The next morning Challoner's outfit of three teams and four men left
north and west for the Reindeer Lake country on the journey to his new
post at the mouth of the Cochrane. An hour later Challoner struck due
west with a light sledge and a five-dog team for the Jackson's Knee.
Behind him followed one of MacDonnell's Indians with the team that was
to bring Nanette to Fort O' God.
He saw nothing more of Durant and Grouse Piet, and accepted
MacDonnell's explanation that they had undoubtedly left the Post
shortly after their assault upon him in the cabin. No doubt their
disappearance had been hastened by the fact that a patrol of the Royal
Northwest Mounted Police on its way to York Factory was expected at
Fort O' God that day.
Not until the final moment of departure was Miki brought from the cabin
and tied to the gee-bar of Challoner's sledge. When he saw the five
dogs squatted on their haunches he grew rigid and the old snarl rose in
his throat. Under Challoner's quieting words he quickly came to
understand that these beasts were not enemies, and from a rather
suspicious toleration of them he very soon began to take a new sort of
interest in them. It was a friendly team, bred in the south and without
the wolf strain.
Events had come to pass so swiftly and so vividly in Miki's life during
the past twenty-four hours that for many miles after they left Fort O'
God his senses were in an unsettled state of anticipation. His brain
was filled with a jumble of strange and thrilling pictures. Very far
away, and almost indistinct, were the pictures of things that had
happened before he was made a prisoner by Jacques Le Beau. Even the
memory of Neewa was fading under the thrill of events at Nanette's
cabin and at Fort O' God. The pictures that blazed their way across his
brain now were of men, and dogs, and many other things that he had
never seen before. His world had suddenly transformed itself into a
host of Henri Durants and Grouse Piets and Jacques Le Beaus, two-legged
beasts who had clubbed him, and half killed him, and who had made him
fight to keep the life in his body. He had tasted their blood in his
vengeance. And he watched for them now. The pictures told him they were
everywhere. He could imagine them as countless as the wolves, and as he
had seen them crowded round the big cage in which he had slain the
wolf-dog.
In all of this excited and distorted world there was only one
Challoner, and one Nanette, and one baby. All else was a chaos of
uncertainty and of dark menace. Twice when the Indian came up close
behind them Miki whirled about with a savage snarl. Challoner watched
him, and understood.
Of the pictures in his brain one stood out above all others, definite
and unclouded, and that was the picture of Nanette. Yes, even above
Challoner himself. There lived in him the consciousness of her gentle
hands; her sweet, soft voice; the perfume of her hair and clothes and
body--the WOMAN of her; and a part of the woman--as the hand is a part
of the body--was the baby. It was this part of Miki that Challoner
could not understand, and which puzzled him when they made camp that
night. He sat for a long time beside the fire trying to bring back the
old comradeship of the days of Miki's puppyhood. But he only partly
succeeded. Miki was restive. Every nerve in his body seemed on edge.
Again and again he faced the west, and always when he sniffed the air
in that direction there came a low whine in his throat.
That night, with doubt in his heart, Challoner fastened him near the
tent with a tough rope of babiche.
For a long time after Challoner had gone to bed Miki sat on his
haunches close to the spruce to which he was fastened. It must have
been ten o'clock, and the night was so still that the snap of a dying
ember in the fire was like the crack of a whip to his ears. Miki's eyes
were wide open and alert. Near the slowly burning logs, wrapped in his
thick blankets, he could make out the motionless form of the Indian,
asleep. Back of him the sledge-dogs had wallowed their beds in the snow
and were silent. The moon was almost straight overhead, and a mile or
two away a wolf pointed his muzzle to the radiant glow of it and
howled. The sound, like a distant calling voice, added new fire to the
growing thrill in Miki's blood. He turned in the direction of the
wailing voice. He wanted to call back. He wanted to throw up his head
and cry out to the forests, and the moon, and the starlit sky. But only
his jaws clicked, and he looked at the tent in which Challoner was
sleeping. He dropped down upon his belly in the snow. But his head was
still alert and listening. The moon had already begun its westward
decline. The fire burned out until the logs were only a dull and
slumbering glow; the hand of Challoner's watch passed midnight, and
still Miki was wide-eyed and restless in the thrill of the thing that
was upon him. And then at last The Call that was coming to him from out
of the night became his master, and he gnawed the babiche in two. It
was the call of the Woman--of Nanette and the baby.
In his freedom Miki sniffed at the edge of Challoner's tent. His back
sagged. His tail drooped. He knew that in this hour he was betraying
the master for whom he had waited so long, and who had lived so vividly
in his dreams. It was not reasoning, but an instinctive oppression of
fact. He would come back. That conviction burned dully in his brain.
But now--to-night--he must go. He slunk off into the darkness. With the
stealth of a fox he made his way between the sleeping dogs. Not until
he was a quarter of a mile from the camp did he straighten out, and
then a gray and fleeting shadow he sped westward under the light of the
moon.
There was no hesitation in the manner of his going. Free of the pain of
his wounds, strong-limbed, deep-lunged as the strongest wolf of the
forests, he went on tirelessly. Rabbits bobbing out of his path did not
make him pause; even the strong scent of a fisher-cat almost under his
nose did not swerve him a foot from his trail. Through swamp and deep
forest, over lake and stream, across open barren and charred burns his
unerring sense of orientation led him on. Once he stopped to drink
where the swift current of a creek kept the water open. Even then he
gulped in haste--and shot on. The moon drifted lower and lower until it
sank into oblivion. The stars began to fade away The little ones went
out, and the big ones grew sleepy and dull. A great snow-ghostly gloom
settled over the forest world.
In the six hours between midnight and dawn he covered thirty-five miles.
And then he stopped. Dropping on his belly beside a rock at the crest
of a ridge he watched the birth of day. With drooling jaws and panting
breath he rested, until at last the dull gold of the winter sun began
to paint the eastern sky. And then came the first bars of vivid
sunlight, shooting over the eastern ramparts as guns flash from behind
their battlements, and Miki rose to his feet and surveyed the morning
wonder of his world. Behind him was Fort O' God, fifty miles away;
ahead of him the cabin--twenty. It was the cabin he faced as he went
down from the ridge.
As the miles between him and the cabin grew fewer and fewer he felt
again something of the oppression that had borne upon him at
Challoner's tent. And yet it was different. He had run his race. He had
answered The Call. And now, at the end, he was seized by a fear of what
his welcome would be. For at the cabin he had killed a man--and the man
had belonged to the woman. His progress became more hesitating.
Mid-forenoon found him only half a mile from the home of Nanette and
the baby. His keen nostrils caught the faint tang of smoke in the air.
He did not follow it up, but circled like a wolf, coming up stealthily
and uncertainly until at last he looked out into the little clearing
where a new world had come into existence for him. He saw the sapling
cage in which Jacques Le Beau had kept him a prisoner; the door of that
cage was still open, as Durant had left it after stealing him; he saw
the ploughed-up snow where he had leapt upon the man-brute--and he
whined.
He was facing the cabin door--and the door was wide open. He could see
no life, but he could SMELL it. And smoke was rising from the chimney.
He slunk across the open. In the manner of his going there was an
abject humiliation--a plea for mercy if he had done wrong, a prayer to
the creatures he worshipped that he might not be driven away.
He came to the door, and peered in. The room was empty. Nanette was not
there. Then his ears shot forward and his body grew suddenly tense, and
he listened, listened, LISTENED to a soft, cooing sound that was coming
from the crib. He swallowed hard; the faintest whine rose in his throat
and his claws CLICKED, CLICKED, CLICKED, across the floor and he thrust
his great head over the side of the little bed. The baby was there.
With his warm tongue he kissed it--just once--and then, with another
deep breath, lay down on the floor.
He heard footsteps. Nanette came in with her arms filled with blankets;
she carried these into the smaller room, and returned, before she saw
him. For a moment she stared. Then, with a strange little cry, she ran
to him; and once more he felt her arms about him; and he cried like a
puppy with his muzzle against her breast, and Nanette laughed and
sobbed, and in the crib the baby kicked and squealed and thrust her
tiny moccasined feet up into the air.
"Ao-oo tap-wa-mukun" ("When the devil goes heaven comes in,") say the
Crees. And with the death of Le Beau, her husband, the devil had gone
out of life for Nanette. She was more beautiful than ever. Heaven was
in the dark, pure glow of her eyes. She was no longer like a dog under
the club and the whip of a brute, and in the re-birth of her soul she
was glorious. Youth had come back to her--freed from the yoke of
oppression. She was happy. Happy with her baby, with freedom, with the
sun and the stars shining for her again; and with new hope, the
greatest star of all. Again on the night of that first day of his
return Miki crept up to her when she was brushing her glorious hair. He
loved to put his muzzle in it; he loved the sweet scent of it; he loved
to put his head on her knees and feel it smothering him. And Nanette
hugged him tight, even as she hugged the baby, for it was Miki who had
brought her freedom, and hope, and life. What had passed was no longer
a tragedy. It was justice. God had sent Miki to do for her what a
father or a brother would have done.
And the second night after that, when Challoner came early in the
darkness, it happened that Nanette had her hair down in that same way;
and Challoner, seeing her thus, with the lampglow shining in her eyes,
felt that the world had taken a sudden swift turn under his feet--that
through all his years he had been working forward to this hour.