BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Courage of Captain Plum
The Honor of the Big Snows
The Gold Hunters
The Wolf Hunters
The Danger Trail
Philip Steele
The Great Lakes
Flower of the North
Isobel
Kazan
God’s Country—and the Woman
The Hunted Woman
The Grizzly King
Baree, Son of Kazan
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[Illustration: Baree had not killed, but he had conquered. His first
great day—or night—had come. The world was filled with a new promise for
him, as vast as the night itself.]
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BAREE, SON OF KAZAN
BY
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
ILLUSTRATED BY
FRANK B. HOFFMAN
Garden City New York
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
1917
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright, 1917, by
Doubleday, Page & Company
All rights reserved, including that of
translation into foreign languages,
including the Scandinavian
COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE RED BOOK CORPORATION
UNDER THE TITLE “A SON OF KAZAN”
------------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE
Since the publication of my two animal books, “Kazan” and “The Grizzly
King,” I have received so many hundreds of letters from friends of wild
animal life, all of which were more or less of an enquiring nature, that
I have been encouraged to incorporate in this preface of the third of my
series—“Baree, Son of Kazan”—something more of my desire and hope in
writing of wild life, and something of the foundation of fact whereupon
this and its companion books have been written.
I have always disliked the preaching of sermons in the pages of romance.
It is like placing a halter about an unsuspecting reader’s neck and
dragging him into paths for which he may have no liking. But if fact and
truth produce in the reader’s mind a message for himself, then a work
has been done. That is what I hope for in my nature books. The American
people are not and never have been lovers of wild life. As a nation we
have gone after Nature with a gun.
And what right, you may ask, has a confessed slaughterer of wild life
such as I have been to complain? None at all, I assure you. I have
twenty-seven guns—and I have used them all. I stand condemned as having
done more than my share toward extermination. But that does not lessen
the fact that I have learned; and in learning I have come to believe
that if boys and girls and men and women could be brought into the homes
and lives of wild birds and animals as their homes are made and their
lives are lived we would all understand at last that wherever a heart
beats it is very much like our own in the final analysis of things. To
see a bird singing on a twig means but little; but to live a season with
that bird, to be with it in courting days, in matehood and motherhood,
to understand its griefs as well as its gladness means a great deal. And
in my books it is my desire to tell of the lives of the wild things
which I know as they are actually lived. It is not my desire to humanize
them. If we are to love wild animals so much that we do not want to kill
them we _must know them as they actually live_. And in their lives, in
the _facts_ of their lives, there is so much of real and honest romance
and tragedy, so much that makes them akin to ourselves that the animal
biographer need not step aside from the paths of actuality to hold one’s
interest.
Perhaps rather tediously I have come to the few words I want to say
about Baree, the hero of this book. Baree, after all, is only another
Kazan. For it was Kazan I found in the way I have described—a bad dog, a
killer about to be shot to death by his master when chance, and my own
faith in him, gave him to me.
We travelled together for many thousands of miles through the
northland—on trails to the Barren Lands, to Hudson’s Bay and to the
Arctic. Kazan, the bad dog, the half-wolf, the killer—was the best
four-legged friend I ever had. He died near Fort MacPherson, on the Peel
River, and is buried there. And Kazan was the father of Baree; Gray
Wolf, the full-blooded wolf was his mother. Nepeese, The Willow, still
lives near God’s Lake; and it was in the country of Nepeese and her
father that for three lazy months I watched the doings at Beaver Town,
and went on fishing trips with Wakayoo, the bear. Sometimes I have
wondered if old Beaver Tooth himself did not in some way understand that
I had made his colony safe for his people. It was Pierrot’s trapping
ground; and to Pierrot—father of Nepeese—I gave my best rifle on his
word that he would not harm my beaver friends for two years. And the
people of Pierrot’s breed keep their word. Wakayoo, Baree’s big bear
friend is dead. He was killed as I have described, in that “pocket”
among the ridges, while I was on a jaunt to Beaver Town. We were
becoming good friends and I missed him a great deal. The story of
Pierrot and of his princess wife, Wyola, is true; they are buried side
by side under the tall spruce that stood near their cabin. Pierrot’s
murderer, instead of dying as I have told it, was killed in his attempt
to escape the Royal Mounted farther west. When I last saw Baree he was
at Lac Seul House, where I was the guest of Mr. William Patterson, the
factor; and the last word I heard from him was through my good friend
Frank Aldous, factor at White Dog Post, who wrote me only a few weeks
ago that he had recently seen Nepeese and Baree and the husband of
Nepeese, and that the happiness he found in their far wilderness home
made him regret that he was a bachelor. I feel sorry for Aldous. He is a
splendid young Englishman, unattached, and some day I am going to try
and marry him off. I have in mind some one at the present moment—a
fox-trapper’s daughter up near the Barren, very pretty, and educated at
a Missioner’s school; and as Aldous is going with me on my next trip I
may have something to say about them in the book that is to follow
“Baree, Son of Kazan.”
James Oliver Curwood.
Owosso, Michigan,
June 12, 1917.
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Baree had not killed, but he had conquered. His first great day—or
night—had come _Frontispiece_
Nepeese, the trapper’s daughter, known to the forest men as “The
Willow,” who became a big factor in the life of the pup Baree
Baree stood still. Nepeese was not more than twenty feet from him.
She sat on a rock, full in the early morning sun
With an oath McTaggart snatched his revolver from its holster. The
Willow was ahead of him
The Willow rose slowly to her feet and looked at Pierrot. Her eyes
were big and dark and steady
When Baree joined the pack, a maddened, mouth-frothing, snarling
horde, Napamoos, the young caribou bull, was well out in the river
------------------------------------------------------------------------
BAREE, SON OF KAZAN
CHAPTER I
To Baree, for many days after he was born, the world was a vast gloomy
cavern.
During these first days of his life his home was in the heart of a great
windfall where Gray Wolf, his blind mother, had found a safe nest for
his babyhood, and to which Kazan, her mate, came only now and then, his
eyes gleaming like strange balls of greenish fire in the darkness. It
was Kazan’s eyes that gave to Baree his first impression of something
existing away from his mother’s side, and they brought to him also his
discovery of vision. He could feel, he could smell, he could hear—but in
that black pit under the fallen timber he had never _seen_ until the
eyes came. At first they frightened him; then they puzzled him, and his
fear changed to an immense curiosity. He would be looking straight at
them, when all at once they would disappear. This was when Kazan turned
his head. And then they would flash back at him again out of the
darkness with such startling suddenness that Baree would involuntarily
shrink closer to his mother, who always trembled and shivered in a
strange sort of way when Kazan came in.
Baree, of course, would never know their story. He would never know that
Gray Wolf, his mother, was a full-blooded wolf, and that Kazan, his
father, was a dog. In him nature was already beginning its wonderful
work, but it would never go beyond certain limitations. It would tell
him, in time, that his beautiful wolf-mother was blind, but he would
never know of that terrible battle between Gray Wolf and the lynx in
which his mother’s sight had been destroyed. Nature could tell him
nothing of Kazan’s merciless vengeance, of the wonderful years of their
matehood, of their loyalty, their strange adventures in the great
Canadian wilderness—it could make him only a son of Kazan.
But at first, and for many days, it was all mother. Even after his eyes
had opened wide and he had found his legs so that he could stumble about
a little in the darkness, nothing existed for Baree but his mother. When
he was old enough to be playing with sticks and moss out in the
sunlight, he still did not know what she looked like. But to him she was
big and soft and warm, and she licked his face with her tongue, and
talked to him in a gentle, whimpering way that at last made him find his
own voice in a faint, squeaky yap.
And then came that wonderful day when the greenish balls of fire that
were Kazan’s eyes came nearer and nearer, a little at a time, and very
cautiously. Heretofore Gray Wolf had warned him back. To be alone was
the first law of her wild breed during mothering-time. A low snarl from
her throat, and Kazan had always stopped. But on this day the snarl did
not come. In Gray Wolf’s throat it died away in a low, whimpering sound.
A note of loneliness, of gladness, of a great yearning. “It is all right
now,” she was saying to Kazan; and Kazan—pausing for a moment to make
sure—replied with an answering note deep in his throat.
Still slowly, as if not quite sure of what he would find, Kazan came to
them, and Baree snuggled closer to his mother. He heard Kazan as he
dropped down heavily on his belly close to Gray Wolf. He was
unafraid—and mightily curious. And Kazan, too, was curious. He sniffed.
In the gloom his ears were alert. After a little Baree began to move. An
inch at a time he dragged himself away from Gray Wolf’s side. Every
muscle in her lithe body tensed. Again her wolf blood was warning her.
There was danger for Baree. Her lips drew back, baring her fangs. Her
throat trembled, but the note in it never came. Out of the darkness two
yards away came a soft, puppyish whine, and the caressing sound of
Kazan’s tongue.
Baree had felt the thrill of his first great adventure. He had
discovered his father.
This all happened in the third week of Baree’s life. He was just
eighteen days old when Gray Wolf allowed Kazan to make the acquaintance
of his son. If it had not been for Gray Wolf’s blindness and the memory
of that day on the Sun Rock when the lynx had destroyed her eyes, she
would have given birth to Baree in the open, and his legs would have
been quite strong. He would have known the sun and the moon and the
stars; he would have realized what the thunder meant, and would have
seen the lightning flashing in the sky. But as it was, there had been
nothing for him to do in that black cavern under the windfall but
stumble about a little in the darkness, and lick with his tiny red
tongue the raw bones that were strewn about them. Many times he had been
left alone. He had heard his mother come and go, and nearly always it
had been in response to a yelp from Kazan that came to them like a
distant echo. He had never felt a very strong desire to follow until
this day when Kazan’s big, cool tongue caressed his face. In those
wonderful seconds nature was at work. His instinct was not quite born
until then. And when Kazan went away, leaving them alone in darkness,
Baree whimpered for him to come back, just as he had cried for his
mother when now and then she had left him in response to her mate’s
call.
The sun was straight above the forest when, an hour or two after Kazan’s
visit, Gray Wolf slipped away. Between Baree’s nest and the top of the
windfall were forty feet of jammed and broken timber through which not a
ray of light could break. This blackness did not frighten him, for he
had yet to learn the meaning of light. Day, and not night, was to fill
him with his first great terror. So quite fearlessly, with a yelp for
his mother to wait for him, he began to follow. If Gray Wolf heard him,
she paid no attention to his call, and the scrape of her claws on the
dead timber died swiftly away.
This time Baree did not stop at the eight-inch log which had always shut
in his world in that particular direction. He clambered to the top of it
and rolled over on the other side. Beyond this was vast adventure, and
he plunged into it courageously.
It took him a long time to make the first twenty yards. Then he came to
a log worn smooth by the feet of Gray Wolf and Kazan, and stopping every
few feet to send out a whimpering call for his mother, he made his way
farther and farther along it. As he went, there grew slowly a curious
change in this world of his. He had known nothing but blackness. And now
this blackness seemed breaking itself up into strange shapes and
shadows. Once he caught the flash of a fiery streak above him—a gleam of
sunshine—and it startled him so that he flattened himself down upon the
log and did not move for half a minute. Then he went on. An ermine
squeaked under him. He heard the swift rustling of a squirrel’s feet,
and a curious _whut-whut-whut_ that was not at all like any sound his
mother had ever made. He was off the trail.
The log was no longer smooth, and it was leading him upward higher and
higher into the tangle of the windfall, and was growing narrower every
foot he progressed. He whined. His soft little nose sought vainly for
the warm scent of his mother. The end came suddenly when he lost his
balance and fell. He let out a piercing cry of terror as he felt himself
slipping, and then plunged downward. He must have been high up in the
windfall, for to Baree it was a tremendous fall. His soft little body
thumped from log to log as he shot this way and that, and when at last
he stopped, there was scarcely a breath left in him. But he stood up
quickly on his four trembling legs—and blinked.
A new terror held Baree rooted there. In an instant the whole world had
changed. It was a flood of sunlight. Everywhere he looked he could see
strange things. But it was the sun that frightened him most. It was his
first impression of fire, and it made his eyes smart. He would have
slunk back into the friendly gloom of the windfall, but at this moment
Gray Wolf came around the end of a great log, followed by Kazan. She
muzzled Baree joyously, and Kazan in a most doglike fashion wagged his
tail. This mark of the dog was to be a part of Baree. Half wolf, he
would always wag his tail. He tried to wag it now. Perhaps Kazan saw the
effort, for he emitted a muffled yelp of approbation as he sat back on
his haunches.
Or he might have been saying to Gray Wolf:
“Well, we’ve got the little rascal out of that windfall at last, haven’t
we?”
For Baree it had been a great day. He had discovered his father—and the
world.