet. He was wolf–all wolf. With the warm scent of the caribou in his nostrils, and the passion to kill sweeping through him like fire, he darted after the pack.
Even at that, Maheegun was a bit ahead of him. He did not miss her. In the excitement of his first chase he no longer felt the desire to have her at his side. Very soon he found himself close to the flanks of one of the gray monsters of the pack. Half a minute later a new hunter swept in from the bush behind him, and then a second, and after that a third. At times he was running shoulder to shoulder with his new companions. He heard the whining excitement in their throats; the snap of their jaws as they ran–and in the golden moonlight ahead of him the sound of a caribou as it plunged through thickets and over windfalls in its race for life.
It was as if Baree had belonged to the pack always. He had joined it naturally, as other stray wolves had joined it from out of the bush. There had been no ostentation, no welcome such as Maheegun had given him in the open, and no hostility. He belonged with these slim, swift-footed outlaws of the old forests, and his own jaws snapped and his blood ran hot as the smell of the caribou grew heavier, and the sound of its crashing body nearer.
It seemed to him they were almost at its heels when they swept into an open plain, a stretch of barren without a tree or a shrub, brilliant in the light of the stars and moon. Across its unbroken carpet of snow sped the caribou a spare hundred yards ahead of the pack. Now the two leading hunters no longer followed directly in the trail, but shot out at an angle, one to the right and the other to the left of the pursued, and like well-trained soldiers the pack split in halves and spread out fan shape in the final charge.
The two ends of the fan forged ahead and closed in, until the leaders were running almost abreast of the caribou, with fifty or sixty feet separating them from the pursued. Thus, adroitly and swiftly, with deadly precision, the pack had formed a horseshoe cordon of fangs from which there was but one course of flight–straight ahead. For the caribou to swerve half a degree to the right or left meant death. It was the duty of the leaders to draw in the ends of the horseshoe now, until one or both of them could make the fatal lunge for the hamstrings. After that it would be a simple matter. The pack would close in over the caribou like an inundation.
Baree had found his place in the lower rim of the horseshoe, so that he was fairly well in the rear when the climax came. The plain made a sudden dip. Straight ahead was the gleam of water–water shimmering softly in the starglow, and the sight of it sent a final great spurt of blood through the caribou’s bursting heart. Forty seconds would tell the story–forty seconds of a last spurt for life, of a final tremendous effort to escape death. Baree felt the sudden thrill of these moments, and he forged ahead with the others in that lower rim of the horseshoe as one of the leading wolves made a lunge for the young bull’s hamstring. It was a clean miss. A second wolf darted in. And this one also missed.
There was no time for others to take their place. From the broken end of the horseshoe Baree heard the caribou’s heavy plunge into water. When Baree joined the pack, a maddened, mouth-frothing, snarling horde, Napamoos, the young bull, was well out in the river and swimming steadily for the opposite shore.
It was then that Baree found himself at the side of Maheegun. She was panting; her red tongue hung from her open jaws. But at his presence she brought her fangs together with a snap and slunk from him into the heart of the wind-run and disappointed pack. The wolves were in an ugly temper, but Baree did not sense the fact. Nepeese had trained him to take to water like an otter, and he did not understand why this narrow river should stop them as it had. He ran down to the water and stood belly deep in it, facing for an instant the horde of savage beasts above him, wondering why they did not follow. And he was black–BLACK. He came among them again, and for the first time they noticed him.
The restless movements of the waters ceased now. A new and wondering interest held them rigid. Fangs closed sharply. A little in the open Baree saw Maheegun, with a big gray wolf standing near her. He went to her again, and this time she remained with flattened ears until he was sniffing her neck. And then, with a vicious snarl, she snapped at him. Her teeth sank deep in the soft flesh of his shoulder, and at the unexpectedness and pain of her attack, he let out a yelp. The next instant the big gray wolf was at him.
Again caught unexpectedly, Baree went down with the wolf’s fangs at his throat. But in him was the blood of Kazan, the flesh and bone and sinew of Kazan, and for the first time in his life he fought as Kazan fought on that terrible day at the top of the Sun Rock. He was young; he had yet to learn the cleverness and the strategy of the veteran. But his jaws were like the iron clamps with which Pierrot set his bear traps, and in his heart was sudden and blinding rage, a desire to kill that rose above all sense of pain or fear.
That fight, if it had been fair, would have been a victory for Baree, even in his youth and inexperience. In fairness the pack should have waited. It was a law of the pack to wait–until one was done for. But Baree was black. He was a stranger, an interloper, a creature whom they noticed now in a moment when their blood was hot with the rage and disappointment of killers who had missed their prey. A second wolf sprang in, striking Baree treacherously from the flank. And while he was in the snow, his jaws crushing the foreleg of his first foe, the pack was on him en masse.
Such an attack on the young caribou bull would have meant death in less than a minute. Every fang would have found its hold. Baree, by the fortunate circumstance that he was under his first two assailants and protected by their bodies, was saved from being torn instantly into pieces. He knew that he was fighting for his life. Over him the horde of beasts rolled and twisted and snarled. He felt the burning pain of teeth sinking into his flesh. He was smothered; a hundred knives seemed cutting him into pieces; yet no sound–not a whimper or a cry–came from him now in the horror and hopelessness of it all.
It would have ended in another half-minute had the struggle not been at the very edge of the bank. Undermined by the erosion of the spring floods, a section of this bank suddenly gave way, and with it went Baree and half the pack. In a flash Baree thought of the water and the escaping caribou. For a bare instant the cave-in had set him free of the pack, and in that space he gave a single leap over the gray backs of his enemies into the deep water of the stream. Close behind him half a dozen jaws snapped shut on empty air. As it had saved the caribou, so this strip of water shimmering in the glow of the moon and stars had saved Baree.
The stream was not more than a hundred feet in width, but it cost Baree close to a losing struggle to get across it. Until he dragged himself out on the opposite shore, the extent of his injuries was not impressed upon him fully. One hind leg, for the time, was useless. His forward left shoulder was laid open to the bone. His head and body were torn and cut; and as he dragged himself slowly away from the stream, the trail he left in the snow was a red path of blood. It trickled from his panting jaws, between which his tongue was bleeding. It ran down his legs and flanks and belly, and it dripped from his ears, one of which was slit clean for two inches as though cut with a knife. His instincts were dazed, his perception of things clouded as if by a veil drawn close over his eyes. He did not hear, a few minutes later, the howling of the disappointed wolf horde on the other side of the river, and he no longer sensed the existence of moon or stars. Half dead, he dragged himself on until by chance he came to a clump of dwarf spruce. Into this he struggled, and then he dropped exhausted.
All that night and until noon the next day Baree lay without moving. The fever burned in his blood. It flamed high and swift toward death; then it ebbed slowly, and life conquered. At noon he came forth. He was weak, and he wobbled on his legs. His hind leg still dragged, and he was racked with pain. But it was a splendid day. The sun was warm; the snow was thawing; the sky was like a great blue sea; and the floods of life coursed warmly again through Baree’s veins. But now, for all time, his desires were changed, and his great quest at an end.
A red ferocity grew in Baree’s eyes as he snarled in the direction of last night’s fight with the wolves. They were no longer his people. They were no longer of his blood. Never again could the hunt call lure him or the voice of the pack rouse the old longing. In him there was a thing newborn, an undying hatred for the wolf, a hatred that was to grow in him until it became like a disease in his vitals, a thing ever present and insistent, demanding vengeance on their kind. Last night he had gone to them a comrade. Today he was an outcast. Cut and maimed, bearing with him scars for all time, he had learned his lesson of the wilderness. Tomorrow, and the next day, and for days after that without number, he would remember the lesson well.
CHAPTER 19
At the cabin on the Gray Loon, on the fourth night of Baree’s absence, Pierrot was smoking his pipe after a great supper of caribou tenderloin he had brought in from the trail, and Nepeese was listening to his tale of the remarkable shot he had made, when a sound at the door interrupted them. Nepeese opened it, and Baree came in. The cry of welcome that was on the girl’s lips died there instantly, and Pierrot stared as if he could not quite believe this creature that had returned was the wolf dog. Three days and nights of hunger in which he could not hunt because of the leg that dragged had put on him the marks of starvation. Battle-scarred and covered with dried blood clots that still clung tenaciously to his long hair, he was a sight that drew at last a long despairing breath from Nepeese. A queer smile was growing in Pierrot’s face as he leaned forward in his chair. Then slowly rising to his feet and looking closer, he said to Nepeese:
“Ventre Saint Gris! Oui, he has been to the pack, Nepeese, and the pack turned on him. It was not a two-wolf fight–non! It was the pack. He is cut and torn in fifty places. And–mon Dieu, he is alive!”
In Pierrot’s voice there was growing wonder and amazement. He was incredulous, and yet he could not disbelieve what his eyes told him. What had happened was nothing short of a miracle, and for a time he uttered not a word more but remained staring in silence while Nepeese recovered from her astonishment to give Baree doctoring and food. After he had eaten ravenously of cold boiled mush she began bathing his wounds in warm water, and after that she soothed them with bear grease, talking to him all the time in her soft Cree. After the pain and hunger and treachery of his adventure, it was a wonderful homecoming for Baree. He slept that night at the foot of the Willow’s bed. The next morning it was the cool caress of his tongue on her hand that awakened her.
With this day they resumed the comradeship interrupted by Baree’s temporary desertion. The attachment was greater than ever on Baree’s part. It was he who had run away from the Willow, who had deserted her at the call of the pack, and it seemed at times as though he sensed the depths of his perfidy and was striving to make amends. There was indubitably a very great change in him. He clung to Nepeese like a shadow. Instead of sleeping at night in the spruce shelter Pierrot made for him, he made himself a little hollow in the earth close to the cabin door. Pierrot thought that he understood, and Nepeese thought that she understood even more; but in reality the key to the mystery remained with Baree himself. He no longer played as he had played before he went off alone into the forest. He did not chase sticks, or run until he was winded, for the pure joy of running. His puppyishness was gone. In its place was a great worship and a rankling bitterness, a love for the girl and a hatred for the pack and all that it stood for. Whenever he heard the wolf howl, it brought an angry snarl into his throat, and he would bare his fangs until even Pierrot would draw a little away from him. But a touch of the girl’s hand would quiet him.
In a week or two the heavier snows came, and Pierrot began making his trips over the trap lines. Nepeese had entered into an exciting bargain with him this winter. Pierrot had taken her into partnership. Every fifth trap, every fifth deadfall, and every fifth poison bait was to be her own, and what they caught or killed was to bring a bit nearer to realization a wonderful dream that was growing in the Willow’s heart. Pierrot had promised. If they had great luck that winter, they would go down together on the last snows to Nelson House and buy the little old organ that was for sale there. And if the organ was sold, they would work another winter, and get a new one.
This plan gave Nepeese an enthusiastic and tireless interest in the trap line. With Pierrot it was more or less a fine bit of strategy. He would have sold his hand to give Nepeese the organ. He was determined that she should have it, whether the fifth traps and the fifth