deadfalls and fifth poison baits caught the fur or not. The partnership meant nothing so far as the actual returns were concerned. But in another way it meant to Nepeese a business interest, the thrill of personal achievement. Pierrot impressed on her that it made a comrade and coworker of her on the trail. His scheme was to keep her with him when he was away from the cabin. He knew that Bush McTaggart would come again to the Gray Loon, probably more than once during the winter. He had swift dogs, and it was a short journey. And when McTaggart came, Nepeese must not be at the cabin–alone.
Pierrot’s trap line swung into the north and west, covering in all a matter of fifty miles, with an average of two traps, one deadfall, and a poison bait to each mile. It was a twisting line blazed along streams for mink, otter, and marten, piercing the deepest forests for fishercat and lynx and crossing lakes and storm-swept strips of barrens where poison baits could be set for fox and wolf. Halfway over this line Pierrot had built a small log cabin, and at the end of it another, so that a day’s work meant twenty-five miles. This was easy for Pierrot, and not hard on Nepeese after the first few days.
All through October and November they made the trips regularly, making the round every six days, which gave one day of rest at the cabin on the Gray Loon and another day in the cabin at the end of the trail. To Pierrot the winter’s work was business, the labor of his people for many generations back. To Nepeese and Baree it was a wild and joyous adventure that never for a day grew tiresome. Even Pierrot could not quite immunize himself against their enthusiasm. It was infectious, and he was happier than he had been since his sun had set that evening the princess mother died.
They were glorious months. Fur was thick, and it was steadily cold without any bad storms. Nepeese not only carried a small pack on her shoulders in order that Pierrot’s load might be lighter, but she trained Baree to bear tiny shoulder panniers which she manufactured. In these panniers Baree carried the bait. In at least a third of the total number of traps set there was always what Pierrot called trash–rabbits, owls, whisky jacks, jays, and squirrels. These, with the skin or feathers stripped off, made up the bulk of the bait for the traps ahead.
One afternoon early in December, as they were returning to the Gray Loon, Pierrot stopped suddenly a dozen paces ahead of Nepeese and stared at the snow. A strange snowshoe trail had joined their own and was heading toward the cabin. For half a minute Pierrot was silent and scarcely moved a muscle as he stared. The trail came straight out of the north–and off there was Lac Bain.
Also they were the marks of large snowshoes, and the stride indicated was that of a tall man. Before Pierrot had spoken, Nepeese had guessed what they meant.
“M’sieu the Factor from Lac Bain!” she said.
Baree was sniffing suspiciously at the strange trail. They heard the low growl in his throat, and Pierrot’s shoulders stiffened.
“Yes, the m’sieu,” he said.
The Willow’s heart beat more swiftly as they went on. She was not afraid of McTaggart, not physically afraid. And yet something rose up in her breast and choked her at the thought of his presence on the Gray Loon. Why was he there? It was not necessary for Pierrot to answer the question, even had she given voice to it. She knew. The factor from Lac Bain had no business there–except to see her. The blood burned red in her cheeks as she thought again of that minute on the edge of the chasm when he had almost crushed her in his arms. Would he try that again?
Pierrot, deep in his own somber thoughts, scarcely heard the strange laugh that came suddenly from her lips. Nepeese was listening to the growl that was again in Baree’s throat. It was a low but terrible sound. When half a mile from the cabin, she unslung the panniers from his shoulders and carried them herself. Ten minutes later they saw a man advancing to meet them.
It was not McTaggart. Pierrot recognized him, and with an audible breath of relief waved his hand. It was DeBar, who trapped in the Barren Country north of Lac Bain. Pierrot knew him well. They had exchanged fox poison. They were friends, and there was pleasure in the grip of their hands. DeBar stared then at Nepeese.
“Tonnerre, she has grown into a woman!” he cried, and like a woman Nepeese looked at him straight, with the color deepening in her cheeks, as he bowed low with a courtesy that dated back a couple of centuries beyond the trap line.
DeBar lost no time in explaining his mission, and before they reached the cabin Pierrot and Nepeese knew why he had come. M’sieu, the factor at Lac Bain, was leaving on a journey in five days, and he had sent DeBar as a special messenger to request Pierrot to come up to assist the clerk and the half-breed storekeeper in his absence. Pierrot made no comment at first. But he was thinking. Why had Bush McTaggart sent for HIM? Why had he not chosen some one nearer? Not until a fire was crackling in the sheet-iron stove in the cabin, and Nepeese was busily engaged getting supper, did he voice these questions to the fox hunter.
DeBar shrugged his shoulders.
“He asked me, at first, if I could stay. But I have a wife with a bad lung, Pierrot. It was caught by frost last winter, and I dare not leave her long alone. He has great faith in you. Besides, you know all the trappers on the company’s books at Lac Bain. So he sent for you, and begs you not to worry about your fur lines, as he will pay you double what you would catch in the time you are at the Post.”
“And–Nepeese?” said Pierrot. “M’sieu expects me to bring her?”
From the stove the Willow bent her head to listen, and her heart leaped free again at DeBar’s answer.
“He said nothing about that. But surely–it will be a great change for li’le m’selle.”
Pierrot nodded.
“Possibly, Netootam.”
They discussed the matter no more that night. But for hours Pierrot was still, thinking, and a hundred times he asked himself that same question: Why had McTaggart sent for him? He was not the only man well known to the trappers on the company’s books. There was Wassoon, for instance, the half-breed Scandinavian whose cabin was less than four hours’ journey from the Post–or Baroche, the white-bearded old Frenchman who lived yet nearer and whose word was as good as the Bible. It must be, he told himself finally, that M’sieu had sent for HIM because he wanted to win over the father of Nepeese and gain the friendship of Nepeese herself. For this was undoubtedly a very great honor that the factor was conferring on him.
And yet, deep down in his heart, he was filled with suspicion. When DeBar was about to leave the next morning, Pierrot said:
“Tell m’sieu that I will leave for Lac Bain the day after tomorrow.”
After DeBar had gone, he said to Nepeese:
“And you shall remain here, ma cherie. I will not take you to Lac Bain. I have had a dream that m’sieu will not go on a journey, but that he has lied, and that he will be SICK when I arrive at the Post. And yet, if it should happen that you care to go–“
Nepeese straightened suddenly, like a reed that has been caught by the wind.
“Non!” she cried, so fiercely that Pierrot laughed, and rubbed his hands.
So it happened that on the second day after the fox hunter’s visit Pierrot left for Lac Bain, with Nepeese in the door waving him good-bye until he was out of sight.
On the morning of this same day Bush McTaggart rose from his bed while it was still dark. The time had come. He had hesitated at murder–at the killing of Pierrot; and in his hesitation he had found a better way. There could be no escape for Nepeese.
It was a wonderful scheme, so easy of accomplishment, so inevitable in its outcome. And all the time Pierrot would think he was away to the east on a mission!
He ate his breakfast before dawn, and was on the trail before it was yet light. Purposely he struck due east, so that in coming up from the south and west Pierrot would not strike his sledge tracks. For he had made up his mind now that Pierrot must never know and must never have a suspicion, even though it cost him so many more miles to travel that he would not reach the Gray Loon until the second day. It was better to be a day late, after all, as it was possible that something might have delayed Pierrot. So he made no effort to travel fast.
McTaggart took a vast amount of brutal satisfaction in anticipating what was about to happen, and he reveled in it to the full. There was no chance for disappointment. He was positive that Nepeese would not accompany her father to Lac Bain. She would be at the cabin on the Gray Loon–alone.
This aloneness to Nepeese was burdened with no thought of danger. There were times, now, when the thought of being alone was pleasant to her, when she wanted to dream by herself, when she visioned things into the mysteries of which she would not admit even Pierrot. She was growing into womanhood–just the sweet, closed bud of womanhood as yet–still a girl with the soft velvet of girlhood in her eyes, yet with the mystery of woman stirring gently in her soul, as if the Great Hand were hesitating between awakening her and letting her sleep a little longer. At these times, when the opportunity came to steal hours by herself, she would put on the red dress and do up her wonderful hair as she saw it in the pictures of the magazines Pierrot had sent up twice a year from Nelson House.
On the second day of Pierrot’s absence Nepeese dressed herself like this, but today she let her hair cascade in a shining glory about her, and about her forehead bound a circlet of red ribbon. She was not yet done. Today she had marvelous designs. On the wall close to her mirror she had tacked a large page from a woman’s magazine, and on this page was a lovely vision of curls. Fifteen hundred miles north of the sunny California studio in which the picture had been taken, Nepeese, with pouted red lips and puckered forehead, was struggling to master the mystery of the other girl’s curls!
She was looking into her mirror, her face flushed and her eyes aglow in the excitement of the struggle to fashion one of the coveted ringlets from a tress that fell away below her hips, when the door opened behind her, and Bush McTaggart walked in.
CHAPTER 20
The Willow’s back was toward the door when the factor from Lac Bain entered the cabin, and for a few startled seconds she did not turn. Her first thought was of Pierrot–for some reason he had returned. But even as this thought came to her, she heard in Baree’s throat a snarl that brought her suddenly to her feet, facing the door.
McTaggart had not entered unprepared. He had left his pack, his gun, and his heavy coat outside. He was standing with his back against the door; and at Nepeese–in her wonderful dress and flowing hair–he was staring as if stunned for a space at what he saw. Fate, or accident, was playing against the Willow now. If there had been a spark of slumbering chivalry, of mercy, even, in Bush McTaggart’s soul, it was extinguished by what he saw. Never had Nepeese looked more beautiful, not even on that day when MacDonald the map maker had taken her picture. The sun, flooding through the window, lighted up her marvelous hair. Her flushed face was framed in its lustrous darkness like a tinted cameo. He had dreamed, but he had pictured nothing like this woman who stood before him now, her eyes widening with fear and the flush leaving her face even as he looked at her.
It was not a long interval in which their eyes met in that terrible silence. Words were unnecessary. At last she understood–understood what her peril had been that day at the edge of the chasm and in the forest, when fearlessly she had played with the menace that was confronting her now.
A breath that was like a sob broke from her lips.
“M’sieu!” she tried to say. But it was only a gasp–an effort.
Plainly she heard the click of the iron bolt as it locked the door. McTaggart advanced a step.
Only a single step McTaggart advanced. On the floor Baree had remained like something carved out of stone. He had not moved. He had not made a sound but that one warning snarl–until McTaggart took the step. And then, like a flash, he was up and in front of Nepeese, every hair of his body on end; and at the fury in his growl McTaggart lunged back against the barred door. A word from Nepeese in that moment, and it would have been over. But an instant was lost–an instant before her cry came. In that moment man’s hand and brain worked swifter than brute understanding; and as Baree launched himself at the factor’s throat, there came a flash and a deafening explosion almost in the Willow’s eyes.
It was a chance shot, a shot from the hip with McTaggart’s automatic. Baree fell short. He struck the floor with a thud and rolled against the log wall. There was not a kick or a quiver left in his body. McTaggart laughed nervously as he shoved his pistol back in its holster. He knew that only a brain shot could have done that.
With her back against the farther wall, Nepeese was waiting. McTaggart could hear her panting breath. He advanced halfway to her.
“Nepeese, I have come to make you my wife,” he said.
She did not answer. He could see that her breath was choking her. She raised a hand to her throat. He took two more steps, and stopped. He had never seen such eyes.
“I have come to make you my wife, Nepeese. Tomorrow you will go on to Nelson House with me, and then back to Lac Bain–forever.” He added the last word as an afterthought. “Forever,” he repeated.
He did not mince words. His courage and his determination rose as he saw her body droop a little against the wall. She was powerless. There was no escape. Pierrot was gone. Baree was dead.
He had thought that no living creature could move as swiftly as the Willow when his arms reached out for her. She made no sound as she darted under one of his outstretched arms. He made a lunge, a savage grab, and his fingers caught a bit of hair. He heard the snap of it as she tore herself free and flew to the door. She had thrown back the bolt when he caught her and his arms closed about her. He dragged her back, and now she cried out–cried out in her despair for Pierrot, for Baree, for some miracle of God that might save her.
And Nepeese fought. She twisted in his arms until she was facing him. She could no longer see. She was smothered in her own hair. It covered her face and breast and body, suffocating her, entangling her hands and arms–and still she fought. In the struggle McTaggart stumbled over the body of Baree, and they went down. Nepeese was up fully five seconds ahead of the man. She could have reached the door. But again it was her hair. She paused to fling back the thick masses of it so that she could see, and McTaggart was at the door ahead of her.
He did not lock it again, but stood facing her. His face was scratched and bleeding. He was no longer a man but a devil. Nepeese was broken, panting–a low sobbing came with every breath. She bent down, and picked up a piece of firewood. McTaggart could see that her strength was almost gone.
She clutched the stick as he approached her again. But McTaggart had lost all thought of fear or caution. He sprang upon her like an animal. The stick of firewood fell. And again fate played against the girl. In her terror and hopelessness she had caught up the first stick her hand had touched–a light one. With her last strength she hurled it at McTaggart, and as it struck his head, he staggered back. But it did not make him loose his hold.
Vainly she was fighting now, not to strike him or to escape, but to get her breath. She tried to cry out again, but this time no sound came from between her gasping lips.
Again he laughed, and as he laughed, he heard the door open. Was it the wind? He turned, still holding her in his arms.
In the open door stood Pierrot.
CHAPTER 21
During that terrible interval which followed an eternity of time passed slowly through the little cabin on the Gray Loon–that eternity which lies somewhere between life and death and which is sometimes meted out to a human life in seconds instead of years.
In those seconds Pierrot did not move from where he stood in the doorway. McTaggart, encumbered with the weight in his arms, and staring at Pierrot, did not move. But the Willow’s eyes were opening. And at the same moment a convulsive quiver ran through the body of Baree, where he lay near the wall. There was not the sound of a breath. And then, in that silence, a great gasping sob came from Nepeese.
Then Pierrot stirred to life. Like McTaggart, he had left his coat and mittens outside. He spoke, and his voice was not like Pierrot’s. It was a strange voice.
“The great God has sent me back in time, m’sieu,” he said. “I, too, traveled by way of the east, and saw your trail where it turned this way.”
No, that was not like Pierrot’s voice! A chill ran through McTaggart now, and slowly he let go of Nepeese. She fell to the floor. Slowly he straightened.
“Is it not true, m’sieu?” said Pierrot again. “I have come in time?”
What power was it–what great fear, perhaps, that made McTaggart nod his head, that made his thick lips form huskily the words, “Yes–in time.” And yet it was not fear. It was something greater, something more all-powerful than that. And Pierrot said, in that same strange voice:
“I thank the great God!”
The eyes of madman met the eyes of madman now. Between them was death. Both saw it. Both thought that they saw the direction in which its bony finger pointed. Both were certain. McTaggart’s hand did not go to the pistol in his holster, and Pierrot did not touch the knife in his belt. When they came together, it was throat to throat–two beasts now, instead of one, for Pierrot had in him the fury and strength of the wolf, the cat, and the panther.
McTaggart was the bigger and heavier man, a giant in strength; yet in the face of Pierrot’s fury he lurched back over the table and went down with a crash. Many times in his life he had fought, but he had never felt a grip at his throat like the grip of Pierrot’s hands. They almost crushed the life from him at once. His neck snapped–a little more, and it would have broken. He struck out blindly, and twisted himself to throw off the weight of the half-breed’s body. But Pierrot was fastened there, as Sekoosew the ermine had fastened itself at the jugular of the partridge, and Bush McTaggart’s jaws slowly swung open, and his face began to turn from red to purple.
Cold air rushing through the door, Pierrot’s voice and the sound of battle roused Nepeese quickly to consciousness and the power to raise herself from the floor. She had fallen near Baree, and as she lifted her head, her eyes rested for a moment on the dog before they went to the fighting men. Baree was alive! His body was twitching; his eyes were open. He made an effort to raise his head as she was looking at him.
Then she dragged herself to her knees and turned to the men, and Pierrot, even in the blood-red fury of his desire to kill, must have heard the sharp cry of joy that came from her when she saw that it was the factor from Lac Bain who was underneath. With a tremendous effort she staggered to her feet, and for a few moments she stood swaying unsteadily as her brain and her body readjusted themselves. Even as she looked down upon the blackening face from which Pierrot’s fingers were choking the life, Bush McTaggart’s hand was groping blindly for his pistol. He found it. Unseen by Pierrot, he dragged it from its holster. It was one of the black devils of chance that favored him again, for in his excitement he had not snapped the safety shut after shooting Baree. Now he had only strength left to pull the trigger. Twice his forefinger closed. Twice there came deadened explosion close to Pierrot’s body.
In Pierrot’s face Nepeese saw what had happened. Her heart died in her breast as she looked upon the swift and terrible change wrought by sudden death. Slowly Pierrot straightened. His eyes were wide for a moment–wide and staring. He made no sound. She could not see his lips move. And then he fell toward her, so that McTaggart’s body was free. Blindly and with an agony that gave no evidence in cry or word she flung herself down beside her father. He was dead.
How long Nepeese lay there, how long she waited for Pierrot to move, to open his eyes, to breathe, she would never know. In that time McTaggart rose to his feet and stood leaning against the wall, the pistol in his hand, his brain clearing itself as he saw his final triumph. His work did not frighten him. Even in that tragic moment as he stood against the wall, his defense–if it ever came to a defense–framed itself in his mind. Pierrot had murderously assaulted him–without cause. In self-defense he had killed him. Was he not the Factor of Lac Bain? Would not the company and the law believe his word before that of this girl? His brain leaped with the old exultation. It would never come to that–to a betrayal of this struggle and death in the cabin–after he had finished with her! She would not be known for all time as La Bete Noir. No, they would bury Pierrot, and she would return to Lac Bain with him. If she had been helpless before, she was ten times more helpless now. She would never tell of what had happened in the cabin.
He forgot the presence of death as he looked at her, bowed over her father so that her hair covered him like a silken-shroud. He replaced the pistol in its holster and drew a deep breath into his lungs. He was still a little unsteady on his feet, but his face was again the face of a devil. He took a step, and it was then there came a sound to rouse the girl. In the shadow of the farther wall Baree had struggled to his haunches, and now he growled.
Slowly Nepeese lifted her head. A power which she could not resist drew her eyes up until she was looking into the face of Bush McTaggart. She had almost lost consciousness of his presence. Her senses were cold and deadened–it was as if her own heart had stopped beating along with Pierrot’s. What she saw in the factor’s face dragged her out of the numbness of her grief back into the shadow of her own peril. He was standing over her. In his face there was no pity, nothing of horror at what he had done–only an insane exultation as he looked–not at Pierrot’s dead body, but at her. He put out a hand, and it rested on her head. She felt his thick fingers crumpling her hair, and his eyes blazed like embers of fire behind watery films. She struggled to rise, but with his hands at her hair he held her down.
“Great God!” she breathed.
She uttered no other words, no plea for mercy, no other sound but a dry, hopeless sob. In that moment neither of them heard or saw Baree. Twice in crossing the cabin his hindquarters had sagged to the floor. Now he was close to McTaggart. He wanted to give a single lunge to the man-brute’s back and snap his thick neck as he would have broken a caribou bone. But he had no strength. He was still partially paralyzed from his foreshoulder back. But his jaws were like iron, and they closed savagely on McTaggart’s leg.
With a yell of pain the factor released his hold on the Willow, and she staggered to her feet. For a precious half-minute she was free, and as the factor kicked and struck to loose Baree’s hold, she ran to the cabin door and out into the day. The cold air struck her face. It filled her lungs with new strength; and without thought of where hope might lie she ran through the snow into the forest.
McTaggart appeared at the door just in time to see her disappear. His leg was torn where Baree had fastened his fangs, but he felt no pain as he ran in pursuit of the girl. She could not go far. An exultant cry, inhuman as the cry of a beast, came in a great breath from his gaping mouth as he saw that she was staggering weakly as she fled. He was halfway to the edge of the forest when Baree dragged himself over the threshold. His jaws were bleeding where McTaggart had kicked him again and again before his fangs gave way. Halfway between his ears was a seared spot, as if a red-hot poker had been laid there for an instant. This was where McTaggart’s bullet had gone. A quarter of an inch deeper, and it would have meant death. As it was, it had been like the blow of a heavy club, paralyzing his senses and sending him limp and unconscious against the wall. He could move on his feet now without falling, and slowly he followed in the tracks of the man and the girl.
As she ran, Nepeese’s mind became all at once clear and reasoning. She turned into the narrow trail over which McTaggart had followed her once before, but just before reaching the chasm, she swung sharply to the right. She could see McTaggart. He was not running fast, but was gaining steadily, as if enjoying the sight of her helplessness, as he had enjoyed it in another way on that other day. Two hundred yards below the deep pool into which she had pushed the factor–just beyond the shallows out of which he had dragged himself to safety–was the beginning of Blue Feather’s Gorge. An appalling thing was shaping itself in her mind as she ran to it–a thing that with each gasping breath she drew became more and more a great and glorious hope. At last she reached it and looked down. And as she looked, there whispered up out of her soul and trembled on her lips the swan song of her mother’s people.
Our fathers–come!
Come from out of the valley.
Guide us–for today we die,
And the winds whisper of death!
She had raised her arms. Against the white wilderness beyond the chasm she stood tall and slim. Fifty yards behind her the factor from Lac Bain stopped suddenly in his tracks. “Ah,” he mumbled. “Is she not wonderful!” And behind McTaggart, coming faster and faster, was Baree.
Again the Willow looked down. She was at the edge, for she had no fear in this hour. Many times she had clung to Pierrot’s hand as she looked over. Down there no one could fall and live. Fifty feet below her the water which never froze was smashing itself into froth among the rocks. It was deep and black and terrible, for between the narrow rock walls the sun did not reach it. The roar of it filled the Willow’s ears.
She turned and faced McTaggart.
Even then he did not guess, but came toward her again, his arms stretched out ahead of him. Fifty yards! It was not much, and shortening swiftly.
Once more the Willow’s lips moved. After all, it is the mother soul that gives us faith to meet eternity–and it was to the spirit of her mother that the Willow called in the hour of death. With the call on her lips she plunged into the abyss, her wind-whipped hair clinging to her in a glistening shroud.
CHAPTER 22
A moment later the factor from Lac Bain stood at the edge of the chasm. His voice had called out in a hoarse bellow–a wild cry of disbelief and horror that had formed the Willow’s name as she disappeared. He looked down, clutching his huge red hands and staring in ghastly suspense at the boiling water and black rocks far below. There was nothing there now–no sign of her, no last flash of her pale face and streaming hair in the white foam. And she had done THAT–to save herself from him!
The soul of the man-beast turned sick within him, so sick that he staggered back, his vision blinded and his legs tottering under him. He had killed Pierrot, and it had been a triumph. All his life he had played the part of the brute with a stoicism and cruelty that had known no shock–nothing like this that overwhelmed him now, numbing him to the marrow of his bones until he stood like one paralyzed. He did not see Baree. He did not hear the dog’s whining cries at the edge of the chasm. For a few moments the world turned black for him. And then, dragging himself out of his stupor, he ran frantically along the edge of the gorge, looking down wherever his eyes could see the water, striving for a glimpse of her. At last it grew too deep. There was no hope. She was gone–and she had faced that to escape him!
He mumbled that fact over and over again, stupidly, thickly, as though his brain could grasp nothing beyond it. She was dead. And Pierrot was dead. And he, in a few minutes, had accomplished it all.
He turned back toward the cabin–not by the trail over which he had pursued Nepeese, but straight through the thick bush. Great flakes of snow had begun to fall. He looked at the sky, where banks of dark clouds were rolling up from the south and east. The sun disappeared. Soon there would be a storm–a heavy snowstorm. The big flakes falling on his naked hands and face set his mind to work. It was lucky for him, this storm. It would cover everything–the fresh trails, even the grave he would dig for Pierrot.
It does not take such a man as the factor long to recover from a moral concussion. By the time he came in sight of the cabin his mind was again at work on physical things–on the necessities of the situation. The appalling thing, after all, was not that both Pierrot and Nepeese were dead, but that his dream was shattered. It was not that Nepeese was dead, but that he had lost her. This was his vital disappointment. The other thing–his crime–it was easy to destroy all traces of that.
It was not sentiment that made him dig Pierrot’s grave close to the princess mother’s under the tall spruce. It was not sentiment that made him dig the grave at all, but caution. He buried Pierrot decently. Then he poured Pierrot’s stock of kerosene where it would be most effective and touched a match to it. He stood in the edge of the forest until the cabin was a mass of flames. The snow was falling thickly. The freshly made grave was a white mound, and the trails were filling up with new snow. For the physical things he had done there was no fear in Bush McTaggart’s heart as he turned back toward Lac Bain. No one would ever look into the grave of Pierrot Du Quesne. And there was no one to betray him if such a miracle happened. But of one thing his black soul would never be able to free itself. Always he would see the pale, triumphant face of the Willow as she stood facing him in that moment of her glory when, even as she was choosing death rather than him, he had cried to himself: “Ah! Is she not wonderful!”
As Bush McTaggart had forgotten Baree, so Baree had forgotten the factor from Lac Bain. When McTaggart had run along the edge of the chasm, Baree had squatted himself in the trodden plot of snow where Nepeese had last stood, his body stiffened and his forefeet braced as he looked down. He had seen her take the leap. Many times that summer he had followed her in her daring dives into the deep, quiet water of the pool. But this was a tremendous distance. She had never dived into a place like that before. He could see the black shapes of the rocks, appearing and disappearing in the whirling foam like the heads of monsters at play. The roar of the water filled him with dread. His eyes caught the swift rush of crumbled ice between the rock walls. And she had gone down there!
He had a great desire to follow her, to jump in, as he had always jumped in after her in previous times. She was surely down there, even though he could not see her. Probably she was playing among the rocks and hiding herself in the white froth and wondering why he didn’t come. But he hesitated–hesitated with his head and neck over the abyss, and his forefeet giving way a little in the snow. With an effort he dragged himself back and whined. He caught the fresh scent of McTaggart’s moccasins in the snow, and the whine changed slowly into a long snarl. He looked over again. Still he could not see her. He barked–the short, sharp signal with which he always called her. There was no answer. Again and again he barked, and always there was nothing but the roar of the water that came back to him. Then for a few moments he stood back, silent and listening, his body shivering with the strange dread that was possessing him.
The snow was falling now, and McTaggart had returned to the cabin. After a little Baree followed in the trail he had made along the edge of the chasm, and wherever McTaggart had stopped to peer over, Baree paused also. For a space his hatred of the man was lost in his desire to join the Willow, and he continued along the gorge until, a quarter of a mile beyond where the factor had last looked into it, he came to the narrow trail down which he and Nepeese had many time adventured in quest of rock violets. The twisting path that led down the face of the cliff was filled with snow now, but Baree made his way through it until at last he stood at the edge of the unfrozen torrent. Nepeese was not here. He whined, and barked again, but this time there was in his signal to her an uneasy repression, a whimpering note which told that he did not expect a reply. For five minutes after that he sat on his haunches in the snow, stolid as a rock. What it was that came down out of the dark mystery and tumult of the chasm to him, what spirit whispers of nature that told him the truth, it is beyond the power of reason to explain. But he listened, and he looked; and his muscles twitched as the truth grew in him. And at last he raised his head slowly until his black muzzle pointed to the white storm in the sky, and out of his throat there went forth the quavering, long-drawn howl of the husky who mourns outside the tepee of a master who is newly dead.
On the trail, heading for Lac Bain, Bush McTaggart heard that cry and shivered.
It was the smell of smoke, thickening in the air until it stung his nostrils, that drew Baree at last away from the chasm and back to the cabin. There was not much left when he came to the clearing. Where the cabin had been was a red-hot, smoldering mass. For a long time he sat watching it, still waiting and still listening. He no longer felt the effect of the bullet that had stunned him, but his senses were undergoing another change now, as strange and unreal as their struggle against that darkness of near death in the cabin. In a space that had not covered more than an hour the world had twisted itself grotesquely for Baree. That long ago the Willow was sitting before her little mirror in the cabin, talking to him and laughing in her happiness, while he lay in vast contentment on the floor. And now there was no cabin, no Nepeese, no Pierrot. Quietly he struggled to comprehend. It was some time before he moved from under the thick balsams, for already a deep and growing suspicion began to guide his movements. He did not go nearer to the smoldering mass of the cabin, but slinking low, made his way about the circle of the clearing to the dog corral. This took him under the tall spruce. For a full minute he paused here, sniffing at the freshly made mound under its white mantle of snow. When he went on, he slunk still lower, and his ears were flat against his head.
The dog corral was open and empty. McTaggart had seen to that. Again Baree squatted back on his haunches and sent forth the death howl. This time it was for Pierrot. In it there was a different note from that of the howl he had sent forth from the chasm: it was positive, certain. In the chasm his cry had been tempered with doubt–a questioning hope, something that was so almost human that McTaggart had shivered on the trail. But Baree knew what lay in that freshly dug snow-covered grave. A scant three feet of earth could not hide its secret from him. There was death–definite and unequivocal. But for Nepeese he was still hoping and seeking.
Until noon he did not go far from the site of the cabin, but only once did he actually approach and sniff about the black pile of steaming timbers. Again and again he circled the edge of the clearing, keeping just within the bush and timber, sniffing the air and listening. Twice he went hack to the chasm. Late in the afternoon there came to him a sudden impulse that carried him swiftly through the forest. He did not run openly now. Caution, suspicion, and fear had roused in him afresh the instincts of the wolf. With his ears flattened against the side of his head, his tail drooping until the tip of it dragged the snow and his back sagging in the curious, evasive gait of the wolf, he scarcely made himself distinguishable from the shadows of the spruce and balsams.
There was no faltering in the trail Baree made; it was straight as a rope might have been drawn through the forest, and it brought him, early in the dusk, to the open spot where Nepeese had fled with him that day she had pushed McTaggart over the edge of the precipice into the pool. In the place of the balsam shelter of that day there was now a watertight birchbark tepee which Pierrot had helped the Willow to make during the summer. Baree went straight to it and thrust in his head with a low and expectant whine.
There was no answer. It was dark and cold in the tepee. He could make out indistinctly the two blankets that were always in it, the row of big tin boxes in which Nepeese kept their stores, and the stove which Pierrot had improvised out of scraps of iron and heavy tin. But Nepeese was not there. And there was no sign of her outside. The snow was unbroken except by his own trail. It was dark when he returned to the burned cabin. All that night he hung about the deserted dog corral, and all through the night the snow fell steadily, so that by dawn he sank into it to his shoulders when he moved out into the clearing.
But with day the sky had cleared. The sun came up, and the world was almost too dazzling for the eyes. It warmed Baree’s blood with new hope and expectation. His brain struggled even more eagerly than yesterday to comprehend. Surely the Willow would be returning soon! He would hear her voice. She would appear suddenly out of the forest. He would receive some signal from her. One of these things, or all of them, must happen. He stopped sharply in his tracks at every sound, and sniffed the air from every point of the wind. He was traveling ceaselessly. His body made deep trails in the snow around and over the huge white mound where the cabin had stood. His tracks led from the corral to the tall spruce, and they were as numerous as the footprints of a wolf pack for half a mile up and down the chasm.
On the afternoon of this day the second strong impulse came to him. It was not reason, and neither was it instinct alone. It was the struggle halfway between, the brute mind righting at its best with the mystery of an intangible thing–something that could not be seen by the eye or heard by the ear. Nepeese was not in the cabin, because there was no cabin. She was not at the tepee. He could find no trace of her in the chasm. She was not with Pierrot under the big spruce.
Therefore, unreasoning but sure, he began to follow the old trap line into the north and west.
CHAPTER 23
No man has ever looked clearly into the mystery of death as it is impressed upon the senses of the northern dog. It comes to him, sometimes, with the wind. Most frequently it must come with the wind, and yet there are ten thousand masters in the northland who will swear that their dogs have given warning of death hours before it actually came; and there are many of these thousands who know from experience that their teams will stop a quarter or half a mile from a strange cabin in which there lies unburied dead.
Yesterday Baree had smelled death, and he knew without process of reasoning that the dead was Pierrot. How he knew this, and why he accepted the fact as inevitable, is one of the mysteries which at times seems to give the direct challenge to those who concede nothing more than instinct to the brute mind. He knew that Pierrot was dead without exactly knowing what death was. But of one thing he was sure: he would never see Pierrot again. He would never hear his voice again; he would never hear again the swish-swish-swish of his snowshoes in the trail ahead, and so on the trap line he did not look for Pierrot. Pierrot was gone forever. But Baree had not yet associated death with Nepeese. He was filled with a great uneasiness. What came to him from out of the chasm had made him tremble with fear and suspense. He sensed the thrill of something strange, of something impending, and yet even as he had given the death howl in the chasm, it must have been for Pierrot. For he believed that Nepeese was alive, and he was now just as sure that he would overtake her on the trap line as he was positive yesterday that he would find her at the birchbark tepee.
Since yesterday morning’s breakfast with the Willow, Baree had gone without eating. To appease his hunger meant to hunt, and his mind was too filled with his quest of Nepeese for that. He would have gone hungry all that day, but in the third mile from the cabin he came to a trap in which there was a big snowshoe rabbit. The rabbit was still alive, and he killed it and ate his fill. Until dark he did not miss a trap. In one of them there was a lynx; in another a fishercat. Out on the white surface of a lake he sniffed at a snowy mound under which lay the body of a red fox killed by one of Pierrot’s poison baits. Both the lynx and the fishercat were alive, and the steel chains of their traps clanked sharply as they prepared to give Baree battle. But Baree was uninterested. He hurried on, his uneasiness growing as the day darkened and he found no sign of the Willow.
It was a wonderfully clear night after the storm–cold and brilliant, with the shadows standing out as clearly as living things. The third suggestion came to Baree now. He was, like all animals, largely of one idea at a time–a creature with whom all lesser impulses were governed by a single leading impulse. And this impulse, in the glow of the starlit night, was to reach as quickly as possible the first of Pierrot’s two cabins on the trap line. There he would find Nepeese!
We won’t call the process by which Baree came to this conclusion a process of reasoning. Instinct or reasoning, whatever it was, a fixed and positive faith came to Baree just the same. He began to miss the traps in his haste to cover distance–to reach the cabin. It was twenty-five miles from Pierrot’s burned home to the first trap cabin, and Baree had made ten of these by nightfall. The remaining fifteen were the most difficult. In the open spaces the snow was belly-deep and soft. Frequently he plunged through drifts in which for a few moments he was buried. Three times during the early part of the night Baree heard the savage dirge of the wolves. Once it was a wild paean of triumph as the hunters pulled down their kill less than half a mile away in the deep forest. But the voice no longer called to him. It was repellent–a voice of hatred and of treachery. Each time that he heard it he stopped in his tracks and snarled, while his spine stiffened.
At midnight Baree came to the tiny amphitheater in the forest where Pierrot had cut the logs for the first of his trapline cabins. For at least a minute Baree stood at the edge of the clearing, his ears very alert, his eyes bright with hope and expectation, while he sniffed the air. There was no smoke, no sound, no light in the one window of the log shack. His disappointment fell on him even as he stood there. Again he sensed the fact of his aloneness, of the barrenness of his quest. There was a disheartened slouch to his door. He had traveled twenty-five miles, and he was tired.
The snow was drifted deep at the doorway, and here Baree sat down and whined. It was no longer the anxious, questing whine of a few hours ago. Now it voiced hopelessness and a deep despair. For half an hour he sat shivering with his back to the door and his face to the starlit wilderness, as if there still remained the fleeting hope that Nepeese might follow after him over the trail. Then he burrowed himself a hole deep in the snowdrift and passed the remainder of the night in uneasy slumber.
With the first light of day Baree resumed the trail. He was not so alert this morning. There was the disconsolate droop to his tail which the Indians call the Akoosewin–the sign of the sick dog. And Baree was sick–not of body but of soul. The keenness of his hope had died, and he no longer expected to find the Willow. The second cabin at the far end of the trap line drew him on, but it inspired in him none of the enthusiasm with which he had hurried to the first. He traveled slowly and spasmodically, his suspicions of the forests again replacing the excitement of his quest. He approached each of Pierrot’s traps and the deadfalls cautiously, and twice he showed his fangs–once at a marten that snapped at him from under a root where it had dragged the trap in which it was caught, and the second time at a big snowy owl that had come to steal bait and was now a prisoner at the end of a steel chain. It may be that Baree thought it was Oohoomisew and that he still remembered vividly the treacherous assault and fierce battle of that night when, as a puppy, he was dragging his sore and wounded body through the mystery and fear of the big timber. For he did more than to show his fangs. He tore the owl into pieces.
There were plenty of rabbits in Pierrot’s traps, and Baree did not go hungry. He reached the second trap-line cabin late in the afternoon, after ten hours of traveling. He met with no very great disappointment here, for he had not anticipated very much. The snow had banked this cabin even higher than the other. It lay three feet deep against the door, and the window was white with a thick coating of frost. At this place, which was close to the edge of a big barren, and unsheltered by the thick forests farther back, Pierrot had built a shelter for his firewood, and in this shelter Baree made his temporary home. All the next day he remained somewhere near the end of the trap line, skirting the edge of the barren and investigating the short side line of a dozen traps which Pierrot and Nepeese had strung through a swamp in which there had been many signs of lynx. It was the third day before he set out on his return to the Gray Loon.
He did not travel very fast, spending two days in covering the twenty-five miles between the first and the second trap-line cabins. At the second cabin he remained for three days, and it was on the ninth day that he reached the Gray Loon. There was no change. There were no tracks in the snow but his own, made nine days ago.
Baree’s quest for Nepeese became now more or less involuntary, a sort of daily routine. For a week he made his burrow in the dog corral, and at least twice between dawn and darkness he would go to the birchbark tepee and the chasm. His trail, soon beaten hard in the snow, became as fixed as Pierrot’s trap line. It cut straight through the forest to the tepee, swinging slightly to the east so that it crossed the frozen surface of the Willow’s swimming pool. From the tepee it swung in a circle through a part of the forest where Nepeese had frequently gathered armfuls of crimson fireflowers, and then to the chasm. Up and down the edge of the gorge it went, down into the little cup at the bottom of the chasm, and thence straight back to the dog corral.
And then, of a sudden, Baree made a change. He spent a night in the tepee. After that, whenever he was at the Gray Loon, during the day he always slept in the tepee. The two blankets were his bed–and they were a part of Nepeese. And there, all through the long winter, he waited.
If Nepeese had returned in February and could have taken him unaware, she would have found a changed Baree. He was more than ever like a wolf; yet he never gave the wolf howl now, and always he snarled deep in his throat when he heard the cry of the pack. For several weeks the old trap line had supplied him with meat, but now he hunted. The tepee, in and out, was scattered with fur and bones. Once–alone–he caught a young deer in deep snow and killed it. Again, in the heart of a fierce February storm, he pursued a bull caribou so closely that it plunged over a cliff and broke its neck. He lived well, and in size and strength he was growing swiftly into a giant of his kind. In another six months he would be as large as Kazan, and his jaws were almost as powerful, even now.
Three times that winter Baree fought–once with a lynx that sprang down upon him from a windfall while he was eating a freshly killed rabbit, and twice with two lone wolves. The lynx tore him unmercifully before it fled into the windfall. The younger of the wolves he killed; the other fight was a draw. More and more he became an outcast, living alone with his dreams and his smoldering hopes.
And Baree did dream. Many times, as he lay in the tepee, he would hear the voice of Nepeese. He would hear her sweet voice calling, her laughter, the sound of his name. and often he would start up to his feet–the old Baree for a thrilling moment or two–only to lie down in his nest again with a low, grief-filled whine. And always when he heard the snap of a twig or some other sound in the forest, it was thought of Nepeese that flashed first into his brain. Some day she would return. That belief was a part of his existence as much as the sun and the moon and the stars.
The winter passed, and spring came, and still Baree continued to haunt his old trails, even going now and then over the old trap line as far as the first of the two cabins. The traps were rusted and sprung now; the thawing snow disclosed bones and feathers between their jaws. Under the deadfalls were remnants of fur, and out on the ice of the lakes were picked skeletons of foxes and wolves that had taken the poison baits. The last snow went. The swollen streams sang in the forests and canyons. The grass turned green, and the first flowers came.
Surely this was the time for Nepeese to come home! He watched for her expectantly. He went still more frequently to their swimming pool in the forest, and he hung closely to the burned cabin and the dog corral. Twice he sprang into the pool and whined as he swam about, as though she surely must join him in their old water frolic. And now, as the spring passed and summer came, there settled upon him slowly the gloom and misery of utter hopelessness. The flowers were all out now, and even the bakneesh vines glowed like red fire in the woods. Patches of green were beginning to hide the charred heap where the cabin had stood, and the blue-flower vines that covered the princess mother’s grave were reaching out toward Pierrot’s, as if the princess mother herself were the spirit of them.
All these things were happening, and the birds had mated and nested, and still Nepeese did not come! And at last something broke inside of Baree, his last hope, perhaps, his last dream; and one day he bade good-bye to the Gray Loon.
No one can say what it cost him to go. No one can say how he fought against the things that were holding him to the tepee, the old swimming pool, the familiar paths in the forest, and the two graves that were not so lonely now under the tall spruce. He went. He had no reason–simply went. It may be that there is a Master whose hand guides the beast as well as the man, and that we know just enough of this guidance to call it instinct. For, in dragging himself away, Baree faced the Great Adventure.
It was there, in the north, waiting for him–and into the north he went.
CHAPTER 24
It was early in August when Baree left the Gray Loon. He had no objective in view. But there was still left upon his mind, like the delicate impression of light and shadow on a negative, the memories of his earlier days. Things and happenings that he had almost forgotten recurred to him now, as his trail led him farther and farther away from the Gray Loon. And his earlier experiences became real again, pictures thrown out afresh in his mind by the breaking of the last ties that held him to the home of the Willow. Involuntarily he followed the trail of these impressions–of these past happenings, and slowly they helped to build up new interests for him.
A year in his life was a long time–a decade of man’s experience. It was more than a year ago that he had left Kazan and Gray Wolf and the old windfall, and yet now there came back to him indistinct memories of those days of his earliest puppyhood, of the stream into which he had fallen, and of his fierce battle with Papayuchisew. It was his later experiences that roused the older memories. He came to the blind canyon up which Nepeese and Pierrot had chased him. That seemed but yesterday. He entered the little meadow, and stood beside the great rock that had almost crushed the life out of the Willow’s body; and then he remembered where Wakayoo, his big bear friend, had died under Pierrot’s rifle–and he smelled of Wakayoo’s whitened bones where they lay scattered in the green grass, with flowers growing up among them.
A day and night he spent in the little meadow before he went back out of the canyon and into his old haunts along the creek, where Wakayoo had fished for him. There was another bear here now, and he also was fishing. Perhaps he was a son or a grandson of Wakayoo. Baree smelled where he had made his fish caches, and for three days he lived on fish before he struck out for the North.
And now, for the first time in many weeks, a bit of the old-time eagerness put speed into Baree’s feet. Memories that had been hazy and indistinct through forgetfulness were becoming realities again, and as he would have returned to the Gray Loon had Nepeese been there so now, with something of the feeling of a wanderer going home, he returned to the old beaver pond.
It was that most glorious hour of a summer’s day–sunset–when he reached it. He stopped a hundred yards away, with the pond still hidden from his sight, and sniffed the air, and listened. The POND was there. He caught the cool, honey smell of it. But Umisk, and Beaver Tooth, and all the others? Would he find them? He strained his ears to catch a familiar sound, and after a moment or two it came–a hollow splash in the water.
He went quietly through the alders and stood at last close to the spot where he had first made the acquaintance of Umisk. The surface of the pond was undulating slightly, two or three heads popped up. He saw the torpedolike wake of an old beaver towing a stick close to the opposite shore. He looked toward the dam, and it was as he had left it almost a year ago. He did not show himself for a time, but stood concealed in the young alders. He felt growing in him more and more a feeling of restfulness, a relaxation from the long strain of the lonely months during which he had waited for Nepeese.
With a long breath he lay down among the alders, with his head just enough exposed to give him a clear view. As the sun settled lower the pond became alive. Out on the shore where he had saved Umisk from the fox came another generation of young beavers–three of them, fat and waddling. Very softly Baree whined.
All that night he lay in the alders. The beaver pond became his home again. Conditions were changed, of course, and as days grew into weeks the inhabitants of Beaver Tooth’s colony showed no signs of accepting the grown-up Baree as they had accepted the baby Baree of long ago. He was big, black, and wolfish now–a long-fanged and formidable-looking creature, and though he offered no violence he was regarded by the beavers with a deep-seated feeling of fear and suspicion.
On the other hand, Baree no longer felt the old puppyish desire to play with the baby beavers, so their aloofness did not trouble him as in those other days. Umisk was grown up, too, a fat and prosperous young buck who was just taking unto himself this year a wife, and who was at present very busy gathering his winter’s rations. It is entirely probable that he did not associate the big black beast he saw now and then with the little Baree with whom he had smelled noses once upon a time, and it is quite likely that Baree did not recognize Umisk except as a part of the memories that had remained with him.
All through the month of August Baree made the beaver pond his headquarters. At times his excursions kept him away for two or three days at a time. These journeys were always into the north, sometimes a little east and sometimes a little west, but never again into the south. And at last, early in September, he left the beaver pond for good.
For many days his wanderings carried him in no one particular direction. He followed the hunting, living chiefly on rabbits and that simple-minded species of partridge known as the “fool hen.” This diet, of course, was given variety by other things as they happened to come his way. Wild currants and raspberries were ripening, and Baree was fond of these. He also liked the bitter berries of the mountain ash, which, along with the soft balsam and spruce pitch which he licked with his tongue now and then, were good medicine for him. In shallow water he occasionally caught a fish. Now and then he hazarded a cautious battle with a porcupine, and if he was successful he feasted on the tenderest and most luscious of all the flesh that made up his menu.
Twice in September he killed young deer. The big “burns” that he occasionally came to no longer held terrors for him; in the midst of plenty he forgot the days in which he had gone hungry. In October he wandered as far west as the Geikie River, and then northward to Wollaston Lake, which was a good hundred miles north of the Gray Loon. The first week in November he turned south again, following the Canoe River for a distance, and then swinging westward along a twisting creek called The Little Black Bear with No Tail.
More than once during these weeks Baree came into touch with man, but, with the exception of the Cree hunter at the upper end of Wollaston Lake, no man had seen him. Three times in following the Geikie he lay crouched in the brush while canoes passed. Half a dozen times, in the stillness of night, he nosed about cabins and tepees in which there was life, and once he came so near to the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Wollaston that he could hear the barking of dogs and the shouting of their masters.
And always he was seeking–questing for the thing that had gone out of his life. At the thresholds of the cabins he sniffed; outside of the tepees he circled close, gathering the wind. The canoes he watched with eyes in which there was a hopeful gleam. Once he thought the wind brought him the scent of Nepeese, and all at once his legs grew weak under his body and his heart seemed to stop beating. It was only for a moment or two. She came out of the tepee–an Indian girl with her hands full of willow work–and Baree slunk away unseen.
It was almost December when Lerue, a half-breed from Lac Bain, saw Baree’s footprints in freshly fallen snow, and a little later caught a flash of him in the bush.
“Mon Dieu, I tell you his feet are as big as my hand, and he is as black as a raven’s wing with the sun on it!” he exclaimed in the company’s store at Lac Bain. “A fox? Non! He is half as big as a bear. A wolf–oui! And black as the devil, m’sieus.”
McTaggart was one of those who heard. He was putting his signature in ink to a letter he had written to the company when Lerue’s words came to him. His hand stopped so suddenly that a drop of ink spattered on the letter. Through him there ran a curious shiver as he looked over at the half-breed. Just then Marie came in. McTaggart had brought her back from her tribe. Her big, dark eyes had a sick look in them, and some of her wild beauty had gone since a year ago.
“He was gone like–that!” Lerue was saying, with a snap of his fingers. He saw Marie, and stopped.
“Black, you say?” McTaggart said carelessly, without lifting his eyes from his writing. “Did he not bear some dog mark?”
Lerue shrugged his shoulders.
“He was gone like the wind, m’sieu. But he was a wolf.”
With scarcely a sound that the others could hear Marie had whispered into the factor’s ear, and folding his letter McTaggart rose quickly and left the store. He was gone an hour. Lerue and the others were puzzled. It was not often that Marie came into the store. It was not often that they saw her at all. She remained hidden in the factor’s log house, and each time that he saw her Lerue thought that her face was a little thinner than the last, and her eyes bigger and hungrier looking. In his own heart there was a great yearning.
Many a night he passed the little window beyond which he knew that she was sleeping. Often he looked to catch a glimpse of her pale face, and he lived in the one happiness of knowing that Marie understood, and that into her eyes there came for an instant a different light when their glances met. No one else knew. The secret lay between them–and patiently Lerue waited and watched. “Some day,” he kept saying to himself–“Some day”–and that was all. The one word carried a world of meaning and of hope. When that day came he would take Marie straight to the missioner over at Fort Churchill, and they would be married. It was a dream–a dream that made the long days and the longer nights on the trap line patiently endured. Now they were both slaves to the environing Power. But–some day–
Lerue was thinking of this when McTaggart returned at the end of the hour. The factor came straight up to where the half dozen of them were seated about the big box stove, and with a grunt of satisfaction shook the freshly fallen snow from his shoulders.
“Pierre Eustach has accepted the Government’s offer and is going to guide that map-making party up into the Barrens this winter,” he announced. “You know, Lerue–he has a hundred and fifty traps and deadfalls set, and a big poison-bait country. A good line, eh? And I have leased it of him for the season. It will give me the outdoor work I need–three days on the trail, three days here. Eh, what do you say to the bargain?”
“It is good,” said Lerue.
“Yes, it is good,” said Roget.
“A wide fox country,” said Mons Roule.
“And easy to travel,” murmured Valence in a voice that was almost like a woman’s.
CHAPTER 25
The trap line of Pierre Eustach ran thirty miles straight west of Lac Bain. It was not as long a line as Pierrot’s had been, but it was like a main artery running through the heart of a rich fur country. It had belonged to Pierre Eustach’s father, and his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, and beyond that it reached, Pierre averred, back to the very pulse of the finest blood in France. The books at McTaggart’s Post went back only as far as the great-grandfather end of it, the older evidence of ownership being at Churchill. It was the finest game country between Reindeer Lake and the Barren Lands. It was in December that Baree came to it.
Again he was traveling southward in a slow and wandering fashion, seeking food in the deep snows. The Kistisew Kestin, or Great Storm, had come earlier than usual this winter, and for a week after it scarcely a hoof or claw was moving. Baree, unlike the other creatures, did not bury himself in the snow and wait for the skies to clear and crust to form. He was big, and powerful, and restless. Less than two years old, he weighed a good eighty pounds. His pads were broad and wolfish. His chest and shoulders were like a Malemute’s, heavy and yet muscled for speed. He was wider between the eyes than the wolf-breed husky, and his eyes were larger, and entirely clear of the Wuttooi, or blood film, that marks the wolf and also to an extent the husky. His jaws were like Kazan’s, perhaps even more powerful.
Through all that week of the Big Storm he traveled without food. There were four days of snow, with driving blizzards and fierce winds, and after that three days of intense cold in which every living creature kept to its warm dugout in the snow. Even the birds had burrowed themselves in. One might have walked on the backs of caribou and moose and not have guessed it. Baree sheltered himself during the worst of the storm but did not allow the snow to gather over him.
Every trapper from Hudson’s Bay to the country of the Athabasca knew that after the Big Storm the famished fur animals would be seeking food, and that traps and deadfalls properly set and baited stood the biggest chance of the year of being filled. Some of them set out over their trap lines on the sixth day; some on the seventh, and others on the eighth. It was on the seventh day that Bush McTaggart started over Pierre Eustach’s line, which was now his own for the season. It took him two days to uncover the traps, dig the snow from them, rebuild the fallen “trap houses,” and rearrange the baits. On the third day he was back at Lac Bain.
It was on this day that Baree came to the cabin at the far end of McTaggart’s line. McTaggart’s trail was fresh in the snow about the cabin, and the instant Baree sniffed of it every drop of blood in his body seemed to leap suddenly with a strange excitement. It took perhaps half a minute for the scent that filled his nostrils to associate itself with what had gone before, and at the end of that half-minute there rumbled in Baree’s chest a deep and sullen growl. For many minutes after that he stood like a black rock in the snow, watching the cabin.
Then slowly he began circling about it, drawing nearer and nearer, until at last he was sniffing at the threshold. No sound or smell of life came from inside, but he could smell the old smell of McTaggart. Then he faced the wilderness–the direction in which the trap line ran back to Lac Bain. He was trembling. His muscles twitched. He whined. Pictures were assembling more and more vividly in his mind–the fight in the cabin, Nepeese, the wild chase through the snow to the chasm’s edge–even the memory of that age-old struggle when McTaggart had caught him in the rabbit snare. In his whine there was a great yearning, almost expectation. Then it died slowly away. After all, the scent in the snow was of a thing that he had hated and wanted to kill, and not of anything that he had loved. For an instant nature had impressed on him the significance of associations–a brief space only, and then it was gone. The whine died away, but in its place came again that ominous growl.
Slowly he followed the trail and a quarter of a mile from the cabin struck the first trap on the line. Hunger had caved in his sides until he was like a starved wolf. In the first trap house McTaggart had placed as bait the hindquarter of a snowshoe rabbit. Baree reached in cautiously. He had learned many things on Pierrot’s line: he had learned what the snap of a trap meant. He had felt the cruel pain of steel jaws; he knew better than the shrewdest fox what a deadfall would do when the trigger was sprung–and Nepeese herself had taught him that he was never to touch a poison bait. So he closed his teeth gently in the rabbit flesh and drew it forth as cleverly as McTaggart himself could have done. He visited five traps before dark, and ate the five baits without springing a pan. The sixth was a deadfall. He circled about this until he had beaten a path in the snow. Then he went on into a warm balsam swamp and found himself a bed for the night.
The next day saw the beginning of the struggle that was to follow between the wits of man and beast. To Baree the encroachment of Bush McTaggart’s trap line was not war; it was existence. It was to furnish him food, as Pierrot’s line had furnished him food for many weeks. But he sensed the fact that in this instance he was lawbreaker and had an enemy to outwit. Had it been good hunting weather he might have gone on, for the unseen hand that was guiding his wanderings was drawing him slowly but surely back to the old beaver pond and the Gray Loon. As it was, with the snow deep and soft under him–so deep that in places he plunged into it over his ears–McTaggart’s trap line was like a trail of manna made for his special use.
He followed in the factor’s snowshoe tracks, and in the third trap killed a rabbit. When he had finished with it nothing but the hair and crimson patches of blood lay upon the snow. Starved for many days, he was filled with a wolfish hunger, and before the day was over he had robbed the bait from a full dozen of McTaggart’s traps. Three times he struck poison baits–venison or caribou fat in the heart of which was a dose of strychnine, and each time his keen nostrils detected the danger. Pierrot had more than once noted the amazing fact that Baree could sense the presence of poison even when it was most skillfully injected into the frozen carcass of a deer. Foxes and wolves ate of flesh from which his supersensitive power of detecting the presence of deadly danger turned him away.
So he passed Bush McTaggart’s poisoned tidbits, sniffing them on the way, and leaving the story of his suspicion in the manner of his footprints in the snow. Where McTaggart had halted at midday to cook his dinner Baree made these same cautious circles with his feet.
The second day, being less hungry and more keenly alive to the hated smell of his enemy, Baree ate less but was more destructive. McTaggart was not as skillful as Pierre Eustach in keeping the scent of his hands from the traps and “houses,” and every now and then the smell of him was strong in Baree’s nose. This wrought in Baree a swift and definite antagonism, a steadily increasing hatred where a few days before hatred was almost forgotten.
There is, perhaps, in the animal mind a process of simple computation which does not quite achieve the distinction of reason, and which is not altogether instinct, but which produces results that might be ascribed to either. Baree did not add two and two together to make four. He did not go back step by step to prove to himself that the man to whom this trap line belonged was the cause of all hit, griefs and troubles–but he DID find himself possessed of a deep and yearning hatred. McTaggart was the one creature except the wolves that he had ever hated. It was McTaggart who had hurt him, McTaggart who had hurt Pierrot, McTaggart who had made him lose his beloved Nepeese–AND McTAGGART WAS HERE ON THIS TRAP LINE! If he had been wandering before, without object or destiny, he was given a mission now. It was to keep to the traps. To feed himself. And to vent his hatred and his vengeance as he lived.
The second day, in the center of a lake, he came upon the body of a wolf that had died of one of the poison baits. For a half-hour he mauled the dead beast until its skin was torn into ribbons. He did not taste the flesh. It was repugnant to him. It was his vengeance on the wolf breed. He stopped when he was half a dozen miles from Lac Bain, and turned back. At this particular point the line crossed a frozen stream beyond which was an open plain, and over that plain came–when the wind was right–the smoke and smell of the Post. The second night Baree lay with a full stomach in a thicket of banksian pine; the third day he was traveling westward over the trap line again.
Early on this morning Bush McTaggart started out to gather his catch, and where he crossed the stream six miles from Lac Bain he first saw Baree’s tracks. He stopped to examine them with sudden and unusual interest, falling at last on his knees, whipping off the glove from his right hand, and picking up a single hair.
“The black wolf!”
He uttered the words in an odd, hard voice, and involuntarily his eyes turned straight in the direction of the Gray Loon. After that, even more carefully than before, he examined one of the clearly impressed tracks in the snow. When he rose to his feet there was in his face the look of one who had made an unpleasant discovery.
“A black wolf!” he repeated, and shrugged his shoulders. “Bah! Lerue is a fool. It is a dog.” And then, after a moment, he muttered in a voice scarcely louder than a whisper, “HER DOG.”
He went on, traveling in the trail of the dog. A new excitement possessed him that was more thrilling than the excitement of the hunt. Being human, it was his privilege to add two and two together, and out of two and two he made–Baree. There was little doubt in his mind. The thought had flashed on him first when Lerue had mentioned the black wolf. He was convinced after his examination of the tracks. They were the tracks of a dog, and the dog was black. Then he came to the first trap that had been robbed of its bait.
Under his breath he cursed. The bait was gone, and the trap was unsprung. The sharpened stick that had transfixed the bait was pulled out clean.
All that day Bush McTaggart followed a trail where Baree had left traces of his presence. Trap after trap he found robbed. On the lake he came upon the mangled wolf. From the first disturbing excitement of his discovery of Baree’s presence his humor changed slowly to one of rage, and his rage increased as the day dragged out. He was not unacquainted with four-footed robbers of the trap line, but usually a wolf or a fox or a dog who had grown adept in thievery troubled only a few traps. But in this case Baree was traveling straight from trap to trap, and his footprints in the snow showed that he had stopped at each one. There was, to McTaggart, almost a human devilishness to his work. He evaded the poisons. Not once did he stretch his head or paw within the danger zone of a deadfall. For apparently no reason whatever he had destroyed a splendid mink, whose glossy fur lay scattered in worthless bits over the snow. Toward the end of the day McTaggart came to a deadfall in which a lynx had died. Baree had torn the silvery flank of the animal until the skin was of less than half value. McTaggart cursed aloud, and his breath came hot.
At dusk he reached the shack Pierre Eustach had built midway of his line, and took inventory of his fur. It was not more than a third of a catch; the lynx was half-ruined, a mink was torn completely in two. The second day he found still greater ruin, still more barren traps. He was like a madman. When he arrived at the second cabin, late in the afternoon, Baree’s tracks were not an hour old in the snow. Three times during the night he heard the dog howling.
The third day McTaggart did not return to Lac Bain, but began a cautious hunt for Baree. An inch or two of fresh snow had fallen, and as if to take even greater measure of vengeance from his man enemy Baree had left his footprints freely within a radius of a hundred yards of the cabin. It was half an hour before McTaggart could pick out the straight trail, and he followed it for two hours into a thick banksian swamp. Baree kept with the wind. Now and then he caught the scent of his pursuer. A dozen times he waited until the other was so close he could hear the snap of brush, or the metallic click of twigs against his rifle barrel. And then, with a sudden inspiration that brought the curses afresh to McTaggart’s lips, he swung in a wide circle and cut straight back for the trap line. When the factor reached the line, along toward noon, Baree had already begun his work. He had killed and eaten a rabbit. He had robbed three traps within the distance of a mile, and he was headed again straight over the trap line for Post Lac Bain.
It was the fifth day that Bush McTaggart returned to his post. He was in an ugly mood. Only Valence of the four Frenchmen was there, and it was Valence who heard his story, and afterward heard him cursing Marie. She came into the store a little later, big-eyed and frightened, one of her cheeks flaming red where McTaggart had struck her. While the storekeeper was getting her the canned salmon McTaggart wanted for his dinner Valence found the opportunity to whisper softly in her ear:
“M’sieu Lerue has trapped a silver fox,” he said with low triumph. “He loves you, cherie, and he will have a splendid catch by spring–and sends you this message from his cabin up on The Little Black Bear with No Tail: BE READY TO FLY WHEN THE SOFT SNOWS COME!”
Marie did not look at him, but she heard, and her eyes shone so like stars when the young storekeeper gave her the salmon that he said to Valence, when she had gone:
“Blue Death, but she is still beautiful at times. Valence!”
To which Valence nodded with an odd smile.
CHAPTER 26
By the middle of January the war between Baree and Bush McTaggart had become more than an incident–more than a passing adventure to the beast, and more than an irritating happening to the man. It was, for the time, the elemental raison d’etre of their lives. Baree hung to the trap line. He haunted it like a devastating specter, and each time that he sniffed afresh the scent of the factor from Lac Bain he was impressed still more strongly with the instinct that he was avenging himself upon a deadly enemy. Again and again he outwitted McTaggart. He continued to strip his traps of their bait and the humor grew in him more strongly to destroy the fur he came across. His greatest pleasure came to be–not in eating–but in destroying.
The fires of his hatred burned fiercer as the weeks passed, until at last he would snap and tear with his long fangs at the snow where McTaggart’s feet had passed. And all of the time, away back of his madness, there was a vision of Nepeese that continued to grow more and more clearly in his brain. That first Great Loneliness–the loneliness of the long days and longer nights of his waiting and seeking on the Gray Loon, oppressed him again as it had oppressed him in the early days of her disappearance. On starry or moonlit nights he sent forth his wailing cries for her again, and Bush McTaggart, listening to them in the middle of the night, felt strange shivers run up his spine. The man’s hatred was different than the beast’s, but perhaps even more implacable. With McTaggart it was not hatred alone. There was mixed with it an indefinable and superstitious fear, a thing he laughed at, a thing he cursed at, but which clung to him as surely as the scent of his trail clung to Baree’s nose. Baree no longer stood for the animal alone; HE STOOD FOR NEPEESE. That was the thought that insisted in growing in McTaggart’s ugly mind. Never a day passed now that he did not think of the Willow; never a night came and went without a visioning of her face.
He even fancied, on a certain night of storm, that he heard her voice out in the wailing of the wind–and less than a minute later he heard faintly a distant howl out in the forest. That night his heart was filled with a leaden dread. He shook himself. He smoked his pipe until the cabin was blue. He cursed Baree, and the storm–but there was no longer in him the bullying courage of old. He had not ceased to hate Baree; he still hated him as he had never hated a man, but he had an even greater reason now for wanting to kill him. It came to him first in his sleep, in a restless dream, and after that it lived, and lived–THE THOUGHT THAT THE SPIRIT OF NEPEESE WAS GUIDING BAREE IN THE RAVAGING OF HIS TRAP LINE!
After a time he ceased to talk at the Post about the Black Wolf that was robbing his line. The furs damaged by Baree’s teeth he kept out of sight, and to himself he kept his secret. He learned every trick and scheme of the hunters who killed foxes and wolves along the Barrens. He tried three different poisons, one so powerful that a single drop of it meant death. He tried strychnine in gelatin capsules, in deer fat, caribou fat, moose liver, and even in the flesh of porcupine. At last, in preparing his poisons, he dipped his hands in beaver oil before he handled the venoms and flesh so that there could be no human smell. Foxes, wolves, and even the mink and ermine died of these baits, but Baree came always so near–and no nearer. In January McTaggart poisoned every bait in his trap houses. This produced at least one good result for him. From that day Baree no longer touched his baits, but ate only the rabbits he killed in the traps.
It was in January that McTaggart caught his first glimpse of Baree. He had placed his rifle against a tree, and was a dozen feet away from it at the time. It was as if Baree knew, and had come to taunt him. For when the factor suddenly looked up Baree was standing out clear from the dwarf spruce not twenty yards away from him, his white fangs gleaming and his eyes burning like coals. For a space McTaggart stared as if turned into stone. It was Baree. He recognized the white star, the white-tipped ear, and his heart thumped like a hammer in his breast. Very slowly he began to creep toward his rifle. His hand was reaching for it when like a flash Baree was gone.
This gave McTaggart his new idea. He blazed himself a fresh trail through the forests parallel with his trap line but at least five hundred yards distant from it. Wherever a trap or deadfall was set this new trail struck sharply in, like the point of a V, so that he could approach his line unobserved. By this strategy he believed that in time he was sure of getting a shot at the dog.
Again it was the man who was reasoning, and again it was the man who was defeated. The first day that McTaggart followed his new trail Baree also struck that trail. For a little while it puzzled him. Three times he cut back and forth between the old and the new trail. Then there was no doubt. The new trail was the FRESH trail, and he followed in the footsteps of the factor from Lac Bain. McTaggart did not know what was happening until his return trip, when he saw the story told in the snow. Baree had visited each trap, and without exception he had approached each time at the point of the inverted V. After a week of futile hunting, of lying in wait, of approaching at every point of the wind–a period during which McTaggart had twenty times cursed himself into fits of madness, another idea came to him. It was like an inspiration, and so simple that it seemed almost inconceivable that he had not thought of it before.
He hurried back to Post Lac Bain.
The second day after he was on the trail at dawn. This time he carried a pack in which there were a dozen strong wolf traps freshly dipped in beaver oil, and a rabbit which he had snared the previous night. Now and then he looked anxiously at the sky. It was clear until late in the afternoon, when banks of dark clouds began rolling up from the east. Half an hour later a few flakes of snow began falling. McTaggart let one of these drop on the back of his mittened hand, and examined it closely. It was soft and downy, and he gave vent to his satisfaction. It was what he wanted. Before morning there would be six inches of freshly fallen snow covering the trails.
He stopped at the next trap house and quickly set to work. First he threw away the poisoned bait in the “house” and replaced it with the rabbit. Then he began setting his wolf traps. Three of these he placed close to the “door” of the house, through which Baree would have to reach for the bait. The remaining nine he scattered at intervals of a foot or sixteen inches apart, so that when he was done a veritable cordon of traps guarded the house. He did not fasten the chains, but let them lay loose in the snow. If Baree got into one trap he would get into others and there would be no use of toggles. His work done, McTaggart hurried on through the thickening twilight of winter night to his shack. He was highly elated. This time there could be no such thing as failure. He had sprung every trap on his way from Lac Bain. In none of those traps would Baree find anything to eat until he came to the “nest” of twelve wolf traps.
Seven inches of snow fell that night, and the whole world seemed turned into a wonderful white robe. Like billows of feathers the snow clung to the trees and shrubs. It gave tall white caps to the rocks, and underfoot it was so light that a cartridge dropped from the hand sank out of sight. Baree was on the trap line early. He was more cautious this morning, for there was no longer the scent or snowshoe track of McTaggart to guide him. He struck the first trap about halfway between Lac Bain and the shack in which the factor was waiting. It was sprung, and there was no bait. Trap after trap he visited, and all of them he found sprung, and all without bait. He sniffed the air suspiciously, striving vainly to catch the tang of smoke, a whiff of the man smell.
Along toward noon he came to the “nest”–the twelve treacherous traps waiting for him with gaping jaws half a foot under the blanket of snow. For a full minute he stood well outside the danger line, sniffing the air, and listening. He saw the rabbit, and his jaws closed with a hungry click. He moved a step nearer. Still he was suspicious–for some strange and inexplicable reason he sensed danger. Anxiously he sought for it with his nose, his eyes, and his ears. And all about him there was a great silence and a great peace. His jaws clicked again. He whined softly. What was it stirring him? Where was the danger he could neither see nor smell? Slowly he circled about the trap house. Three times he circled round it, each circle drawing him a little nearer–until at last his feet almost touched the outer cordon of traps. Another minute he stood still; his ears flattened; in spite of the rich aroma of the rabbit in his nostrils SOMETHING WAS DRAWING HIM AWAY. In another moment he would have gone, but there came suddenly–and from directly behind the trap house–a fierce little ratlike squeak, and the next instant Baree saw an ermine whiter than the snow tearing hungrily at the flesh of the rabbit. He forgot his strange premonition of danger. He growled fiercely, but his plucky little rival did not budge from his feast. And then he sprang straight into the “nest” that Bush McTaggart had made for him.
CHAPTER 27
The next morning Bush McTaggart heard the clanking of a chain when he was still a good quarter of a mile from the “nest.” Was it a lynx? Was it a fishercat? Was it a wolf or a fox? OR WAS IT BAREE? He half ran the rest of the distance, and it last he came to where he could see, and his heart leaped into his throat when he saw that he had caught his enemy. He approached, holding his rifle ready to fire if by any chance the dog should free himself.
Baree lay on his side, panting from exhaustion and quivering with pain. A hoarse cry of exultation burst from McTaggart’s lips as he drew nearer and looked at the snow. It was packed hard for many feet about the trap house, where Baree had struggled, and it was red with blood. The blood had come mostly from Baree’s jaws. They were dripping now as he glared at his enemy. The steel jaws hidden under the snow had done their merciless work well. One of his forefeet was caught well up toward the first joint; both hind feet were caught. A fourth trap had closed on his flank, and in tearing the jaws loose he had pulled off a patch of skin half as big as McTaggart’s hand. The snow told the story of his desperate fight all through the night. His bleeding jaws showed how vainly he had tried to break the imprisoning steel with his teeth. He was panting. His eyes were bloodshot.
But even now, after all his hours of agony, neither his spirit nor his courage was broken. When he saw McTaggart he made a lunge to his feet, almost instantly crumpling down into the snow again. But his forefeet were braced. His head and chest remained up, and the snarl that came from his throat was tigerish in its ferocity. Here, at last–not more than a dozen feet from him–was the one thing in all the world that he hated more than he hated the wolf breed. And again he was helpless, as he had been helpless that other time in the rabbit snare.
The fierceness of his snarl did not disturb Bush McTaggart now. He saw how utterly the other was at his mercy, and with an exultant laugh he leaned his rifle against a tree, pulled oft his mittens, and began loading his pipe. This was the triumph he had looked forward to, the torture he had waited for. In his soul there was a hatred as deadly as Baree’s, the hatred that a man might have for a man. He had expected to send a bullet through the dog. But this was better–to watch him dying by inches, to taunt him as he would have taunted a human, to walk about him so that he could hear the clank of the traps and see the fresh blood drip as Baree twisted his tortured legs and body to keep facing him. It was a splendid vengeance. He was so engrossed in it that he did not hear the approach of snowshoes behind him. It was a voice–a man’s voice–that turned him round in his tracks.
The man was a stranger, and he was younger than McTaggart by ten years. At least he looked no more than thirty-five or six, even with the short growth of blond beard he wore. He was of that sort that the average man would like at first glance; boyish, and yet a man; with clear eyes that looked out frankly from under the rim of his fur cap, a form lithe as an Indian’s, and a face that did not bear the hard lines of the wilderness. Yet McTaggart knew before he had spoken that this man was of the wilderness, that he was heart and soul a part of it. His cap was of fisher skin. He wore a windproof coat of softly tanned caribou skin, belted at the waist with a long sash, and Indian fringed. The inside of the coat was furred. He was traveling on the long, slender bush country snowshoe. His pack, strapped over the shoulders, was small and compact; he was carrying his rifle in a cloth jacket. And from cap to snowshoes he was TRAVEL WORN. McTaggart, at a guess, would have said that he had traveled a thousand miles in the last few weeks. It was not this thought that sent the strange and chilling thrill up his back; but the sudden fear that in some strange way a whisper of the truth might have found its way down into the south–the truth of what had happened on the Gray Loon–and that this travel-worn stranger wore under his caribou-skin coat the badge of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police. For that instant it was almost a terror that possessed him, and he stood mute.
The stranger had uttered only an amazed exclamation before. Now he said, with his eyes on Baree:
“God save us, but you’ve got the poor devil in a right proper mess, haven’t you?”
There was something in the voice that reassured McTaggart. It was not a suspicious voice, and he saw that the stranger was more interested in the captured animal than in himself. He drew a deep breath.
“A trap robber,” he said.
The stranger was staring still more closely at Baree. He thrust his gun stock downward in the snow and drew nearer to him.
“God save us again–a dog!” he exclaimed.
From behind, McTaggart was watching the man with the eyes of a ferret.
“Yes, a dog,” he answered. “A wild dog, half wolf at least. He’s robbed me of a thousand dollars’ worth of fur this winter.”
The stranger squatted himself before Baree, with his mittened hands resting on his knees, and his white teeth gleaming in a half smile.
“You poor devil!” he said sympathetically. “So you’re a trap robber, eh? An outlaw? And–the police have got you! And–God save us once more–they haven’t played you a very square game!”
He rose and faced McTaggart.
“I had to set a lot of traps like that,” the factor apologized, his face reddening slightly under the steady gaze of the stranger’s blue eyes. Suddenly his animus rose. “And he’s going to die there, inch by inch. I’m going to let him starve, and rot in the traps, to pay for all he’s done.” He picked up his gun, and added, with his eyes on the stranger and his finger ready at the trigger, “I’m Bush McTaggart, the factor at Lac Bain. Are you bound that way, M’sieu?”
“A few miles. I’m bound upcountry–beyond the Barrens.”
McTaggart felt again the strange thrill.
“Government?’ he asked.
The stranger nodded.
“The–police, perhaps,” persisted McTaggart.
“Why, yes–of course–the police,” said the stranger, looking straight into the factor’s eyes. “And now, m’sieu, as a very great courtesy to the Law I’m going to ask you to send a bullet through that beast’s head before we go on. Will you? Or shall I?”
“It’s the law of the line,” said McTaggart, “to let a trap robber rot in the traps. And that beast was a devil. Listen–“
Swiftly, and yet leaving out none of the fine detail, he told of the weeks and months of strife between himself and Baree; of the maddening futility of all his tricks and schemes and the still more maddening cleverness of the beast he had at last succeeded in trapping.
“He was a devil–that clever,” he cried fiercely when he had finished. “And now–would you shoot him, or let him lie there and die by inches, as the devil should?”
The stranger was looking at Baree. His face was turned away from McTaggart. He said:
“I guess you are right. Let the devil rot. If you’re heading for Lac Bain, m’sieu, I’ll travel a short distance with you now. It will take a couple of miles to straighten out the line of my compass.”
He picked up his gun. McTaggart led the way. At the end of half an hour the stranger stopped, and pointed north.
“Straight up there–a good five hundred miles,” he said, speaking as lightly as though he would reach home that night. “I’ll leave you here.”
He made no offer to shake hands. But in going, he said:
“You might report that John Madison has passed this way.”
After that he traveled straight northward for half a mile through the deep forest. Then he swung westward for two miles, turned at a sharp angle into the south, and an hour after he had left McTaggart he was once more squatted on his heels almost within arms’ reach of Baree.
And he was saying, as though speaking to a human companion:
“So that’s what you’ve been, old boy. A trap robber, eh? An OUTLAW? And you beat him at the game for two months! And for that, because you’re a better beast than he is, he wants to let you die here as slow as you can. An OUTLAW!” His voice broke into a pleasant laugh, the sort of laugh that warms one, even a beast. “That’s funny. We ought to shake hands, Boy, by George, we had! You’re a wild one, he says. Well, so am I. Told him my name was John Madison. It ain’t. I’m Jim Carvel. And, oh Lord!–all I said was ‘police.’ And that was right. It ain’t a lie. I’m wanted by the whole corporation–by every danged policeman between Hudson’s Bay and the Mackenzie River. Shake, old man. We’re in the same boat, an’ I’m glad to meet you!”
CHAPTER 28
Jim Carvel held out his hand, and the snarl that was in Baree’s throat died away. The man rose to his feet. He stood there, looking in the direction taken by Bush McTaggart, and chuckled in a curious, exultant sort of way.
There was friendliness even in that chuckle. There was friendliness in his eyes and in the shine of his teeth as he looked again at Baree. About him there was something that seemed to make the gray day brighter, that seemed to warm the chill air–a strange something that radiated cheer and hope and comradeship just as a hot stove sends out the glow of heat. Baree felt it. For the first time since the two men had come his trap-torn body lost its tenseness; his back sagged; his teeth clicked as he shivered in his agony. To THIS man he betrayed his weakness. In his bloodshot eyes there was a hungering look as he watched Carvel–the self-confessed outlaw. And Jim Carvel again held out his hand–much nearer this time.
“You poor devil,” he said, the smile going out of his face. “You poor devil!”
The words were like a caress to Baree–the first he had known since the loss of Nepeese and Pierrot. He dropped his head until his jaw lay flat in the snow. Carvel could see the blood dripping slowly from it.
“You poor devil!” he repeated.
There was no fear in the way he put forth his hand. It was the confidence of a great sincerity and a great compassion. It touched Baree’s head and patted it in a brotherly fashion, and then–slowly and with a bit more caution–it went to the trap fastened to Baree’s forepaw. In his half-crazed brain Baree was fighting to understand things, and the truth came finally when he felt the steel jaws of the trap open, and he drew forth his maimed foot. He did then what he had done to no other creature but Nepeese. Just once his hot tongue shot out and licked Carvel’s hand. The man laughed. With his powerful hands he opened the other traps, and Baree was free.
For a few moments he lay without moving, his eyes fixed on the man. Carvel had seated himself on the snow-covered end of a birch log and was filling his pipe. Baree watched him light it; he noted with new interest the first purplish cloud of smoke that left Carvel’s mouth. The man was not more than the length of two trap chains away–and he grinned at Baree.
“Screw up your nerve, old chap,” he encouraged. “No bones broke. Just a little stiff. Mebby we’d better–get out.”
He turned his face in the direction of Lac Bain. The suspicion was in his mind that McTaggart might turn back. Perhaps that same suspicion was impressed upon Baree, for when Carvel looked at him again he was on his feet, staggering a bit as he gained his equilibrium. In another moment the outlaw had swung the packsack from his shoulders and was opening it. He thrust in his hand and drew out a chunk of raw, red meat.
“Killed it this morning,” he explained to Baree. “Yearling bull, tender as partridge–and that’s as fine a sweetbread as ever came out from under a backbone. Try it!”
He tossed the flesh to Baree. There was no equivocation in the manner of its acceptance. Baree was famished–and the meat was flung to him by a friend. He buried his teeth in it. His jaws crunched it. New fire leapt into his blood as he feasted, but not for an instant did his reddened eyes leave the other’s face. Carvel replaced his pack. He rose to his feet, took up his rifle, slipped on his snowshoes, and fronted the north.
“Come on. Boy,” he said. “We’ve got to travel.”
It was a matter-of-fact invitation, as though the two had been traveling companions for a long time. It was, perhaps, not only an invitation but partly a command. It puzzled Baree. For a full half-minute he stood motionless in his tracks gazing at Carvel as he strode into the north. A sudden convulsive twitching shot through Baree. He swung his head toward Lac Bain; he looked again at Carvel, and a whine that was scarcely more than a breath came out of his throat. The man was just about to disappear into the thick spruce. He paused, and looked back.
“Coming, Boy?”
Even at that distance Baree could see him grinning affably. He saw the outstretched hand, and the voice stirred new sensations in him. It was not like Pierrot’s voice. He had never loved Pierrot. Neither was it soft and sweet like the Willow’s. He had known only a few men, and all of them he had regarded with distrust. But this was a voice that disarmed him. It was lureful in its appeal. He wanted to answer it. He was filled with a desire, all at once, to follow close at the heels of this stranger. For the first time in his life a craving for the friendship of man possessed him. He did not move until Jim Carvel entered the spruce. Then he followed.
That night they were camped in a dense growth of cedars and balsams ten miles north of Bush McTaggart’s trap line. For two hours it had snowed, and their trail was covered. It was still snowing, but not a flake of the white deluge sifted down through the thick canopy of boughs. Carvel had put up his small silk tent, and had built a fire. Their supper was over, and Baree lay on his belly facing the outlaw, almost within reach of his hand. With his back to a tree Carvel was smoking luxuriously. He had thrown off his cap and his coat, and in the warm fireglow he looked almost boyishly young. But even in that glow his jaws lost none of their squareness, nor his eyes their clear alertness.
“Seems good to have someone to talk to,” he was saying to Baree. “Someone who can understand, an’ keep his mouth shut. Did you ever want to howl, an’ didn’t dare? Well, that’s me. Sometimes I’ve been on the point of bustin’ because I wanted to talk to someone, an’ couldn’t.”
He rubbed his hands together, and held them out toward the fire. Baree watched his movements and listened intently to every sound that escaped his lips. His eyes had in them now a dumb sort of worship, a look that warmed Carvel’s heart and did away with the vast loneliness and emptiness of the night. Baree had dragged himself nearer to the man’s feet, and suddenly Carvel leaned over and patted his head.
“I’m a bad one, old chap,” he chuckled. “You haven’t got it on me–not a bit. Want to know what happened?” He waited a moment, and Baree looked at him steadily. Then Carvel went on, as if speaking to a human, “Let’s see–it was five years ago, five years this December, just before Christmas time. Had a Dad. Fine old chap, my dad was. No Mother–just the Dad, an’ when you added us up we made just One. Understand? And along came a white-striped skunk named Hardy and shot him one day because Dad had worked against him in politics. Out an’ out murder. An’ they didn’t hang that skunk! No, sir, they didn’t hang him. He had too much money, an’ too many friends in politics, an’ they let ‘im off with two years in the penitentiary. But he didn’t get there. No–s’elp me God, he didn’t get there!”
Carvel was twisting his hands until his knuckles cracked. An exultant smile lighted up his face, and his eyes flashed back the firelight. Baree drew a deep breath–a mere coincidence; but it was a tense moment for all that.
“No, he didn’t get to the penitentiary,” went on Carvel, looking straight at Baree again. “Yours truly knew what that meant, old chap. He’d have been pardoned inside a year. An’ there was my dad, the biggest half of me, in his grave. So I just went up to that white-striped skunk right there before the judge’s eyes, an’ the lawyers’ eyes, an’ the eyes of all his dear relatives an’ friends–AND I KILLED HIM! And I got away. Was out through a window before they woke up, hit for the bush country, and have been eating up the trails ever since. An’ I guess God was with me, Boy. For He did a queer thing to help me out summer before last, just when the Mounties were after me hardest an’ it looked pretty black. Man was found drowned down in the Reindeer Country, right where they thought I was cornered. An’ the good Lord made that man look so much like me that he was buried under my name. So I’m officially dead, old chap. I don’t need to be afraid any more so long as I don’t get too familiar with people for a year or so longer, and ‘way down inside me I’ve liked to believe God fixed it up in that way to help me out of a bad hole. What’s YOUR opinion? Eh?”
He leaned forward for an answer. Baree had listened. Perhaps, in a way, he had understood. But it was another sound than Carvel’s voice that came to his ears now. With his head close to the ground he heard it quite distinctly. He whined, and the whine ended in a snarl so low that Carvel just caught the warning note in it. He straightened. He stood up then, and faced the south. Baree stood beside him, his legs tense and his spine bristling.
After a moment Carvel said:
“Relatives of yours, old chap. Wolves.”
He went into the tent for his rifle and cartridges.
CHAPTER 29
Baree was on his feet, rigid as hewn rock, when Carvel came out of the tent, and for a few moments Carvel stood in silence, watching him closely. Would the dog respond to the call of the pack? Did he belong to them? Would he go–now? The wolves were drawing nearer. They were not circling, as a caribou or a deer would have circled, but were traveling straight–dead straight for their camp. The significance of this fact was easily understood by Carvel. All that afternoon Baree’s feet had left a blood smell in their trail, and the wolves had struck the trail in the deep forest, where the falling snow had not covered it. Carvel was not alarmed. More than once in his five years of wandering between the Arctic and the Height of Land he had played the game with the wolves. Once he had almost lost, but that was out in the open Barren. Tonight he had a fire, and in the event of his firewood running out he had trees he could climb. His anxiety just now was centered in Baree. So he said, making his voice quite casual:
“You aren’t going, are you, old chap?”
If Baree heard him he gave no evidence of it. But Carvel, still watching him closely, saw that the hair along his spine had risen like a brush, and then he heard–growing slowly in Baree’s throat–a snarl of ferocious hatred. It was the sort of snarl that had held back the factor from Lac Bain, and Carvel, opening the breech of his gun to see that all was right, chuckled happily. Baree may have heard the chuckle. Perhaps it meant something to him, for he turned his head suddenly and with flattened ears looked at his companion.
The wolves were silent now. Carvel knew what that meant, and he was tensely alert. In the stillness the click of the safety on his rifle sounded with metallic sharpness. For many minutes they heard nothing but the crack of the fire. Suddenly Baree’s muscles seemed to snap. He sprang back, and faced the quarter behind Carvel, his head level with his shoulders, his inch-long fangs gleaming as he snarled into the black caverns of the forest beyond the rim of firelight. Carvel had turned like a shot. It was almost frightening–what he saw. A pair of eyes burning with greenish fire, and then another pair, and after that so many of them that he could not have counted them. He gave a sadden gasp. They were like cat eyes, only much larger. Some of them, catching the firelight fully, were red as coals, others flashed blue and green–living things without bodies. With a swift glance he took in the black circle of the forest. They were out there, too; they were on all sides of them, but where he had seen them first they were thickest. In these first few seconds he had forgotten Baree, awed almost to stupefaction by that monster-eyed cordon of death that hemmed them in. There were fifty–perhaps a hundred wolves out there, afraid of nothing in all this savage world but fire. They had come up without the sound of a padded foot or a broken twig. If it had been later, and they had been asleep, and the fire out–
He shuddered, and for a moment the thought got the better of his nerves. He had not intended to shoot except from necessity, but all at once his rifle came to his shoulder and he sent a stream of fire out where the eyes were thickest. Baree knew what the shots meant, and filled with the mad desire to get at the throat of one of his enemies he dashed in their direction. Carvel gave a startled yell as he went. He saw the flash of Baree’s body, saw it swallowed up in the gloom, and in that same instant heard the deadly clash of fangs and the impact of bodies. A wild thrill shot through him. The dog had charged alone–and the wolves had waited. There could be but one end. His four-footed comrade had gone straight into the jaws of death!
He could hear the ravening snap of those jaws out in the darkness. It was sickening. His hand went to the Colt .45 at his belt, and he thrust his empty rifle butt downward into the snow. With the big automatic before his eyes he plunged out into the darkness, and from his lips there issued a wild yelling that could have been heard a mile away. With the yelling a steady stream of fire spat from the Colt into the mass of fighting beasts. There were eight shots in the automatic, and not until the plunger clicked with metallic emptiness did Carvel cease his yelling and retreat into the firelight. He listened, breathing deeply. He no longer saw eyes in the darkness, nor did he hear the movement of bodies. The suddenness and ferocity of his attack had driven back the wolf horde. But the dog! He caught his breath, and strained his eyes. A shadow was dragging itself into the circle of light. It was Baree. Carvel ran to him, put his arms under his shoulders, and brought him to the fire.
For a long time after that there was a questioning light in Carvel’s eyes. He reloaded his guns, put fresh fuel on the fire, and from his pack dug out strips of cloth with which he bandaged three or four of the deepest cuts in Baree’s legs. And a dozen times he asked, in a wondering sort of way,
“Now what the deuce made you do that, old chap? What have YOU got against the wolves?”
All that night he did not sleep, but watched.
Their experience with the wolves broke down the last bit of uncertainty that might have existed between the man and the dog. For days after that, as they traveled slowly north and west, Carvel nursed Baree as he might have cared for a sick child. Because of the dog’s hurts, he made only a few miles a day. Baree understood, and in him there grew stronger and stronger a great love for the man whose hands were as gentle as the Willow’s and whose voice warmed him with the thrill of an immeasurable comradeship. He no longer feared him or had a suspicion of him. And Carvel, on his part, was observing things. The vast emptiness of the world about them, and their aloneness, gave him the opportunity of pondering over unimportant details, and he found himself each day watching Baree a little more closely. He made at last a discovery which interested him deeply. Always, when they halted on the trail, Baree would turn his face to the south. When they were in camp it was from the south that he nosed the wind most frequently. This was quite natural, Carvel thought, for his old hunting grounds were back there. But as the days passed he began to notice other things. Now and then, looking off into the far country from which they had come, Baree would whine softly, and on that day he would be filled with a great restlessness. He gave no evidence of wanting to leave Carvel, but more and more Carvel came to understand that some mysterious call was coming to him from out of the south.
It was the wanderer’s intention to swing over into the country of the Great Slave, a good eight hundred miles to the north and west, before the mush snows came. From there, when the waters opened in springtime, he planned to travel by canoe westward to the Mackenzie and ultimately to the mountains of British Columbia. These plans were changed in