Father Roland slipped the little plush box into his pocket as he and
David went out to join Thoreau. They left the cabin together, Marie
lifting her eyes from her work in a furtive glance to see if the
stranger was wearing her cap.
A wild outcry from the dogs greeted the three men as they appeared
outside the door, and for the first time David saw with his eyes what he
had only heard last night. Among the balsams and spruce close to the
cabin there were fully a score of the wildest and most savage-looking
dogs he had ever beheld. As he stood for a moment, gazing about him,
three things impressed themselves upon him in a flash: it was a glorious
day, it was so cold that he felt a curious sting in the air, and not one
of those long-haired, white-fanged beasts straining at their leashes
possessed a kennel, or even a brush shelter. It was this last fact that
struck him most forcefully. Inherently he was a lover of animals, and he
believed these four-footed creatures of Thoreau's must have suffered
terribly during the night. He noticed that at the foot of each tree to
which a dog was attached there was a round, smooth depression in the
snow, where the animal had slept. The next few minutes added to his
conviction that the Frenchman and the Missioner were heartless masters,
though open-handed hosts. Mukoki and another Indian had come up with two
gunny sacks, and from one of these a bushel of fish was emptied out
upon the snow. They were frozen stiff, so that Mukoki had to separate
them with his belt-axe; David fancied they must be hard as rock. Thoreau
proceeded to toss these fish to the dogs, one at a time, and one to each
dog. The watchful and apparently famished beasts caught the fish in
mid-air, and there followed a snarling and grinding of teeth and
smashing of bones and frozen flesh that made David shiver. He was half
disgusted. Thoreau might at least have boiled the fish, or thawed them
out. A fish weighing from one and a half to two pounds was each dog's
allotment, and the work--if this feeding process could be called
work--was done. Father Roland watched the dogs, rubbing his hands with
satisfaction. Thoreau was showing his big, white teeth, as if proud of
something.
"Not a bad tooth among them, _mon Père_," he said. "Not one!"
"Fine--fine--but a little too fat, Thoreau. You're feeding them too well
for dogs out of the traces," replied Father Roland.
David gasped.
"Too _well_!" he exclaimed. "They're half starved, and almost frozen!
Look at the poor devils swallow those fish, ice and all! Why don't you
cook the fish? Why don't you give them some sort of shelter to sleep
in?"
Father Roland and the Frenchman stared at him as if they did not quite
catch his meaning. Then a look of comprehension swept over the
Missioner's face. He chuckled, the chuckle grew, it shook his body, and
he laughed--laughed until the forest flung back the echoes of his
merriment, and even the leathery faces of the Indians crinkled in
sympathy. David could see no reason for his levity. He looked at
Thoreau. His host was grinning broadly.
"God bless my soul!" said the Little Missioner at last. "Starved? Cold?
_Boil_ their fish? Give 'em _beds_!" He stopped himself as he saw a
flush rising in David's face. "Forgive me, David," he begged, laying a
hand on the other's arm. "You can't understand how funny that was--what
you said. If you gave those fellows the warmest kennels in New York
City, lined with bear skins, they wouldn't sleep in them, but would come
outside and burrow those little round holes in the snow. That's their
nature. I've felt sorry for them, like you--when the thermometer was
down to sixty. But it's no use. As for the fish--they want 'em fresh or
frozen. I suppose you might educate them to eat cooked meat, but it
would be like making over a lynx or a fox or a wolf. They're mighty
comfortable, those dogs, David. That bunch of eight over there is mine.
They'll take us north. And I want to warn you, don't put yourself in
reach of them until they get acquainted with you. They're not pets, you
know; I guess they'd appreciate petting just about as much as they would
boiled fish, or poison. There's nothing on earth like a husky or an
Eskimo dog when it comes to lookin' you in the eye with a friendly and
lovable look and snapping your hand off at the same time. But you'll
like 'em, David. You can't help feeling they're pretty good comrades
when you see what they do in the traces."
Thoreau had shouldered the second gunny sack and now led the way into
the thicker spruce and balsam behind the cabin. David and Father Roland
followed, the latter explaining more fully why it was necessary to keep
the sledge dogs "hard as rocks," and how the trick was done. He was
still talking, with the fingers of one hand closed about the little
plush box in his pocket, when they came to the first of the fox pens. He
was watching David closely, a little anxiously--thrilled by the touch of
that box. He read men as he read books, seeing much that was not in
print, and feeling by a wonderful intuitive power emotions not visible
in a face, and he believed that in David there were strange and
conflicting forces struggling now for mastery. It was not in the
surrender of the box that he had felt David's triumph, but in the
voluntary sacrifice of what that box contained. He wanted to rid himself
of the picture, and quickly. He was filled with apprehension lest David
should weaken again, and ask for its return. The locket meant nothing.
It was a bauble--cold, emotionless, easily forgotten; but the other--the
picture of the woman who had almost destroyed him--was a deadly menace,
a poison to David's soul and body as long as it remained in his
possession, and the Little Missioner's fingers itched to tear it from
the velvet casket and destroy it.
He watched his opportunity. As Thoreau tossed three fish over the high
wire netting of the first pen the Frenchman was explaining to David why
there were two female foxes and one male in each of his nine pens, and
why warm houses partly covered with earth were necessary for their
comfort and health, while the sledge dogs required nothing more than a
bed of snow. Father Roland seized this opportunity to drop back toward
the cabin, calling in Cree to Mukoki. Five seconds after the cabin
concealed him from David he had the plush box out of his pocket; another
five and he had opened it and the locket itself was in his hand. And
then, his breath coming in a sudden, hissing spurt between his teeth, he
was looking upon the face of the woman. Again in Cree he spoke to
Mukoki, asking him for his knife. The Indian drew it from his sheath and
watched in silence while Father Roland accomplished his work of
destruction. The Missioner's teeth were set tight. There was a strange
gleam of fire in his eyes. An unspoken malediction rose out of his soul.
The work was done! He wanted to hurl the yellow trinket, shaped so
sacrilegiously in the image of a heart, as far as he could fling it into
the forest. It seemed to burn his fingers, and he held for it a personal
hatred. But it was for Marie! Marie would prize it, and Marie would
purify it. Against her breast, where beat a heart of his beloved
Northland, it would cease to be a polluted thing. This was his thought
as he replaced it in the casket and retraced his steps to the fox pens.
Thoreau was tossing fish into the last pen when Father Roland came up.
David was not with him. In answer to the Missioner's inquiry he nodded
toward the thicker growth of the forest where as yet his axe had not
scarred the trees.
"He said that he would walk a little distance into the timber."
Father Roland muttered something that Thoreau did not catch, and then, a
sudden brightness lighting up his eyes:
"I am going to leave you to-day."
"To-day, _mon Père_!" Thoreau made a muffled exclamation of
astonishment. "To-day? And it is fairly well along toward noon!"
"He cannot travel far." The Missioner nodded in the direction of the
unthinned timber. "It will give us four hours, between noon and dark. He
is soft. You understand? We will make as far as the old trapping shack
you abandoned two winters ago over on Moose Creek. It is only eight
miles, but it will be a bit of hardening for him. And, besides...."
He was silent for a moment, as if turning a matter over again in his own
mind.
"I want to get him away."
He turned a searching, quietly analytic gaze upon Thoreau to see whether
the Frenchman would understand without further explanation.
The fox breeder picked up the empty gunny sack.
"We will begin to pack the sledge, _mon Père_. There must be a good
hundred pounds to the dog."
As they turned back to the cabin Father Roland cast a look over his
shoulder to see whether David was returning.
Three or four hundred yards in the forest David stood in a mute and
increasing wonder. He was in a tiny open, and about him the spruce and
balsam hung still as death under their heavy cloaks of freshly fallen
snow. It was as if he had entered unexpectedly into a wonderland of
amazing beauty, and that from its dark and hidden bowers, crusted with
their glittering mantles of white, snow naiads must be peeping forth at
him, holding their breath for fear of betraying themselves to his eyes.
There was not the chirp of a bird nor the flutter of a wing--not the
breath of a sound to disturb the wonderful silence. He was encompassed
in a white, soft world that seemed tremendously unreal--that for some
strange reason made him breathe very softly, that made him stand without
a movement, and made him listen, as though he had come to the edge of
the universe and that there were mysterious things to hear, and possibly
to see, if he remained very quiet. It was the first sensation of its
kind he had ever experienced; it was disquieting, and yet soothing; it
filled him with an indefinable uneasiness, and yet with a strange
yearning. He stood, in these moments, at the inscrutable threshold of
the great North; he felt the enigmatical, voiceless spirit of it; it
passed into his blood; it made his heart beat a little faster; it made
him afraid, and yet daring. In his breast the spirit of adventure was
waking--had awakened; he felt the call of the Northland, and it alarmed
even as it thrilled him. He knew, now, that this was the beginning--the
door opening to him--of a world that reached for hundreds of miles up
there. Yes, there were thousands of miles of it, many thousands; white,
as he saw it here; beautiful, terrible, and deathly still. And into this
world Father Roland had asked him to go, and he had as good as pledged
himself!
Before he could think, or stop himself, he had laughed. For an instant
it struck him like mirth in a tomb, an unpleasant, soulless sort of
mirth, for his laugh had in it a jarring incredulity, a mocking lack of
faith in himself. What right had _he_ to enter into a world like that?
Why, even now, his legs ached because of his exertion in furrowing
through a few hundred steps of foot-and-a-half snow!
But the laugh succeeded in bringing him back into the reality of
things. He started at right angles, pushed into the maze of white-robed
spruce and balsam, and turned back in the direction of the cabin over a
new trail. He was not in a good humour. There possessed him an ingrowing
and acute feeling of animosity toward himself. Since the day--or
night--fate had drawn that great, black curtain over his life, shutting
out his sun, he had been drifting; he had been floating along on
currents of the least resistance, making no fight, and, in the
completeness of his grief and despair, allowing himself to disintegrate
physically as well as mentally. He had sorrowed with himself; he had
told himself that everything worth having was gone; but now, for the
first time, he cursed himself. To-day--these few hundred yards out in
the snow--had come as a test. They had proved his weakness. He had
degenerated into less than a man! He was....
He clenched his hands inside his thick mittens, and a rage burned within
him like a fire. Go with Father Roland? Go up into that world where he
knew that the one great law of life was the survival of the fittest?
Yes, he _would go_! This body and brain of his needed their
punishment--and they should have it! He would go. And his body would
fight for it, or die. The thought gave him an atrocious satisfaction. He
was filled with a sudden contempt for himself. If Father Roland had
known, he would have uttered a paean of joy.
Out of the darkness of the humour into which he had fallen, David was
suddenly flung by a low and ferocious growl. He had stepped around a
young balsam that stood like a seven-foot ghost in his path, and found
himself face to face with a beast that was cringing at the butt of a
thick spruce. It was a dog. The animal was not more than four or five
short paces from him, and was chained to the tree. David surveyed him
with sudden interest, wondering first of all why he was larger than the
other dogs. As he lay crouched there against his tree, his ivory fangs
gleaming between half-uplifted lips, he looked like a great wolf. In the
other dogs David had witnessed an avaricious excitement at the approach
of men, a hungry demand for food, a straining at leash ends, a whining
and snarling comradeship. Here he saw none of those things. The big,
wolf-like beast made no sound after that first growl, and made no
movement. And yet every muscle in his body seemed gathered in a tense
readiness to spring, and his gleaming fangs threatened. He was
ferocious, and yet shrinking; ready to leap, and yet afraid. He was like
a thing at bay--a hunted creature that had been prisoned. And then David
noticed that he had but one good eye. It was bloodshot, balefully alert,
and fixed on him like a round ball of fire. The lids had closed over his
other eye; they were swollen; there was a big lump just over where the
eye should have been. Then he saw that the beast's lips were cut and
bleeding. There was blood on the snow; and suddenly the big brute
covered his fangs to give a racking cough, as though he had swallowed a
sharp fish-bone, and fresh blood dripped out of his mouth on the snow
between his forepaws. One of these forepaws was twisted; it had been
broken.
"You poor devil!" said David aloud.
He sat down on a birch log within six feet of the end of the chain, and
looked steadily into the big husky's one bloodshot eye as he said
again:
"You poor devil!"
Baree, the dog, did not understand. It puzzled him that this man did not
carry a club. He was used to clubs. So far back as he could remember the
club had been the one dominant thing in his life. It was a club that had
closed his eye. It was a club that had broken one of his teeth and cut
his lips, and it was a club that had beat against his ribs
until--now--the blood came up into his throat and choked him, and
dripped out of his mouth. But this man had no club, and he looked
friendly.
"You poor devil!" said David for the third time.
Then he added, dark indignation in his voice:
"What, in God's name, has Thoreau been doing to you?"
There was something sickening in the spectacle--that battered, bleeding,
broken creature huddling there against the tree, coughing up the red
stuff that discoloured the snow. Loving dogs, he was not afraid of them,
and forgetting Father Roland's warning he rose from the log and went
nearer. From where he stood, looking down, Baree could have reached his
throat. But he made no movement, unless it was that his thickly haired
body was trembling a little. His one red eye looked steadily up at
David.
For the fourth time David spoke;
"You poor, God-forsaken brute!"
There was friendliness, compassion, wonderment in his voice, and he held
down a hand that he had drawn from one of the thick mittens. Another
moment and he would have bent over, but a cry stopped him so sharply and
suddenly that he jumped back.
Thoreau stood within ten feet of him, horrified. He clutched a rifle in
one hand.
"Back--back, m'sieu!" he cried sharply. "For the love of God, jump
back."
He swung his rifle into the crook of his arm. David did not move, and
from Thoreau he looked down coolly at the dog. Baree was a changed
beast. His one eye was fastened upon the fox breeder. His bared,
bleeding lips revealed inch-long fangs between which there came now a
low and menacing snarl. The tawny crest along his spine was like a
brush; from a puzzled toleration of David his posture and look had
changed into deadly hatred for Thoreau, and fear of him. For a moment
after his first warning the Frenchman's voice seemed to stick in his
throat as he saw what he believed to be David's fatal disregard of his
peril. He did not speak to him again. His eyes were on the dog. Slowly
he raised his rifle; David heard the click of the hammer--and Baree
heard it. There was something in the sharp, metallic thrill of it that
stirred his brute instinct. His lips fell over his fangs, he whined, and
then, on his belly, he dragged himself slowly toward David!
It was a miracle that Thoreau the Frenchman looked upon then. He would
have staked his very soul--wagered his hopes of paradise against a
_babiche_ thread--that what he saw could never have happened between
Baree and man. In utter amazement he lowered his gun. David, looking
down, was smiling into that one, wide-open, bloodshot eye of Baree's,
his hand reaching out. Foot by foot Baree slunk to him on his belly, and
when at last he was at David's feet he faced Thoreau again, his
terrible teeth snarling, a low, rumbling growl in his throat. David
reached down and touched him, even as he heard the fox breeder make an
incoherent sound in his beard. At the caress of his hand a great shudder
passed through Baree's body, as if he had been stung. That touch was the
connecting link through which passed the electrifying thrill of a man's
soul reaching out to a brute instinct.
Baree had found a man friend!
When David stepped away from him to Thoreau's side as much of the
Frenchman's face as was not hidden under his beard was of a curious
ashen pallor. He seemed to make a struggle before he could get his
voice.
And then: "M'sieu, I tell you it is incredible! I cannot believe what I
have seen. It was a miracle!"
He shuddered. David was looking at him, a bit puzzled. He could not
quite comprehend the fear that had possessed him. Thoreau saw this, and
pointing to Baree--a gesture that brought a snarl from the beast--he
said:
"He is bad, m'sieu, _bad_! He is the worst dog in all this country. He
was born an outcast--among the wolves--and his heart is filled with
murder. He is a quarter wolf, and you can't club it out of him. Half a
dozen masters have owned him, and none of them has been able to club it
out of him. I, myself, have beaten him until he lay as if dead, but it
did no good. He has killed two of my dogs. He has leaped at my throat. I
am afraid of him. I chained him to that tree a month ago to keep him
away from the other dogs, and since then I have not been able to unleash
him. He would tear me into pieces. Yesterday I beat him until he was
almost dead, and still he was ready to go at my throat. So I am
determined to kill him. He is no good. Step a little aside, m'sieu,
while I put a bullet through his head!"
He raised his rifle again. David put a hand on it.
"I can unleash him," he said.
Before the other could speak, he had walked boldly to the tree. Baree
did not turn his head--did not for an instant take his eye from Thoreau.
There came the click of the snap that fastened the chain around the body
of the spruce, and David stood with the loose end of the chain in his
hand.
"There!"
He laughed a little proudly.
"And I didn't use a club," he added.
Thoreau gasped "_Mon Dieu_!" and sat down on the birch log as though the
strength had gone from his legs.
David rattled the chain and then re-fastened it about the spruce. Baree
was still watching Thoreau, who sat staring at him as if the beast had
suddenly changed his shape and species.
In David's breast there was the thrill of a new triumph. He had done it
unconsciously, without fear, and without feeling that there had been any
great danger. In those few minutes something of his old self had
returned into him; he felt a new excitement pumping the blood through
his heart, and he felt the warm glow of it in his body. Baree had
awakened something within him--Baree and the _club_. He went to Thoreau,
who had risen from the log. He laughed again, a bit exultantly.
"I am going north with Father Roland," he said. "Will you let me have
the dog, Thoreau? It will save you the trouble of killing him."
Thoreau stared at him blankly for a moment before he answered.
"That dog? You? Into the North?" He shot a look full of hatred and
disgust at Baree. "Would you risk it, m'sieu?"
"Yes. It is an adventure I would very much like to try. You may think it
strange, Thoreau, but that dog--ugly and fierce as he is--has found a
place with me. I like him. And I fancy he has begun to like me."
"But look at his eye, m'sieu----"
"Which eye?" demanded David. "The one you have shut with a club?"
"He deserved it," muttered Thoreau. "He snapped at my hand. But I mean
the other eye, m'sieu--the one that is glaring at us now like a red
bloodstone with the heart of a devil in it! I tell you he is a quarter
wolf...."
"And the broken paw. I suppose that was done by a club, too?"
interrupted David.
"It was broken like that when I traded for him a year ago, m'sieu. I
have not maimed him. And ... yes, you may have the beast! May the saints
preserve you!"
"And his name?"
"The Indian who owned him as a puppy five years ago called him Baree,
which among the Dog Ribs means Wild Blood. He should have been called
The Devil."
Thoreau shrugged his shoulders, as though the matter and its
consequences were now off his hands, and turned in the direction of the
cabin. As he followed the Frenchman, David looked back at Baree. The big
husky had risen from the snow. He was standing at the full length of
his chain, and as David disappeared among the spruce a low whine that
was filled with a strange yearning followed him. He did not hear the
whine, but there came to him distinctly a moment later the dog's racking
cough, and he shivered, and his eyes burned into Thoreau's broad back as
he thought of the fresh blood-clots that were staining the white snow.