The Honor of the Big Snows Part 4

There was no recurrence of the strange excitement in Jan. He gave no hint of it in word or action, and the thing seemed to be forgotten between the two.

The education of the little Melisse began at once, while the post was still deserted. It began, first of all, with Maballa. She stared dumbly and with shattered faith at these two creatures who told her of wonderful things in the upbringing of a child--things of which she had never so much as heard rumor before. Her mother instincts were aroused, but with Cree stoicism she made no betrayal of them.

The leather-tanned immobility of her face underwent no whit of change when c.u.mmins solemnly declared that the little Melisse was about to begin teething. She sat grimly and watched them in silence when between them, upon a bearskin stretched on the floor, they tried vainly to persuade Melisse to use her feet.

It was great fun for Melisse, and she enjoyed it immensely; so that as the days pa.s.sed, and the post still remained deserted, John c.u.mmins and Jan Th.o.r.eau spent much of their time upon their knees. In their eyes, the child's progress was remarkable. They saw in her an unceasing physical growth, and countless symptoms of forthcoming mental development. She delighted to pull the strings of Jan's violin, which was an unmistakable token of her musical genius. She went into ecstasies over the gaudy plates in the fas.h.i.+on paper. She fingered them in suggestive and inquiring silence, or with still more suggestive grunts, and made futile efforts to eat them, which was the greatest token of all.

Weeks pa.s.sed, and Williams came in from the southern forests. Mukee followed him from the edge of the barrens. Per-ee returned from the Eskimo people, three-quarters starved and with half of his dogs stolen.

From the north, east, west, and south the post's fur-rangers trailed back. Life was resumed. There was a softness in the air, a growing warmth in the midday sun. The days of the big change were near. And when they came, John c.u.mmins and Jan Th.o.r.eau, of all the factor's people, wore patches at their knee.

CHAPTER VI

DAYS OF TRIUMPH

One afternoon, in the beginning of the mush-snow, a long team of rakish Malemutes, driven by an Athabasca French-Canadian, raced wildly into the clearing about the post. A series of yells, and the wild cracking of a thirty-foot caribou-gut whip, announced that the big change was at hand--that the wilderness was awakening, and life was drawing near.

The entire post rushed out to meet the new-comer--men and dogs, the little black-and-tan children, and even Williams' fat and lethargic wife. For a few moments there was a scene of wild disorder, of fighting Malemutes buried under a rush of angry huskies, while men shouted, and the yelling Frenchman leaped about and cut his caribou-gut in vicious slashes over the wolfish horde around his heavily laden sledge.

Partial order being restored, Mukee and Per-ee took charge of the snarling Malemutes, and, surrounded by Williams' men, the trapper stalked to the company's office. He was Jean de Gravois, the most important man in the Fond du Lac country, for whose good-will the company paid a small bonus. That he had made a record catch even the children knew by the size of the packs on his sledge and by the swagger in his walk.

Gravois was usually one of the last to appear at the annual gathering of the wilderness fur-gatherers. He was a big man in reputation, as he was small in stature. He was known as far west as the Peace River, and eastward to Fort Churchill. He loved to make his appearance at the post in a wild and picturesque rush when the rest of the forest rovers were there to look on, and to envy or admire. He was one of the few of his kind who had developed personal vanity along with unerring cunning in the ways of the wild. Everybody liked Gravois, for he had a big soul in him and was as fearless as a lynx; and he liked everybody, including himself.

He explained his early arrival by announcing in a nonchalant manner that after he had given his Malemutes a day's rest he was going on to Fort Churchill, to bring back a wife. He hinted, with a punctuating crack of his whip, that he would make a second visit, and a more interesting one, at just about the time when the trappers were there in force.

Jan Th.o.r.eau listened to him, hunching his shoulders a little at the other's manifest air of importance. In turn, the French-Canadian scrutinized Jan good-naturedly. Neither of them knew the part which Jean de Gravois was to play in Jan's life.

Every hour after the half-breed's arrival quickened the pulse of expectancy at the post. For six months it had been a small and solitary unit of life in the heart of a big desolation. The first snow had smothered it in a loneliness that was almost the loneliness of desertion. With that first snow began the harvest days of the people of the wilderness. Far and wide they were busy along their trap-lines, their lonely shacks hidden in the shelter of thick swamps, in deep chasms and dense forests. For six months the short days and the long nights had been days and nights of fur-gathering.

During those months the post was silent. It lived and breathed, but that was all. Its life, for Williams and the few people whom the company kept with him, was a life of waiting. Now the change was at hand. It was like the breath of spring to the awakening wilderness. The forest people were moving. Trap-lines were being broken, shacks abandoned, sledge-dogs put to harness. On the day that Jean de Gravois left for Hudson's Bay, the company's supplies came in from Fort Churchill--seven toboggans drawn by Eskimo dogs, laden with flour and cloth; fifty pounds of beads, ammunition, and a hundred other things to be exchanged for the furs that would soon be in London and Paris.

Fearfully Jan Th.o.r.eau ran out to meet the sledges. There were seven Indians and one white man. Jan thrust himself close to look at the white man. He wore two revolver-holsters and carried an automatic.

Unquestionably he was not a missionary, but an agent of the company well prepared to care for the company's treasure.

Jan hurried back to the cabin, his heart bubbling with a strange joy.

"There ees no missioner, Melisse!" he cried triumphantly, dropping beside her, his face glowing with the gladness of his tidings. "You shall be good and beautiful, lak HER, but you shall not be baptize by missioner! He has not come!"

A few minutes later c.u.mmins came in. One of his hands was torn and bleeding.

"Those Eskimo dogs are demons!" he growled. "If they knew how to stand on their legs, they'd eat our huskies alive! Will you help me with this?"

Jan was at work in an instant, bandaging the wounded hand.

"It ees not deep," he said; and then, without looking up, he added: "The missioner did not come."

"No," said c.u.mmins shortly. "Neither has the mail. He is with that."

He did not notice the sudden tremble of Jan's fingers, nor did he see the startled look that shot into the boy's down-turned eyes. Jan finished his bandaging without betraying his emotion, and went back with c.u.mmins to the company's store.

The next morning, two Chippewayans trailed in with a team of mongrel curs from the south. Thereafter c.u.mmins found but little time to devote to Melisse. The snow was softening rapidly, and the daily increasing warmth of the sun hastened the movement of the trappers. Mukee's people from the western Barren Lands arrived first, bringing with them great loads of musk-ox and caribou skins, and an army of big-footed, long-legged Mackenzie hounds that pulled like horses and wailed like whipped puppies when the huskies and Eskimo dogs set upon them.

From east and west and south all trails now led to the post. By the end of the third day after the arrival of the company's supplies, a babel of fighting, yelling, ceaselessly moving discord had driven forth the peace and quiet in which c.u.mmins' wife had died. The fighting and discord were among the dogs, and the yelling was a necessary human accompaniment. Half a hundred packs, almost as wild and as savage as the wolves from whom half of them possessed a strong inheritance of blood, were thrown suddenly into warring confusion.

All the dogs were fighters except the big, soft-throated Mackenzie hounds, with the slow strength of oxen in their movements, and the quarter-strained and half-strained mongrels from the south; and upon these unfortunates the others preyed. Packs of fierce Labrador dogs, never vanquished except by death, came from close to Hudson's Bay. Team after team of the little yellow and gray Eskimo dogs, as quick with their fangs as were their black and swift-running masters with their hands and feet, met the much larger and darker-colored Malemutes from the Athabasca. Enemies of all these, fighting, snapping, and snarling, with the l.u.s.t of killing deep born in them from their wolf progenitors, packs of fierce huskies trailed in from all sides.

There was no cessation in the battle of the fangs. It began with the first brute arrivals. It continued from dawn through the day, and around the campfires at night. There was never an end to the strife between the dogs, and between the men and the dogs. The snow was stained and trailed with blood, and the scent of it added greater fierceness to the wolf-breeds. Half a dozen battles were fought to the death each day and night. Those that died were chiefly the south-bred curs--mixtures of mastiff, Great Dane, and sheep-dogs--and the fatally slow Mackenzie hounds.

From its towering height the sentinel spruce frowned down upon the savage life that had come to outrage the grave it guarded. Yet beyond all this discord and b.l.o.o.d.y strife there was a great, throbbing human happiness--a beating of honest hearts filled to overflowing with the joys of the moment, a welding of new friends.h.i.+ps, a renewal of old ones, a closer union of the brotherhood that holds together all things under the cold gray of the northern skies.

There were no bickerings among the hunters, no anger of man against man in the fierce voices that emphasized the slas.h.i.+ng cuts of the caribou-whips. If the fangs of a Hudson's Bay husky let out the life-blood from the soft throat of a Mackenzie hound, it was a matter of the dogs, and not of their owners. They did not quarrel.

One day a fierce Eskimo pack cornered a giant husky under the big spruce, and slew him. When c.u.mmins came from the company's store in the afternoon, he saw a number of men, with bared heads, working about the grave. He drew near enough to see that they were building around it a barricade of saplings; and his breath choked him as he turned to the cabin and Melisse. He noticed, too, that no fires were built near the spot consecrated to the memory of the dead woman; and to his cabin the paths in the snow became deeper and wider where trod the wild forest men who came to look upon the little Melisse.

These were days of unprecedented prosperity and triumph for the baby, as they were for the company. The cabin was half filled with strange things, for all who came gave something to Melisse. There were polar bears' teeth, brought down by the little black men who in turn had got them from the coast people; strange G.o.ds carved from wood; bits of fur, bushy fox tails, lynx paws, dried fruits, candy bought at fabulous prices in the store, and musk--always and incessantly musk--from Mukee's people of the west barrens.

To Jan this homage to Melisse was more than gratifying. It formed a bond between him and c.u.mmins' people. His heart went out to them, and he went more freely among them, and made friends.

CHAPTER VII

THE CARIBOU CARNIVAL

Jan had not played upon his violin since the coming of Jean de Gravois; but one evening he tuned his strings, and said to Melisse:

"They have been good to you, my Melisse. I will give them ze museek of ze violon."

It was the big night at the post--the night that is known from Athabasca to Hudson's Bay as the night of the caribou roast. A week had pa.s.sed, and there were no more furs to be disposed of. In the company's ledger each man had received his credit, and in the company's store the furs were piled high and safe. Three caribou had been killed by Per-ee and his hunters; and on this night, when Jan took down his violin from its peg on the wall, a huge fire blazed in the open, and on spits six inches in diameter the caribou were roasting.

The air was filled with the sound and odor of the carnival. Above the fighting and snarling of dogs, the forest people lifted their voices in wild celebration, forgetting, in this one holiday of the year, the silence that they would carry back into the solitudes with them.

Numbers gave them courage of voice, and in its manifestation there was the savagery of the forests that hemmed them in. Shrill voices rose in meaningless cries above the roaring of the fire. Caribou whips snapped fiercely. Chippewayans, Crees, Eskimos, and breeds crowded in the red glare. The factor's men shouted and sang like mad, for this was the company's annual "good time"--the show that would lure many of these same men back again at the end of another trapping season.

Huge boxes of white bread were placed near to the fire. A tub of real b.u.t.ter, brought five thousand miles from across the sea for the occasion, was set on a gun-case thrown where the heat played upon it in yellow glory. In a giant copper kettle, over a smaller fire, bubbled and steamed half a barrel of coffee.

The richness of the odors that drifted in the air set the dogs gathering upon their haunches beyond the waiting circle of masters, their lips dripping, their fangs snapping in an eagerness that was not for the flesh of battle. And above it all there gleamed down a billion stars from out of the skies, the aurora flung its banners through the pale night, and softly the smoke rose straight up and then floated into the North, carried there by the gentle breath that spring was luring from out of the South.

Jan picked his way through the cordon of dogs and the inner circle of men until he stood with the firelight flas.h.i.+ng in his glossy hair and black eyes, and there, seated upon the edge of one of the bread-boxes, he began to play.

It was not the low, sweet music of c.u.mmins and the little Melisse that he played now, but a wild, wailing song that he had found in the autumn winds. It burst above the crackling fire and the tumult of man and dog in a weird and savage beauty that hushed all sound; and life about him became like life struck suddenly dead. With his head bowed Jan saw nothing--saw nothing of the wonder in the faces of the half-cringing little black men who were squatted in a group a dozen feet away, nothing of the staring amazement in the eyes that were looking upon this miracle he was performing. He knew only that about him there was a deep hush, and after a while his violin sang a lower song, and sweeter; and still softer it became, and more sweet, until he was playing that which he loved most of all--the music that had filled the little cabin when c.u.mmins' wife died.

As he continued to play there came an interruption to the silence--a low refrain that was almost like that of the moaning wind. It grew beyond the tense circle of men, until a song of infinite sadness rose from the throats of a hundred dogs in response to Jan Th.o.r.eau's violin.

To Jan, it was like the song of life. The unending loneliness and grief of it stirred him to the quick of his soul, and unconsciously his voice rose and fell softly with the wailing of the brute chorus. But to the others it was a thing that rose portentous above their understanding, a miracle of mystery that smote them with awe even as they surrendered themselves to the wonderful sweetness of the music.