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THE GOLDEN SNARE
BY
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
AUTHOR OF KAZAN, THE DANGER TRAIL, THE COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE, THE
GRIZZLY KING, ETC.
JTABLE 10 26 1
THE GOLDEN SNARE
CHAPTER I
Bram Johnson was an unusual man, even for the northland. He was, above
all other things, a creature of environment--and necessity, and of that
something else which made of him at times a man with a soul, and at
others a brute with the heart of a devil. In this story of Bram, and
the girl, and the other man, Bram himself should not be blamed too
much. He was pathetic, and yet he was terrible. It is doubtful if he
really had what is generally regarded as a soul. If he did, it was
hidden--hidden to the forests and the wild things that had made him.
Bram's story started long before he was born, at least three
generations before. That was before the Johnsons had gone north of
Sixty. But they were wandering, and steadily upward. If one puts a
canoe in the Lower Athabasca and travels northward to the Great Slave
and thence up the Mackenzie to the Arctic he will note a number of
remarkable ethnological changes. The racial characteristics of the
world he is entering change swiftly. The thin-faced Chippewa with his
alert movements and high-bowed canoe turns into the slower moving Cree,
with his broader cheeks, his more slanting eyes, and his racier
birchbark. And even the Cree changes as he lives farther north; each
new tribe is a little different from its southernmost neighbor, until
at last the Cree looks like a Jap, and the Chippewyan takes his place.
And the Chippewyan takes up the story of life where the Cree left off.
Nearer the Arctic his canoe becomes a skin kaiak, his face is still
broader, Ms eyes like a Chinaman's, and writers of human history call
him Eskimo.
The Johnsons, once they started, did not stop at any particular point.
There was probably only one Johnson in the beginning of that hundred
year story which was to have its finality in Bram. But there were more
in time. The Johnson blood mixed itself first with the Chippewa, and
then with the Cree--and the Cree-Chippewa Johnson blood, when at last
it reached the Eskimo, had in it also a strain of Chippewyan. It is
curious how the name itself lived. Johnson! One entered a tepee or a
cabin expecting to find there a white man, and was startled when he
discovered the truth.
Bram, after nearly a century of this intermixing of bloods, was a
throwback--a white man, so far as his skin and his hair and his eyes
went. In other physical ways he held to the type of his half-strain
Eskimo mother, except in size. He was six feet, and a giant in
strength. His face was broad, his cheek-bones high, his lips thick, his
nose flat. And he was WHITE. That was the shocking thing about it all.
Even his hair was a reddish blonde, wild and coarse and ragged like a
lion's mane, and his eyes were sometimes of a curious blue, and at
others--when he was angered--green like a cat's at night-time.
No man knew Bram for a friend. He was a mystery. He never remained at a
post longer than was necessary to exchange his furs for supplies, and
it might be months or even years before he returned to that particular
post again. He was ceaselessly wandering. More or less the Royal
Northwest Mounted Police kept track of him, and in many reports of
faraway patrols filed at Headquarters there are the laconic words, "We
saw Bram and his wolves traveling northward" or "Bram and his wolves
passed us"--always Bram AND HIS WOLVES. For two years the Police lost
track of him. That was when Bram was buried in the heart of the Sulphur
Country east of the Great Bear. After that the Police kept an even
closer watch on him, waiting, and expecting something to happen. And
then--the something came. Bram killed a man. He did it so neatly and so
easily, breaking him as he might have broken a stick, that he was well
off in flight before it was discovered that his victim was dead. The
next tragedy followed quickly--a fortnight later, when Corporal Lee and
a private from the Fort Churchill barracks closed in on him out on the
edge of the Barren. Bram didn't fire a shot. They could hear his great,
strange laugh when they were still a quarter of a mile away from him.
Bram merely set loose his wolves. By a miracle Corporal Lee lived to
drag himself to a half-breed's cabin, where he died a little later, and
the half-breed brought the story to Fort Churchill.
After this, Bram disappeared from the eyes of the world. What he lived
in those four or five years that followed would well be worth his
pardon if his experiences could be made to appear between the covers of
a book. Bram--AND HIS WOLVES! Think of it. Alone. In all that time
without a voice to talk to him. Not once appearing at a post for food.
A loup-garou. An animal-man. A companion of wolves. By the end of the
third year there was not a drop of dog-blood in his pack. It was wolf,
all wolf. From whelps he brought the wolves up, until he had twenty in
his pack. They were monsters, for the under-grown ones he killed.
Perhaps he would have given them freedom in place of death, but these
wolf-beasts of Bram's would not accept freedom. In him they recognized
instinctively the super-beast, and they were his slaves. And Bram,
monstrous and half animal himself, loved them. To him they were
brother, sister, wife--all creation. He slept with them, and ate with
them, and starved with them when food was scarce. They were comradeship
and protection. When Bram wanted meat, and there was meat in the
country, he would set his wolf-horde on the trail of a caribou or a
moose, and if they drove half a dozen miles ahead of Bram himself there
would always be plenty of meat left on the bones when he arrived. Four
years of that! The Police would not believe it. They laughed at the
occasional rumors that drifted in from the far places; rumors that Bram
had been seen, and that his great voice had been heard rising above the
howl of his pack on still winter nights, and that half-breeds and
Indians had come upon his trails, here and there--at widely divergent
places. It was the French half-breed superstition of the chasse-galere
that chiefly made them disbelieve, and the chasse-galere is a thing not
to be laughed at in the northland. It is composed of creatures who have
sold their souls to the devil for the power of navigating the air, and
there were those who swore with their hands on the crucifix of the
Virgin that they had with their own eyes seen Bram and his wolves
pursuing the shadowy forms of great beasts through the skies.
So the Police believed that Bram was dead; and Bram, meanwhile, keeping
himself from all human eyes, was becoming more and more each day like
the wolves who were his brothers. But the white blood in a man dies
hard, and always there flickered in the heart of Bram's huge chest a
great yearning. It must at times have been worse than death--that
yearning to hear a human voice, to have a human creature to speak to,
though never had he loved man or woman. Which brings us at last to the
final tremendous climax in Bram's life--to the girl, and the other man.