THE NIGHT HARRIERS
It was too late to stop the Esquimau’s talking. Kit stood dumbfounded,
staring at him. Oogly either had gone stark crazy, or else he was a man
devoid of fear. He had forced himself into public notice, and judging by
his wide, incorrigible grin he was enjoying his unique position
immensely.
From the demeanor of the Yellow Knives, a person unfamiliar with the
Indian temperament might have imagined that they either had failed to
hear or understand. Not a man moved nor spoke, not a muscle quivered.
They waited for the outlander to go on, watching him in a dead, flinty
silence, like wolves watching a swimming caribou.
Oogly was more than willing to oblige. He not only admitted killing the
Yellow-Knife brave, but he told all about it in picturesque detail. He
seemed to think it was a piece of work that his modesty ought not to
keep hidden.
“The man him praying against my fish,” he explained genially. “So
drowning him had to be.”
Kit no longer tried to interfere. What was the use? The mischief was
accomplished. Oogly could swear himself blue in the face with denials,
but nothing that could be said after this could ever sway or stay the
purpose of the savages who had come to get him.
“What do you mean,” demanded Kitchener--“praying against your fish?”
“So nobody of the fish would eat at my fishing hook,” declared Oogly.
The Esquimau had come a step beyond the open doorway, so everybody could
look at him while he told his outrageous tale. In his queerly chosen
words of English, helped out by vivid pantomime, he showed them exactly
how and why the killing was done.
Oogly, it seemed, was fishing through a hole in the ice on Long Lake,
which emptied its chilly waters into Great Owl Run. He had been catching
plenty of fish--innumerable fish--if his hearers could believe the
number of times he jerked his pretended line out of the imaginary hole
in the ice. Then along came the Yellow-Knife fisherman.
The newcomer chopped himself a hole not far from Oogly’s splendid spot
for fish. He dropped a line of his own in the water and knelt down on
the ice.
The kneeling posture was the man’s undoing. The Esquimau could tell that
he was praying. When the fish stopped biting on Oogly’s hook he knew
that the Indian was praying against his fish. When the fish started to
come wriggling and flapping out of the water at the other hole then he
knew that the Indian was praying the fish onto his own hook. Oogly now
was catching none, and the other man was hauling them out as fast as he
could pray.
This, to the Esquimau’s simple method of thought, was a justifiable
cause for homicide. He walked over to the other fisherman, upended him
by the heels and pushed him down headfirst through the hole in the ice.
By making little explosive sounds with his puffed-out lips, Oogly showed
them how the bubbles came to the surface for a minute or two, and then
stopped coming.
“Awright now,” said the Esquimau, winding up his tale. “Finean’ dandy!
Oogly go back and fishing lucky once again.”
That was the story, and after its cheerful recounting Oogly leaned his
squat bulk against the doorframe as he waited placidly to find out what
the dead man’s friends were going to do about it.
Kitchener was aghast. He had never heard a tale so bloodthirsty and at
the same time so naïve and childlike in its telling.
He looked obliquely at the Yellow Knives, and nudged Diane’s arm.
“Inside!” he said under his breath.
“You come along now,” Tom Salmonfish said to Oogly.
The Indian did not raise his voice, but the glitter of his eyes was like
a baneful flame. He said something to his companions, and with that
soundless, gliding motion that is peculiar to all forest-born creatures,
the bunched group of men spread out right and left in a line that
flanked the front of the cabin.
Kitchener backed into the doorway, shoving Diane and Oogly into the
cabin behind him. He reached around with the toe of his foot and pulled
the door towards him, so he would be able to slam it shut with the least
possible delay.
There could be no doubt about the intentions of the Yellow Knives. They
had made up their minds to seize their man, drag him away, and somewhere
in the dark woods mete out their own cruel, remorseless justice, which
demanded an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.
Kit was not deluding himself. These men wore store shirts and refused to
labor on Sundays, but under the veneer of the missionary teachings they
were still the same savages as their fierce and brutal forefathers. If
he tried to save Oogly it meant a fight to the death. They were a
sinister-looking crowd at this moment, and they had made it clear that
they neither respected nor feared the police uniform. He could hear the
click of rifle hammers up and down the line, and he knew they were all
set to rush the cabin the instant their leader gave the word.
Off on the other side of the clearing Giffard, the Runt, was seated on a
stump, like an ominous specter watching events. No help could be
expected from him. He had met with a rebuff that morning that his
shriveled and spiteful nature could never forget. So he sat tensely now
and waited, and Kit knew by the look of him that anything that happened
to the occupants of the cabin would be all right with Giffard. He even
might have egged the Indians on, had there been any need for that.
In the middle of the clearing, moving in the heavy snow between two
stumps, Kit caught sight of a tiny, gray-furred animal which was
struggling through the drifts, apparently trying to gain the shelter of
the nearer thickets. It was an old, whiskered house-rat. Kit recalled
that there had been rats in the cabin roof, and apparently this one had
been gassed out of his home by the smoking chimney.
The human mind is subject to the queerest aberrations. It was strange
that at this moment when Kit should have been terribly concerned with
his own troubles he could find time to think about a rat. But this
little creature was in a bad plight. It would starve or freeze to death
surely if it tried to live in the woods, and if it were caught in the
open by the predatory monsters that dwelt in the neighborhood--
Even at that moment Kit was conscious of a shadowy flutter in the air
above him, and he lifted his head in time to see one of the great, snowy
owls floating across the murky sky. The sharp senses of the Indians also
had caught the impalpable whisking of sound, and, without exception,
they too forgot their own affairs long enough to look up into the
morning dusk.
The huge, pallid night-bird flew softly above the roof of the cabin and
hovered for a moment to peer downward with his stupid, golden-tinged
eyes. Kit heard the Yellow Knives begin to mutter among themselves in
their own, ancient speech, and he saw them stir uneasily and crowd
closer towards the wall of the cabin. It was not a move of hostility,
but of fear, the impulse to hunt shelter. The savage faces were suddenly
stricken with awe and superstitious dread. This bird, as all Yellow
Knives knew, belonged to _Wetikoo_, the Devil’s regions, and they did
not wish him to fly above them.
The great owl was a weird apparition in the ghostly morning light. A
soft, downy body, poised graciously on soundless wings, at first glance
he seemed gentle and dovelike in his white-plumaged innocence. And then,
at closer range, might be seen his frightful head, the diabolically
hooked beak, the beautiful snowy floss of his cheeks and throat dabbled
in fresh blood. He had killed and dined gluttonously many times through
the night, and on his way back to the dark pits of the forest he could
pause in the quiet of dawn for one more killing.
The owl saw the gray rat wallowing in the snow, and by an imperceptible
movement of his expanded pinions he changed his course, slackened his
silent flight. Some clairvoyance of instinct at that instant warned the
rat of the stealthy form that had just skimmed the tree-tops. His sharp,
twitching nose twisted upward, he spotted the monstrous thing drifting
like a fog-wraith above him, and he tried to run, shrieking in terror.
For those few seconds the men in the clearing, white and Indian, lost
sight of their own grim business to watch tensely this lesser drama of
the wilderness.
The rat was doomed. Its tiny feet and legs sank deep in the loose packed
snow and it piled a drift in front of itself as it tried to drag its
body forward. The nearest thicket was a dozen yards away, and there
wasn’t a chance of its gaining cover.
The feathered legs of the owl reached down stiffly and the terrible
talons opened for their clutching stroke. Unhurried, unexcited the big
bird swerved and dipped earthward as lightly as a wafted ball of fluff.
Backed against a stump the rat turned at bay, squealing insanely.
The owl had turned his staring eyes towards the men for a moment, and
then he went about his butcher’s work, as indifferent to the human
spectators as though he were the unearthly spirit that the Indians
believed him to be. The men of the forest were mortally afraid of the
devils that owned these birds, and never dared to molest them. There was
no beast of the wilderness able to cope with the giant owls. So they
grew up without the instinct of fear.
Like a fleshless, disembodied thing, as aloof from the world, as quiet
as death, the great owl swooped.
What prompted Kitchener’s act, he could not have said. But somehow he
found his pistol butt set comfortably in the arch of his hand. His
sights notched themselves in line, and his finger squeezed the trigger.
He fired--not at the swift-moving owl, which was mostly invulnerable
feathers--but at the crouching rat. Nothing could have saved the little
animal, and it is better to die instantaneously than to be plucked to
bits alive. Kit might have missed the rushing bird, but the rat was
standing still. As the report slammed across the clearing the small,
gray body flopped headless in the snow, twitched once or twice, and
settled quietly at rest.
The great owl, almost scooping the ground, braked his descent as his
victim crumpled beneath him. The connoisseur of death recognized death
at sight. He was no vulturous feeder. He took his meat alive. With a
throaty, hissing sound that was not like any earthly sound, he lifted
himself on his shadows of wings, and vanished between here and there
like a smoke-puff dissipating in twilight.
Kitchener straightened his back and eased out a breath that was
threatening to burst his lungs. He looked at the beheaded rat lying so
still under its stump, he looked across the clearing at the
gaping-mouthed Giffard, and then he turned to look at the Indians.
Something had happened to the Yellow Knives in that astonishing moment.
Kit felt the change in their manner, he saw it in their gawking faces
and in their awed, incredulous eyes. They were huddled in an irresolute
group not far from the cabin door, watching him askance.
In an intuitive flash he realized that a miracle had intervened in his
behalf. These were no longer the fierce, rash men who would have shot
him down and burned the cabin above him. They knew nothing about the
law, but they knew much about shooting. They had seen him snip off a
rat’s head with his short-barreled gun at twenty paces. That sight
somehow had spoiled their stomachs for fighting. That same, quick-firing
gun might as readily pop off a half-dozen Yellow-Knife heads before they
could stop its spitting.
It might be impossible even to down a man who dared to cheat one of the
devil-birds of its prey. Such a one, who stood unsmitten afterwards and
mocked at fate with one high-cocked eyebrow--it was more than possible
that he also might be under the diabolical protection.
Kit read all of this in the guileless, bewildered faces, and he made the
most of his advantages. He moved nonchalantly outside the doorway,
keeping his pistol in his hand.
“You, Tom Salmonfish!” he said so sharply that the Indian jumped. “What
do you mean by bringing your friends here? It’s a bad place. None of you
may get out again.”
Salmonfish raised his anxious, squinting eyes, moistened his lips and
started to say something. Then he ducked his head with a spasmodic
movement and almost seemed to shrink within himself as another huge,
blood-smeared owl sailed in from the barrens to cross low over the cabin
roof.
Before the great, lazy-drifting bird had passed across the clearing a
second and a third and a fourth hove in sight above the whited line of
trees. One of them wheeled for an instant in his course, peered around
below him with solemn, glaring eyes. It might have seemed for those few
seconds as though he were trying to stare the watching men out of
countenance, twisting his gory head from side to side while he circled
and singled out individuals for his somber scrutiny.
The Yellow Knives refused to face the evil eyes looking down upon them.
Their shoulders hunched up, their heads bowed, and they huddled
together, looking absurdly like people who had been caught out
unprotected in bad weather. Kit, who was watching them narrowly,
suddenly raised his voice in a wild, singing shout:
“The owl and the pussycat went to sea in a beautiful
pea-green boat.
They took some honey and plenty of money wrapped up
in a five-pound note.”
He howled the refrain after the owls and beat the time in the air with
the muzzle of his pistol.
For a few seconds the Indians seemed to stop breathing, and they looked
at Kit like so many petrified men. They could not have understood the
words. It might have been an infernal chant for all they knew. In that
hushed nook of the forest the profane outburst of noise was
nerve-shattering. Two or three of the Indians on the outskirts began to
edge away from the cabin, and those in front heard the uneasy shuffling
behind them and were quick to catch the infection.
Before Tom Salmonfish could have realized what was happening he found
himself alone, confronting the mad white man who dared to taunt the
fearsome owls, who could shoot like a fiend, whether he really was one
or not, and who was waving his deadly pistol with a crazy disregard for
those in front of it.
Tom Salmonfish might have stuck, in spite of the owls and the loony
policeman, if anybody had stood behind him. But his braves had thought
of something to do somewhere else. Some of them were already half way
across the clearing, peering furtively over their shoulders as the owls
disappeared in the black timber below the creek. The remaining two or
three lingered momentarily, and then they shambled in an aimless fashion
behind their comrades.
“I’d beat it,” said Kit.
Tom Salmonfish scowled after his departing friends, and then his morbid
glance came back for an instant to the doorway. “We comin’ back an’ get
um soon,” he threatened. “Plenty time to-morrow. Plenty more of us.”
He stalked away with dignity to overtake the last man of the file, who
felt himself being crowded from behind, and stepped on the heels of the
man in front of him. It was like a push given to a line of ten-pins.
Those up ahead moved faster to keep out of the way of those in the rear,
who moved faster to keep up. By the time the retreat began to lose
itself in the underbrush on the farther side of the clearing it had
begun to look like a contest to see who could go at the best walking
clip, without running.
Kit closed the door and dropped the heavy draw-bar. He looked around the
smoky interior, and laughed. Mrs. Mayauk Oogly stood beside him, smiling
up at him, a friendly, cheerful smile. With a sudden surging of good
spirits he leaned forward and kissed the Esquimau woman first on one
roly-poly cheek, and then on the other.
This done, he thought there ought to be no partiality, so he turned and
caught Diane Durand in his arms and firmly kissed her startled, open
mouth. As the girl gasped and lithely struggled free he looked around at
the man who had caused all the trouble.
“We’ve got a reprieve for you, Oogly,” he said. “You lucky stiff! Now
you can be hanged decently, as you should be, by the police.”