Thanks to Al Haines, based on the
non-illustrated version, at
www.gutenberg.org/etext/4743
Thanks to Robert Rowe, Dianne Bean, Charles Franks and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
[Frontispiece: "We'll make it, Peter," she whispered.]
THE COUNTRY BEYOND
A ROMANCE OF THE WILDERNESS
BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
AUTHOR OF THE VALLEY OF SILENT MEN, THE FLAMING FOREST, ETC.
JTABLE 5 23 1
List of Illustrations
"We'll make it, Peter," she whispered. . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
"I've come to tell you things, Nada. I've been living a lie."
They hurried to the camp, the children racing ahead to tell the news.
"--a squaw named Yellow Bird sent word that you would be welcome."
_A glass of wine once lost a kingdom, a nail turned the tide of a mighty
battle, and a woman's smile once upon a time destroyed the homes of a
million people. Thus have trivial things played their potent parts in
the history of human lives; yet these things Peter did not know._
THE COUNTRY BEYOND
CHAPTER I
Not far from the rugged and storm-whipped north shore of Lake Superior,
and south of the Kaministiqua, yet not as far south as the Rainy River
waterway, there lay a paradise lost in the heart of a wilderness
world--and in that paradise "a little corner of hell."
That was what the girl had called it once upon a time, when sobbing out
the shame and the agony of it to herself. That was before Peter had
come to leaven the drab of her life. But the hell was still there.
One would not have guessed its existence, standing at the bald top of
Cragg's Ridge this wonderful thirtieth day of May. In the whiteness of
winter one could look off over a hundred square miles of freezing
forest and swamp and river country, with the gleam of ice-covered lakes
here and there, fringed by their black spruce and cedar and balsam--a
country of storm, of deep snows, and men and women whose blood ran red
with the thrill that the hardship and the never-ending adventure of the
wild.
But this was spring. And such a spring as had not come to the Canadian
north country in many years. Until three days ago there had been a
deluge of warm rains, and since then the sun had inundated the land
with the golden warmth of summer. The last chill was gone from the air,
and the last bit of frozen earth and muck from the deepest and blackest
swamps, North, south, east and west the wilderness world was a glory of
bursting life, of springtime mellowing into summer. Ridge upon ridge of
yellows and greens and blacks swept away into the unknown distances
like the billows of a vast sea; and between them lay the valleys and
swamps, the lakes and waterways, glad with the rippling song of running
waters, the sweet scents of early flowering time, and the joyous voice
of all mating creatures.
Just under Cragg's Ridge lay the paradise, a meadow-like sweep of plain
that reached down to the edge of Clearwater Lake, with clumps of
poplars and white birch and darker tapestries of spruce and balsams
dotting it like islets in a sea of verdant green. The flowers were two
weeks ahead of their time and the sweet perfumes of late June, instead
of May, rose up out of the plain, and already there was nesting in the
velvety splashes of timber.
In the edge of a clump of this timber, flat on his belly, lay Peter.
The love of adventure was in him, and today he had sallied forth on his
most desperate enterprise. For the first time he had gone alone to the
edge of Clearwater Lake, half a mile away; boldly he had trotted up and
down the white strip of beach where the girl's footprints still
remained in the sand, and defiantly he had yipped at the shimmering
vastness of the water, and at the white gulls circling near him in
quest of dead fish flung ashore. Peter was three months old. Yesterday
he had been a timid pup, shrinking from the bigness and strangeness of
everything about him; but today he had braved the lake trail on his own
nerve, and nothing had dared to come near him in spite of his yipping,
so that a great courage and a great desire were born in him.
Therefore, in returning, he had paused in the edge of a great clump of
balsams and spruce, and lay flat on his belly, his sharp little eyes
leveled yearningly at the black mystery of its deeper shadows. The bit
of forest filled a cup-like depression in the plain, and was possibly
half a rifle-shot distance from end to end--but to Peter it was as vast
as life itself. And something urged him to go in.
And as he lay there, desire and indecision struggling for mastery
within him, no power could have told Peter that destinies greater than
his own were working through the soul of the dog that was in him, and
that on his decision to go in or not to go in--on the triumph of
courage or cowardice--there rested the fates of lives greater than his
own, of men, and women, and of little children still unborn. A glass of
wine once lost a kingdom, a nail turned the tide of a mighty battle,
and a woman's smile once upon a time destroyed the homes of a million
people. Thus have trivial things played their potent parts in the
history of human lives, yet these things Peter did not know--nor that
his greatest hour had come.
At last he rose from his squatting posture, and stood upon his feet. He
was not a beautiful pup, this Peter _Pied-Bot_--or Peter Club-foot, as
Jolly Roger McKay--who lived over in the big cedar swamp--had named him
when he gave Peter to the girl. He was, in a way, an accident and a
homely one at that. His father was a blue-blooded fighting Airedale who
had broken from his kennel long enough to commit a _mesalliance_ with a
huge big footed and peace-loving Mackenzie hound--and Peter was the
result. He wore the fiercely bristling whiskers of his Airedale father
at the age of three months; his ears were flappy and big, his tail was
knotted, and his legs were ungainly and loose, with huge feet at the
end of them--so big and heavy that he stumbled frequently, and fell on
his nose. One pitied him at first--and then loved him. For Peter, in
spite of his homeliness, had the two best bloods of all dog creation in
his veins. Yet in a way it was like mixing nitro-glycerin with olive
oil, or dynamite and saltpeter with milk and honey.
Peter's heart was thumping rapidly as he took a step toward the deeper
shadows. He swallowed hard, as if to clear a knot out of his scrawny
throat. But he had made up his mind. Something was compelling him, and
he would go in. Slowly the gloom engulfed him, and once again the
whimsical spirit of fatalism had chosen a trivial thing to work out its
ends in the romance and tragedy of human lives.
Grim shadows began to surround Peter, and his ears shot up, and a
scraggly brush stood out along his spine. But he did not bark, as he
had barked along the shore of the lake, and in the green opens. Twice
he looked back to the shimmer of sunshine that was growing more and
more indistinct. As long as he could see this, and knew that his
retreat was open, there still remained a bit of that courage which was
swiftly ebbing in the thickening darkness. But the third time he looked
back the light of the sun was utterly gone! For an instant the knot
rose up in his throat and choked him, and his eyes popped, and grew
like little balls of fire in his intense desire to see through the
gloom. Even the girl, who was afraid of only one thing in the world,
would have paused where Peter stood, with a little quickening of her
heart. For all the light of the day, it seemed to Peter, had suddenly
died out. Over his head the spruce and cedar and balsam tops grew so
thick they were like a canopy of night. Through them the snow never
came in winter, and under them the light of a blazing sun was only a
ghostly twilight.
And now, as he stood there, his whole soul burning with a desire to see
his way out, Peter began to hear strange sounds. Strangest of all, and
most fearsome, was a hissing that came and went, sometimes very near to
him, and always accompanied by a grating noise that curdled his blood.
Twice after that he saw the shadow of the great owl as it swooped over
him, and he flattened himself down, the knot in his throat growing
bigger and more choking. And then he heard the soft and uncanny
movement of huge feathered bodies in the thick shroud of boughs
overhead, and slowly and cautiously he wormed himself around,
determined to get back to sunshine and day as quickly as he could. It
was not until he had made this movement that the real chill of horror
gripped at his heart. Straight behind him, directly in the path he had
traveled, he saw two little green balls of flame!
It was instinct, and not reason or experience, which told Peter there
was menace and peril in these two tiny spots blazing in the gloom. He
did not know that his own eyes, popping half out of his head, were
equally terrifying in that pit of silence, nor that from him emanated a
still more terrifying thing--the scent of dog. He trembled on his
wobbly legs as the green eyes stared at him, and his back seemed to
break in the middle, so that he sank helplessly down upon the soft
spruce needles, waiting for his doom. In another flash the twin balls
of green fire were gone. In a moment they appeared again, a little
farther away. Then a second time they were gone, and a third time they
flashed back at him--so distant they appeared like needle-points in the
darkness. Something stupendous rose up in Peter. It was the soul of his
Airedale father, telling him the other thing was running away! And in
the joy of triumph Peter let out a yelp. In that night-infested place,
alive with hiding things, the yelp set loose weird rustlings in the
tangled treetops, strange murmurings of chortling voices, and the nasty
snapping of beaks that held in them the power to rend Peter's skinny
body into a hundred bits. From deeper in the thicket came the sudden
crash of a heavy body, and with it the chuckling notes of a porcupine,
and a _hoo-hoo-hoo-ee_ of startled inquiry that at first Peter took for a
human voice. And again he lay shivering close to the foot-deep carpet
of needles under him, while his heart thumped against his ribs, and his
whiskers stood out in mortal fear. There followed a weird and appalling
silence, and in that stillness Peter quested vainly for the sunlight he
had lost. And then, indistinctly, but bringing with it a new thrill, he
heard another sound. It was a soft and distant rippling of running
water. He knew that sound. It was friendly. He had played among the
rocks and pebbles and sand where it was made. His courage came back,
and he rose up on his legs, and made his way toward it. Something
inside him told him to go quietly, but his feet were big and clumsy,
and half a dozen times in the next two minutes he stumbled on his nose.
At last he came to the stream, scarcely wider than a man might have
reached across, rippling and plashing its way through the naked roots
of trees. And ahead of him Peter saw light. He quickened his pace,
until at the last he was running when he came out into the edge of the
meadowy plain, with its sweetness of flowers and green grass and song
of birds, and its glory of blue sky and sun.
If he had ever been afraid, Peter forgot it now. The choking went out
of his throat, his heart fell back in its place, and the fierce
conviction that he had vanquished everything in the world possessed
him. He peered back into the dark cavern of evergreen out of which the
streamlet gurgled, and then trotted straight away from it, growling
back his defiance as he ran. At a safe distance he stopped, and faced
about. Nothing was following him, and the importance of his
achievements grew upon him. He began to swell; his fore-legs he planted
pugnaciously, he hollowed his back, and began to bark with all the
puppyish ferocity that was in him. And though he continued to yelp, and
pounded the earth with his paws, and tore up the green grass with his
sharp little teeth, nothing dared to come out of the black forest in
answer to his challenge!
His head was high and his ears cocked jauntily as he trotted up the
slope, and for the first time in his three months of existence he
yearned to give battle to something that was alive. He was a changed
Peter, no longer satisfied with the thought of gnawing sticks or stones
or mauling a rabbit skin. At the crest of the slope he stopped, and
yelped down, almost determined to go back to that black patch of forest
and chase out everything that was in it. Then he turned toward Cragg's
Ridge, and what he saw seemed slowly to shrink up the pugnaciousness
that was in him, and his stiffened tail drooped until the knotty end of
it touched the ground.
Three or four hundred yards away, out of the heart of that cup-like
paradise which ran back through a break in the ridge, rose a spiral of
white smoke, and with the sight of that smoke Peter heard also the
chopping of axe. It made him shiver, and yet he made his way toward it.
He was not old enough--nor was it in the gentle blood of his Mackenzie
mother--to know the meaning of hate; but something was growing swiftly
in Peter's shrewd little head, and he sensed impending danger whenever
he heard the sound of the axe. For always there was associated with
that sound the cat-like, thin-faced man with the red bristle on his
upper lip, and the one eye that never opened but was always closed. And
Peter had come to fear this one eyed man more than he feared any of the
ghostly monsters hidden in the black pit of the forest he had braved
that day.
But the owls, and the porcupine, and the fiery-eyed fox that had run
away from him, had put into Peter something which was not in him
yesterday, and he did not slink on his belly when he came to the edge
of the cup between the broken ridge, but stood up boldly on his crooked
legs and looked ahead of him. At the far edge of the cup, under the
western shoulder of the ridge, was a thick scattering of tall cedars
and green poplars and white birch, and in the shelter of these was a
cabin built of logs. A lovelier spot could not have been chosen for the
home of man. The hollow, from where Peter stood, was a velvety carpet
of green, thickly strewn with flowers and ferns, sweet with the scent
of violets and wild honey-suckle, and filled with the song of birds.
Through the middle of it purled a tiny creek which disappeared between
the ragged shoulders of rock, and close to this creek stood the cabin,
its log walls smothered under a luxuriant growth of wood-vine. But
Peter's quizzical little eyes were not measuring the beauty of the
place, nor were his ears listening to the singing of birds, or the
chattering of a red-squirrel on a stub a few yards away. He was looking
beyond the cabin, to a chalk-white mass of rock that rose like a giant
mushroom in the edge of the trees--and he was listening to the ringing
of the axe, and straining his ears to catch the sound of a voice.
It was the voice he wanted most of all, and when this did not come he
choked back a whimper in his throat, and went down to the creek, and
waded through it, and came up cautiously behind the cabin, his eyes and
ears alert and his loosely jointed legs ready for flight at a sign of
danger. He wanted to set up his sharp yipping signal for the girl, but
the menace of the axe choked back his desire. At the very end of the
cabin, where the wood-vine grew thick and dense, Peter had burrowed
himself a hiding-place, and into this he skulked with the quickness of
a rat getting away from its enemies. From this protecting screen he
cautiously poked forth his whiskered face, to make what inventory he
could of his chances for supper and a safe home-coming.
And as he looked forth his heart gave a sudden jump.
It was the girl, and not the man who was using the axe today. At the
big wood-pile half a stone's throw away he saw the shimmer of her brown
curls in the sun, and a glimpse of her white face as it was turned for
an instant toward the cabin. In his gladness he would have leaped out,
but the curse of a voice he had learned to dread held him back.
A man had come out of the cabin, and close behind the man, a woman. The
man was a long, lean, cadaverous-faced creature, and Peter knew that
the devil was in him as he stood there at the cabin door. His breath,
if one had stood close enough to smell it, was heavy with whiskey.
Tobacco juice stained the corners of his mouth, and his one eye gleamed
with an animal-like exultation as he nodded toward the girl with the
shining curls
"Mooney says he'll pay seven-fifty for her when he gets his tie-money
from the Government, an' he paid me fifty down," he said. "It'll help
pay for the brat's board these last ten years--an' mebby, when it comes
to a show-down, I can stick him for a thousand."
The woman made no answer. She was, in a way, past answering with a mind
of her own. The man, as he stood there, was wicked and cruel, every
line in his ugly face and angular body a line of sin. The woman was
bent, broken, a wreck. In her face there was no sign of a living soul.
Her eyes were dull, her heart burned out, her hands gnarled with toil
under the slavedom of a beast. Yet even Peter, quiet as a mouse where
he lay, sensed the difference between them. He had seen the girl and
this woman sobbing in each other's arms. And often he had crawled to
the woman's feet, and occasionally her hand had touched him, and
frequently she had given him things to eat. But it was seldom he heard
her voice when the man was near.
The man was biting off a chunk of black tobacco. Suddenly he asked,
"How old is she, Liz?"
And the woman answered in a strange and husky voice.
"Seventeen the twelfth day of this month."
The man spat.
"Mooney ought to pay a thousand. We've had her better'n ten years--an'
Mooney's crazy as a loon to git her. He'll pay!"
"Jed--" The woman's voice rose above its hoarseness. "Jed--it ain't
right!"
The man laughed. He opened his mouth wide, until his yellow fangs
gleamed in the sun, and the girl with the axe paused for a moment in
her work, and flung back her head, staring at the two before the cabin
door.
"Right?" jeered the man. "Right? That's what you been preachin' me
these last ten years 'bout whiskey-runnin,' but it ain't made me stop
sellin' whiskey, has it? An' I guess it ain't a word that'll come
between Mooney and me--not if Mooney gits his thousand." Suddenly he
turned upon her, a hand half raised to strike. "An' if you whisper a
word to her--if y' double-cross me so much as the length of your little
finger--I'll break every bone in your body, so help me God! You
understand? You won't say anything to her?"
The woman's uneven shoulders drooped lower.
"I won't say ennything, Jed. I--promise."
The man dropped his uplifted hand with a harsh grunt.
"I'll kill y' if you do," he warned.
The girl had dropped her axe, and was coming toward them. She was a
slim, bird-like creature, with a poise to her head and an up-tilt to
her chin which warned that the man had not yet beaten her to the level
of the woman. She was dressed in a faded calico, frayed at the bottom,
and with the sleeves bobbed off just above the elbows of her slim white
arms. Her stockings were mottled with patches and mends, and her shoes
were old, and worn out at the toes.
But to Peter, worshipping her from his hiding place, she was the most
beautiful thing in the world. Jolly Roger had said the same thing, and
most men--and women, too--would have agreed that this slip of a girl
possessed a beauty which it would take a long time for unhappiness and
torture to crush entirely out of her. Her eyes were as blue as the
violets Peter had thrust his nose among that day. And her hair was a
glory, loosed by her exertion from its bondage of faded ribbon, and
falling about her shoulders and nearly to her waist in a mass of
curling brown tresses that at times had made even Jed Hawkins' one eye
light of with admiration. And yet, even in those times, he hated her,
and more than once his bony fingers had closed viciously in that mass
of radiant hair, but seldom could he wring a scream of pain from Nada.
Even now, when she could see the light of the devil in his one gleaming
eye, it was only her flesh--and not her soul--that was afraid.
But the strain had begun to show its mark. In the blue of her eyes was
the look of one who was never free of haunting visions, her cheeks were
pallid, and a little too thin, and the vivid redness of her lips was
not of health and happiness, but a touch of the color which should have
been in her face, and which until now had refused to die.
She faced the man, a little out of the reach of his arm.
"I told you never again to raise your hand to strike her," she cried in
a fierce, suppressed little voice, her blue eyes flaming loathing and
hatred at him. "If you hit her once more--something is going to happen.
If you want to hit anyone, hit me. I kin stand it. But--look at her!
You've broken her shoulder, you've crippled her--an' you oughta die!"
The man advanced half a step, his eye ablaze. Deep down in him Peter
felt something he had never felt before. For the first time in his life
he had no desire to run away from the man. Something rose up from his
bony little chest, and grew in his throat, until it was a babyish snarl
so low that no human ears could hear it. And in his hiding-place his
needle-like fangs gleamed under snarling lips.
But the man did not strike, nor did he reach out to grip his fingers in
the silken mass of Nada's hair. He laughed, as if something was choking
him, and turned away with a toss of his arms.
"You ain't seein' me hit her any more, are you, Nady?" he said, and
disappeared around the end of the cabin.
The girl laid a hand on the woman's arm. Her eyes softened, but she was
trembling.
"I've told him what'll happen, an' he won't dare hit you any more," she
comforted. "If he does, I'll end him. I will! I'll bring the police.
I'll show 'em the places where he hides his whiskey. I'll--I'll put him
in jail, if I die for it!"
The woman's bony hands clutched at one of Nada's.
"No, no, you mustn't do that," she pleaded. "He was good to me once, a
long time ago, Nada. It ain't Jed that's bad--it's the whiskey. You
mustn't tell on him, Nada--you mustn't!"
"I've promised you I won't--if he don't hit you any more. He kin shake
me by the hair if he wants to. But if he hits you--"
She drew a deep breath, and also passed around the end of the cabin.
For a few moments Peter listened. Then he slipped back through the
tunnel he had made under the wood-vine, and saw Nada walking swiftly
toward the break in the ridge. He followed, so quietly that she was
through the break, and was picking her way among the tumbled masses of
rock along the farther foot of the ridge, before she discovered his
presence. With a glad cry she caught him up in her arms and hugged him
against her breast.
"Peter, Peter, where have you been?" she demanded. "I thought something
had happened to you, and I've been huntin' for you, and so has Roger--I
mean Mister Jolly Roger."
Peter was hugged tighter, and he hung limply until his mistress came to
a thick little clump of dwarf balsams hidden among the rocks. It was
their "secret place," and Peter had come to sense the fact that its
mystery was not to be disclosed. Here Nada had made her little bower,
and she sat down now upon a thick rug of balsam boughs, and held Peter
out in front of her, squatted on his haunches. A new light had come
into her eyes, and they were shining like stars. There was a flush in
her cheeks, her red lips were parted, and Peter, looking up--and being
just dog--could scarcely measure the beauty of her. But he knew that
something had happened, and he tried hard to understand.
"Peter, he was here ag'in today--Mister Roger--Mister Jolly Roger," she
cried softly, the pink in her cheeks growing brighter. "And he told me
I was pretty!"
She drew a deep breath, and looked out over the rocks to the valley and
the black forest beyond. And her fingers, under Peter's scrawny
armpits, tightened until he grunted.
"And he asked me if he could touch my hair--mind you he asked me that,
Peter!--And when I said 'yes' he just put his hand on it, as if he was
afraid, and he said it was beautiful, and that I must take wonderful
care of it!"
Peter saw a throbbing in her throat.
"Peter--he said he didn't want to do anything wrong to me, that he'd
cut off his hand first. He said that! And then he said--if I didn't
think it was wrong--he'd like to kiss me--"
She hugged Peter up close to her again.
"And--I told him I guessed it wasn't wrong, because I liked him, and
nobody else had ever kissed me, and--Peter--he didn't kiss me! And when
he went away he looked so queer--so white-like--and somethin' inside me
has been singing ever since. I don't know what it is, Peter. But it's
there!"
And then, after a moment.
"Peter," she whispered, "I wish Mister Jolly Roger would take us away!"
The thought drew a tightening to her lips, and the pucker of a frown
between her eyes, and she sat Peter down beside her and looked over the
valley to the black forest, in the heart of which was Jolly Roger's
cabin.
"It's funny he don't want anybody to know he's there, ain't it--I
mean--isn't it, Peter?" she mused. "He's livin' in the old shack Indian
Tom died in last winter, and I've promised not to tell. He says it's a
great secret, and that only you, and I, and the Missioner over at
Sucker Creek know anything about it. I'd like to go over and clean up
the shack for him. I sure would."
Peter, beginning to nose among the rocks, did not see the flash of fire
that came slowly into the blue of the girl's eyes. She was looking at
her ragged shoes, at the patched stockings, at the poverty of her faded
dress, and her fingers clenched in her lap.
"I'd do it--I'd go away--somewhere--and never come back, if it wasn't
for her," she breathed. "She treats me like a witch most of the time,
but Jed Hawkins made her that way. I kin remember--"
Suddenly she jumped up, and flung back her head defiantly, so that her
hair streamed out in a sun-filled cloud in a gust of wind that came up
the valley.
"Some day, I'll kill 'im," she cried to the black forest across the
plain. "Some day--I will!"