DAYS OF TRIUMPH
One afternoon, in the beginning of the mush-snow, a long team of rakish
Malemutes, driven by an Athabasca French-Canadian, raced wildly into
the clearing about the post. A series of yells, and the wild cracking
of a thirty-foot caribou-gut whip, announced that the big change was at
hand--that the wilderness was awakening, and life was drawing near.
The entire post rushed out to meet the new-comer--men and dogs, the
little black-and-tan children, and even Williams' fat and lethargic
wife. For a few moments there was a scene of wild disorder, of fighting
Malemutes buried under a rush of angry huskies, while men shouted, and
the yelling Frenchman leaped about and cut his caribou-gut in vicious
slashes over the wolfish horde around his heavily laden sledge.
Partial order being restored, Mukee and Per-ee took charge of the
snarling Malemutes, and, surrounded by Williams' men, the trapper
stalked to the company's office. He was Jean de Gravois, the most
important man in the Fond du Lac country, for whose good-will the
company paid a small bonus. That he had made a record catch even the
children knew by the size of the packs on his sledge and by the swagger
in his walk.
Gravois was usually one of the last to appear at the annual gathering
of the wilderness fur-gatherers. He was a big man in reputation, as he
was small in stature. He was known as far west as the Peace River, and
eastward to Fort Churchill. He loved to make his appearance at the post
in a wild and picturesque rush when the rest of the forest rovers were
there to look on, and to envy or admire. He was one of the few of his
kind who had developed personal vanity along with unerring cunning in
the ways of the wild. Everybody liked Gravois, for he had a big soul in
him and was as fearless as a lynx; and he liked everybody, including
himself.
He explained his early arrival by announcing in a nonchalant manner
that after he had given his Malemutes a day's rest he was going on to
Fort Churchill, to bring back a wife. He hinted, with a punctuating
crack of his whip, that he would make a second visit, and a more
interesting one, at just about the time when the trappers were there in
force.
Jan Thoreau listened to him, hunching his shoulders a little at the
other's manifest air of importance. In turn, the French-Canadian
scrutinized Jan good-naturedly. Neither of them knew the part which
Jean de Gravois was to play in Jan's life.
Every hour after the half-breed's arrival quickened the pulse of
expectancy at the post. For six months it had been a small and solitary
unit of life in the heart of a big desolation. The first snow had
smothered it in a loneliness that was almost the loneliness of
desertion. With that first snow began the harvest days of the people of
the wilderness. Far and wide they were busy along their trap-lines,
their lonely shacks hidden in the shelter of thick swamps, in deep
chasms and dense forests. For six months the short days and the long
nights had been days and nights of fur-gathering.
During those months the post was silent. It lived and breathed, but
that was all. Its life, for Williams and the few people whom the
company kept with him, was a life of waiting. Now the change was at
hand. It was like the breath of spring to the awakening wilderness. The
forest people were moving. Trap-lines were being broken, shacks
abandoned, sledge-dogs put to harness. On the day that Jean de Gravois
left for Hudson's Bay, the company's supplies came in from Fort
Churchill--seven toboggans drawn by Eskimo dogs, laden with flour and
cloth; fifty pounds of beads, ammunition, and a hundred other things to
be exchanged for the furs that would soon be in London and Paris.
Fearfully Jan Thoreau ran out to meet the sledges. There were seven
Indians and one white man. Jan thrust himself close to look at the
white man. He wore two revolver-holsters and carried an automatic.
Unquestionably he was not a missionary, but an agent of the company
well prepared to care for the company's treasure.
Jan hurried back to the cabin, his heart bubbling with a strange joy.
"There ees no missioner, Mélisse!" he cried triumphantly, dropping
beside her, his face glowing with the gladness of his tidings. "You
shall be good and beautiful, lak HER, but you shall not be baptize by
missioner! He has not come!"
A few minutes later Cummins came in. One of his hands was torn and
bleeding.
"Those Eskimo dogs are demons!" he growled. "If they knew how to stand
on their legs, they'd eat our huskies alive! Will you help me with
this?"
Jan was at work in an instant, bandaging the wounded hand.
"It ees not deep," he said; and then, without looking up, he added:
"The missioner did not come."
"No," said Cummins shortly. "Neither has the mail. He is with that."
He did not notice the sudden tremble of Jan's fingers, nor did he see
the startled look that shot into the boy's down-turned eyes. Jan
finished his bandaging without betraying his emotion, and went back
with Cummins to the company's store.
The next morning, two Chippewayans trailed in with a team of mongrel
curs from the south. Thereafter Cummins found but little time to devote
to Mélisse. The snow was softening rapidly, and the daily increasing
warmth of the sun hastened the movement of the trappers. Mukee's people
from the western Barren Lands arrived first, bringing with them great
loads of musk-ox and caribou skins, and an army of big-footed,
long-legged Mackenzie hounds that pulled like horses and wailed like
whipped puppies when the huskies and Eskimo dogs set upon them.
From east and west and south all trails now led to the post. By the end
of the third day after the arrival of the company's supplies, a babel
of fighting, yelling, ceaselessly moving discord had driven forth the
peace and quiet in which Cummins' wife had died. The fighting and
discord were among the dogs, and the yelling was a necessary human
accompaniment. Half a hundred packs, almost as wild and as savage as
the wolves from whom half of them possessed a strong inheritance of
blood, were thrown suddenly into warring confusion.
All the dogs were fighters except the big, soft-throated Mackenzie
hounds, with the slow strength of oxen in their movements, and the
quarter-strained and half-strained mongrels from the south; and upon
these unfortunates the others preyed. Packs of fierce Labrador dogs,
never vanquished except by death, came from close to Hudson's Bay. Team
after team of the little yellow and gray Eskimo dogs, as quick with
their fangs as were their black and swift-running masters with their
hands and feet, met the much larger and darker-colored Malemutes from
the Athabasca. Enemies of all these, fighting, snapping, and snarling,
with the lust of killing deep born in them from their wolf progenitors,
packs of fierce huskies trailed in from all sides.
There was no cessation in the battle of the fangs. It began with the
first brute arrivals. It continued from dawn through the day, and
around the campfires at night. There was never an end to the strife
between the dogs, and between the men and the dogs. The snow was
stained and trailed with blood, and the scent of it added greater
fierceness to the wolf-breeds. Half a dozen battles were fought to the
death each day and night. Those that died were chiefly the south-bred
curs--mixtures of mastiff, Great Dane, and sheep-dogs--and the fatally
slow Mackenzie hounds.
From its towering height the sentinel spruce frowned down upon the
savage life that had come to outrage the grave it guarded. Yet beyond
all this discord and bloody strife there was a great, throbbing human
happiness--a beating of honest hearts filled to overflowing with the
joys of the moment, a welding of new friendships, a renewal of old
ones, a closer union of the brotherhood that holds together all things
under the cold gray of the northern skies.
There were no bickerings among the hunters, no anger of man against man
in the fierce voices that emphasized the slashing cuts of the
caribou-whips. If the fangs of a Hudson's Bay husky let out the
life-blood from the soft throat of a Mackenzie hound, it was a matter
of the dogs, and not of their owners. They did not quarrel.
One day a fierce Eskimo pack cornered a giant husky under the big
spruce, and slew him. When Cummins came from the company's store in the
afternoon, he saw a number of men, with bared heads, working about the
grave. He drew near enough to see that they were building around it a
barricade of saplings; and his breath choked him as he turned to the
cabin and Mélisse. He noticed, too, that no fires were built near the
spot consecrated to the memory of the dead woman; and to his cabin the
paths in the snow became deeper and wider where trod the wild forest
men who came to look upon the little Mélisse.
These were days of unprecedented prosperity and triumph for the baby,
as they were for the company. The cabin was half filled with strange
things, for all who came gave something to Mélisse. There were polar
bears' teeth, brought down by the little black men who in turn had got
them from the coast people; strange gods carved from wood; bits of fur,
bushy fox tails, lynx paws, dried fruits, candy bought at fabulous
prices in the store, and musk--always and incessantly musk--from
Mukee's people of the west barrens.
To Jan this homage to Mélisse was more than gratifying. It formed a
bond between him and Cummins' people. His heart went out to them, and
he went more freely among them, and made friends.