No man has ever looked clearly into the mystery of death as it is
impinged upon the senses of the northern dog. It comes to him,
sometimes, with the wind; most frequently it must come with the wind,
and yet there are ten thousand masters in the northland who will swear
that their dogs have given warning of death hours before it actually
came; and there are many of these thousands who know from experience
that their teams will stop a quarter or half a mile from a stranger
cabin in which there is unburied dead.
Yesterday Baree had smelled death, and he knew without process of
reasoning that the dead was Pierrot. How he knew this, and why he
accepted the fact as inevitable, is one of the mysteries which at times
seems to give the direct challenge to those who concede nothing more
than instinct to the brute mind. He knew that Pierrot was dead without
exactly knowing what death was. But of one thing he was sure: he would
never see Pierrot again; he would never hear his voice again; he would
never hear again the _swish-swish-swish_ of his snowshoes in the trail
ahead, and so on the trap-line he did not look for Pierrot. Pierrot was
gone forever. But Baree had not yet associated death with Nepeese. He
was filled with a great uneasiness; what came to him from out of the
chasm had made him tremble with fear and suspense; he sensed the thrill
of something strange, of something impending, and yet even as he had
given the death-howl in the chasm, it must have been for Pierrot. For he
believed that Nepeese was alive, and he was now just as sure that he
would overtake her on the trap-line as he was positive yesterday that he
would find her at the birch-bark tepee.
Since yesterday morning’s breakfast with the Willow, Baree had gone
without eating; to appease his hunger meant to hunt, and his mind was
too filled with his quest of Nepeese for that. He would have gone hungry
all that day, but in the third mile from the cabin he came to a trap in
which there was a big snowshoe rabbit. The rabbit was still alive, and
he killed it and ate his fill. Until dark he did not miss a trap. In one
of them there was a lynx; in another a fisher-cat; out on the white
surface of a lake he sniffed at a snowy mound under which lay the body
of a red fox killed by one of Pierrot’s poison baits. Both the lynx and
the fisher-cat were alive, and the steel chains of their traps clanked
sharply as they prepared to give Baree battle. But Baree was
uninterested. He hurried on, his uneasiness growing as the day darkened
and he found no sign of the Willow.
It was a wonderfully clear night after the storm—cold and brilliant,
with the shadows standing out as clearly as living things. The third
idea came to Baree now. He was, like all animals, largely of one idea at
a time—a creature with whom all lesser impulses were governed by a
single leading impulse. And this impulse, in the glow of the starlit
night, was to reach as quickly as possible the first of Pierrot’s two
cabins on the trap-line. There he would find Nepeese!
We won’t call the process by which Baree came to this conclusion a
process of reasoning; instinct or reasoning, whatever it was, a fixed
and positive faith came to Baree just the same. He began to miss the
traps in his haste to cover distance—to reach the cabin. It was
twenty-five miles from Pierrot’s burned home to the first trap-cabin,
and Baree had made ten of these by nightfall. The remaining fifteen were
the most difficult. In the open spaces the snow was belly-deep and soft;
frequently lie plunged through drifts in which for a few moments he was
buried. Three times during the early part of the night Baree heard the
savage dirge of the wolves. Once it was a wild pæan of triumph as the
hunters pulled down their kill less than half a mile away in the deep
forest. But the voice no longer called to him. It was repellent—a voice
of hatred and of treachery. Each time that he heard it he stopped in his
tracks and snarled, while his spine stiffened.
At midnight Baree came to the tiny amphitheatre in the forest where
Pierrot had cut the logs for the first of his trap-line cabins. For at
least a minute Baree stood at the edge of the clearing, his ears very
alert, his eyes bright with hope and expectation, while he sniffed the
air. There was no smoke, no sound, no light in the one window of the log
shack. His disappointment fell on him even as he stood there; again he
sensed the fact of his aloneness, of the barrenness of his quest. There
was a disheartened slouch to his body as he made his way through the
snow to the cabin door. He had travelled twenty-five miles, and he was
tired.
The snow was drifted deep at the doorway, and here Baree sat down and
whined. It was no longer the anxious, questing whine of a few hours ago.
Now it voiced hopelessness and a deep despair. For half an hour he sat
shivering with his back to the door and his face to the starlit
wilderness, as if there still remained the fleeting hope that Nepeese
might follow after him over the trail. Then he burrowed himself a hole
deep in the snowdrift and passed the remainder of the night in uneasy
slumber.
With the first light of day Baree resumed the trail. He was not so alert
this morning. There was the disconsolate droop to his tail which the
Indians call the _Akoosewin_—the sign of the sick dog. And Baree was
sick—not of body but of soul. The keenness of his hope had died, and he
no longer expected to find the Willow. The second cabin at the far end
of the trap-line drew him on, but it inspired in him none of the
enthusiasm with which he had hurried to the first. He travelled slowly
and spasmodically, his suspicions of the forests again replacing the
excitement of his quest. He approached each of Pierrot’s traps and
deadfalls cautiously, and twice he showed his fangs—once at a marten
that snapped at him from under a root where it had dragged the trap in
which it was caught, and the second time at a big snowy owl that had
come to steal bait and was now a prisoner at the end of a steel chain.
It may be that Baree thought it was Oohoomisew and that he still
remembered vividly the treacherous assault and fierce battle of that
night when, as a puppy, he was dragging his sore and wounded body
through the mystery and fear of the big timber. For he did more than to
show his fangs. He tore the owl into pieces.
There were plenty of rabbits in Pierrot’s traps, and Baree did not go
hungry. He reached the second trap-line cabin late in the afternoon,
after ten hours of travelling. He met with no very great disappointment
here, for he had not anticipated very much. The snow had banked this
cabin even higher than the other. It lay three feet deep against the
door, and the window was white with a thick coating of frost. At this
place, which was close to the edge of a big barren, and unsheltered by
the thick forests farther back, Pierrot had built a shelter for his
firewood, and in this shelter Baree made his temporary home. All the
next day he remained somewhere near the end of the trap-line, skirting
the edge of the barren and investigating the short side line of a dozen
traps which Pierrot and Nepeese had strung through a swamp in which
there had been many signs of lynx. It was the third day before he set
out on his return to the Gray Loon.
He did not travel very fast, spending two days in covering the
twenty-five miles between the first and the second trap-line cabins. At
the second cabin he remained for three days, and it was on the ninth day
that he reached the Gray Loon. There was no change. There were no tracks
in the snow but his own, made nine days ago.
Baree’s quest for Nepeese became now more or less involuntary, a sort of
daily routine. For a week he made his burrow in the dog-corral, and at
least twice between dawn and darkness he would go to the birch-bark
tepee and the chasm. His trail, soon beaten hard in the snow, became as
fixed as Pierrot’s trap-line. It cut straight through the forest to the
tepee, swinging slightly to the east so that it crossed the frozen
surface of the Willow’s swimming-pool. From the tepee it swung in a
circle through a part of the forest where Nepeese had frequently
gathered armfuls of crimson fire-flowers, and then to the chasm. Up and
down the edge of the gorge it went, down into the little cup at the
bottom of the chasm, and thence straight back to the dog-corral.
And then, of a sudden, Baree made a change. He spent a night in the
tepee. After that, whenever he was at the Gray Loon, during the day he
always slept in the tepee. The two blankets were his bed—and they were a
part of Nepeese. And there, all through the long winter, he waited.
If Nepeese had returned in February and could have taken him unaware,
she would have found a changed Baree. He was more than ever like a wolf;
yet he never gave the wolf-howl now, and always he snarled deep in his
throat when he heard the cry of the pack. For several weeks the old
trap-line had supplied him with meat, but now he hunted. The tepee, in
and out, was scattered with fur and bones. Once—alone—he caught a young
deer in deep snow and killed it. Again, in the heart of a fierce
February storm, he pursued a bull caribou so closely that it plunged
over a cliff and broke its neck. He lived well, and in size and strength
he was growing swiftly into a giant of his kind. In another six months
he would be as large as Kazan, and his jaws were almost as powerful,
even now.
Three times that winter Baree fought—once with a lynx that sprang down
upon him from a windfall while he was eating a freshly killed rabbit,
and twice with two lone wolves. The lynx tore him unmercifully before it
fled into the windfall. The younger of the wolves he killed; the other
fight was a draw. More and more he became an outcast, living alone with
his dreams and his smouldering hopes.
And Baree did dream. Many times, as he lay in the tepee, he would hear
the voice of Nepeese. He would hear her sweet calling, her laughter, the
sound of his name, and often he would start up to his feet—the old Baree
for a thrilling moment or two—only to lie down in his nest again with a
low, grief-filled whine. And always when he heard the snap of a twig or
some other sound in the forest, it was thought of Nepeese that flashed
first into his brain. Some day she would return. That belief was a part
of his existence as much as the sun and the moon and the stars.
The winter passed, and spring came, and still Baree continued to haunt
his old trails, even going now and then over the old trap-line as far as
the first of the two cabins. The traps were rusted and sprung now; the
thawing snow disclosed bones and feathers between their jaws; under the
deadfalls were remnants of fur, and out on the ice of the lakes were
picked skeletons of foxes and wolves that had taken the poison-baits.
The last snow went. The swollen streams sang in the forests and cañons.
The grass turned green, and the first flowers came.
Surely this was the time for Nepeese to come home! He watched for her
expectantly. He went still more frequently to their swimming-pool in the
forest, and he hung closely to the burned cabin and the dog-corral.
Twice he sprang into the pool and whined as he swam about, as though she
surely must join him in their old water frolic. And now, as the spring
passed and summer came, there settled upon him slowly the gloom and
misery of utter hopelessness. The flowers were all out now, and even the
bakneesh vines glowed like red fire in the woods. Patches of green were
beginning to hide the charred heap where the cabin had stood, and the
blue-flower vines that covered the princess mother’s grave were reaching
out toward Pierrot’s, as if the princess mother herself were the spirit
of them.
All these things were happening, and the birds had mated and nested, and
still Nepeese did not come! And at last something broke inside of Baree,
his last hope, perhaps, his last dream; and one day he bade good-bye to
the Gray Loon.
No one can say what it cost him to go; no one can say how he fought
against the things that were holding him to the tepee, the old
swimming-pool, the familiar paths in the forest, and the two graves that
were not so lonely now under the tall spruce. He went. He had no
reason—simply went. It may be that there is a Master whose hand guides
the beast as well as the man, and that we know just enough of this
guidance to call it instinct. For, in dragging himself away, Baree faced
the Great Adventure.
It was there, in the north, waiting for him—and into the north he went.