THE RED DEATH
Kazan and Gray Wolf wandered northward into the Fond du Lac country, and
were there when Jacques, a Hudson Bay Company's runner, came up to the
post from the south with the first authentic news of the dread
plague--the smallpox. For weeks there had been rumors on all sides. And
rumor grew into rumor. From the east, the south and the west they
multiplied, until on all sides the Paul Reveres of the wilderness were
carrying word that _La Mort Rouge_--the Red Death--was at their heels,
and the chill of a great fear swept like a shivering wind from the edge
of civilization to the bay. Nineteen years before these same rumors had
come up from the south, and the Red Terror had followed. The horror of
it still remained with the forest people, for a thousand unmarked
graves, shunned like a pestilence, and scattered from the lower waters
of James Bay to the lake country of the Athabasca, gave evidence of the
toll it demanded.
Now and then in their wanderings Kazan and Gray Wolf had come upon the
little mounds that covered the dead. Instinct--something that was
infinitely beyond the comprehension of man--made them _feel_ the
presence of death about them, perhaps smell it in the air. Gray Wolf's
wild blood and her blindness gave her an immense advantage over Kazan
when it came to detecting those mysteries of the air and the earth which
the eyes were not made to see. Each day that had followed that terrible
moonlit night on the Sun Rock, when the lynx had blinded her, had added
to the infallibility of her two chief senses--hearing and scent. And it
was she who discovered the presence of the plague first, just as she had
scented the great forest fire hours before Kazan had found it in the
air.
Kazan had lured her back to a trap-line. The trail they found was old.
It had not been traveled for many days. In a trap they found a rabbit,
but it had been dead a long time. In another there was the carcass of a
fox, torn into bits by the owls. Most of the traps were sprung. Others
were covered with snow. Kazan, with his three-quarters strain of dog,
ran over the trail from trap to trap, intent only on something
alive--meat to devour. Gray Wolf, in her blindness, scented _death_. It
shivered in the tree-tops above her. She found it in every trap-house
they came to--death--_man death_. It grew stronger and stronger, and
she whined, and nipped Kazan's flank. And Kazan went on. Gray Wolf
followed him to the edge of the clearing in which Loti's cabin stood,
and then she sat back on her haunches, raised her blind face to the gray
sky, and gave a long and wailing cry. In that moment the bristles began
to stand up along Kazan's spine. Once, long ago, he had howled before
the tepee of a master who was newly dead, and he settled back on his
haunches, and gave the death-cry with Gray Wolf. He, too, scented it
now. Death was in the cabin, and over the cabin there stood a sapling
pole, and at the end of the pole there fluttered a strip of red cotton
rag--the warning flag of the plague from Athabasca to the bay. This man,
like a hundred other heroes of the North, had run up the warning before
he laid himself down to die. And that same night, in the cold light of
the moon, Kazan and Gray Wolf swung northward into the country of the
Fond du Lac.
There preceded them a messenger from the post on Reindeer Lake, who was
passing up the warning that had come from Nelson House and the country
to the southeast.
"There's smallpox on the Nelson," the messenger informed Williams, at
Fond du Lac, "and it has struck the Crees on Wollaston Lake. God only
knows what it is doing to the Bay Indians, but we hear it is wiping out
the Chippewas between the Albany and the Churchill." He left the same
day with his winded dogs. "I'm off to carry word to the Reveillon people
to the west," he explained.
Three days later, word came from Churchill that all of the company's
servants and his majesty's subjects west of the bay should prepare
themselves for the coming of the Red Terror. Williams' thin face turned
as white as the paper he held, as he read the words of the Churchill
factor.
"It means dig graves," he said. "That's the only preparation we can
make."
He read the paper aloud to the men at Fond du Lac, and every available
man was detailed to spread the warning throughout the post's territory.
There was a quick harnessing of dogs, and on each sledge that went out
was a roll of red cotton cloth--rolls that were ominous of death, lurid
signals of pestilence and horror, whose touch sent shuddering chills
through the men who were about to scatter them among the forest people.
Kazan and Gray Wolf struck the trail of one of these sledges on the Gray
Beaver, and followed it for half a mile. The next day, farther to the
west, they struck another, and on the fourth day still a third. The last
trail was fresh, and Gray Wolf drew back from it as if stung, her fangs
snarling. On the wind there came to them the pungent odor of smoke. They
cut at right angles to the trail, Gray Wolf leaping clear of the marks
in the snow, and climbed to the cap of a ridge. To windward of them, and
down in the plain, a cabin was burning. A team of huskies and a man were
disappearing in the spruce forest. Deep down in his throat Kazan gave a
rumbling whine. Gray Wolf stood as rigid as a rock. In the cabin a
plague-dead man was burning. It was the law of the North. And the
mystery of the funeral pyre came again to Kazan and Gray Wolf. This time
they did not howl, but slunk down into the farther plain, and did not
stop that day until they had buried themselves deep in a dry and
sheltered swamp ten miles to the north.
After this they followed the days and weeks which marked the winter of
nineteen hundred and ten as one of the most terrible in all the history
of the Northland--a single month in which wild life as well as human
hung in the balance, and when cold, starvation and plague wrote a
chapter in the lives of the forest people which will not be forgotten
for generations to come.
In the swamp Kazan and Gray Wolf found a home under a windfall. It was a
small comfortable nest, shut in entirely from the snow and wind. Gray
Wolf took possession of it immediately. She flattened herself out on her
belly, and panted to show Kazan her contentment and satisfaction. Nature
again kept Kazan close at her side. A vision came to him, unreal and
dream-like, of that wonderful night under the stars--ages and ages ago,
it seemed--when he had fought the leader of the wolf-pack, and young
Gray Wolf had crept to his side after his victory and had given herself
to him for mate. But this mating season there was no running after the
doe or the caribou, or mingling with the wild pack. They lived chiefly
on rabbit and spruce partridge, because of Gray Wolf's blindness. Kazan
could hunt those alone. The hair had now grown over Gray Wolf's
sightless eyes. She had ceased to grieve, to rub her eyes with her paws,
to whine for the sunlight, the golden moon and the stars. Slowly she
began to forget that she had ever seen those things. She could now run
more swiftly at Kazan's flank. Scent and hearing had become wonderfully
keen. She could wind a caribou two miles distant, and the presence of
man she could pick up at an even greater distance. On a still night she
had heard the splash of a trout half a mile away. And as these two
things--scent and hearing--became more and more developed in her, those
same senses became less active in Kazan.
He began to depend upon Gray Wolf. She would point out the hiding-place
of a partridge fifty yards from their trail. In their hunts she became
the leader--until game was found. And as Kazan learned to trust to her
in the hunt, so he began just as instinctively to heed her warnings. If
Gray Wolf reasoned, it was to the effect that without Kazan she would
die. She had tried hard now and then to catch a partridge, or a rabbit,
but she had always failed. Kazan meant life to her. And--if she
reasoned--it was to make herself indispensable to her mate. Blindness
had made her different than she would otherwise have been. Again nature
promised motherhood to her. But she did not--as she would have done in
the open, and with sight--hold more and more aloof from Kazan as the
days passed. It was her habit, spring, summer and winter, to snuggle
close to Kazan and lie with her beautiful head resting on his neck or
back. If Kazan snarled at her she did not snap back, but slunk down as
though struck a blow. With her warm tongue she would lick away the ice
that froze to the long hair between Kazan's toes. For days after he had
run a sliver in his paw she nursed his foot. Blindness had made Kazan
absolutely necessary to her existence--and now, in a different way, she
became more and more necessary to Kazan. They were happy in their swamp
home. There was plenty of small game about them, and it was warm under
the windfall. Rarely did they go beyond the limits of the swamp to hunt.
Out on the more distant plains and the barren ridges they occasionally
heard the cry of the wolf-pack on the trail of meat, but it no longer
thrilled them with a desire to join in the chase.
One day they struck farther than usual to the west. They left the swamp,
crossed a plain over which a fire had swept the preceding year, climbed
a ridge, and descended into a second plain. At the bottom Gray Wolf
stopped and sniffed the air. At these times Kazan always watched her,
waiting eagerly and nervously if the scent was too faint for him to
catch. But to-day he caught the edge of it, and he knew why Gray Wolf's
ears flattened, and her hindquarters drooped. The scent of game would
have made her rigid and alert. But it was not the game smell. It was
human, and Gray Wolf slunk behind Kazan and whined. For several minutes
they stood without moving or making a sound, and then Kazan led the way
on. Less than three hundred yards away they came to a thick clump of
scrub spruce, and almost ran into a snow-smothered tepee. It was
abandoned. Life and fire had not been there for a long time. But from
the tepee had come the man-smell. With legs rigid and his spine
quivering Kazan approached the opening to the tepee. He looked in. In
the middle of the tepee, lying on the charred embers of a fire, lay a
ragged blanket--and in the blanket was wrapped the body of a little
Indian child. Kazan could see the tiny moccasined feet. But so long had
death been there that he could scarcely smell the presence of it. He
drew back, and saw Gray Wolf cautiously nosing about a long and
peculiarly shaped hummock in the snow. She had traveled about it three
times, but never approaching nearer than a man could have reached with a
rifle barrel. At the end of her third circle she sat down on her
haunches, and Kazan went close to the hummock and sniffed. Under that
bulge in the snow, as well as in the tepee, there was death. They slunk
away, their ears flattened and their tails drooping until they trailed
the snow, and did not stop until they reached their swamp home. Even
there Gray Wolf still sniffed the horror of the plague, and her muscles
twitched and shivered as she lay close at Kazan's side.
That night the big white moon had around its edge a crimson rim. It
meant cold--intense cold. Always the plague came in the days of greatest
cold--the lower the temperature the more terrible its havoc. It grew
steadily colder that night, and the increased chill penetrated to the
heart of the windfall, and drew Kazan and Gray Wolf closer together.
With dawn, which came at about eight o'clock, Kazan and his blind mate
sallied forth into the day. It was fifty degrees below zero. About them
the trees cracked with reports like pistol-shots. In the thickest spruce
the partridges were humped into round balls of feathers. The snow-shoe
rabbits had burrowed deep under the snow or to the heart of the heaviest
windfalls. Kazan and Gray Wolf found few fresh trails, and after an
hour of fruitless hunting they returned to their lair. Kazan, dog-like,
had buried the half of a rabbit two or three days before, and they dug
this out of the snow and ate the frozen flesh.
All that day it grew colder--steadily colder. The night that followed
was cloudless, with a white moon and brilliant stars. The temperature
had fallen another ten degrees, and nothing was moving. Traps were never
sprung on such nights, for even the furred things--the mink, and the
ermine, and the lynx--lay snug in the holes and the nests they had found
for themselves. An increasing hunger was not strong enough to drive
Kazan and Gray Wolf from their windfall. The next day there was no break
in the terrible cold, and toward noon Kazan set out on a hunt for meat,
leaving Gray Wolf in the windfall. Being three-quarters dog, food was
more necessary to Kazan than to his mate. Nature has fitted the
wolf-breed for famine, and in ordinary temperature Gray Wolf could have
lived for a fortnight without food. At sixty degrees below zero she
could exist a week, perhaps ten days. Only thirty hours had passed
sinee they had devoured the last of the frozen rabbit, and she was quite
satisfied to remain in their snug retreat.
But Kazan was hungry. He began to hunt in the face of the wind,
traveling toward the burned plain. He nosed about every windfall that he
came to, and investigated the thickets. A thin shot-like snow had
fallen, and in this--from the windfall to the burn--he found but a
single trail, and that was the trail of an ermine. Under a windfall he
caught the warm scent of a rabbit, but the rabbit was as safe from him
there as were the partridges in the trees, and after an hour of futile
digging and gnawing he gave up his effort to reach it. For three hours
he had hunted when he returned to Gray Wolf. He was exhausted. While
Gray Wolf, with the instinct of the wild, had saved her own strength and
energy, Kazan had been burning up his reserve forces, and was hungrier
than ever.
The moon rose clear and brilliant in the sky again that night, and Kazan
set out once more on the hunt. He urged Gray Wolf to accompany him,
whining for her outside the windfall--returning for her twice--but
Gray Wolf laid her ears aslant and refused to move. The temperature had
now fallen to sixty-five or seventy degrees below zero, and with it
there came from the north an increasing wind, making the night one in
which human life could not have existed for an hour. By midnight Kazan
was back under the windfall. The wind grew stronger. It began to wail in
mournful dirges over the swamp, and then it burst in fierce shrieking
volleys, with intervals of quiet between. These were the first warnings
from the great barrens that lay between the last lines of timber and the
Arctic. With morning the storm burst in all its fury from out of the
north, and Gray Wolf and Kazan lay close together and shivered as they
listened to the roar of it over the windfall. Once Kazan thrust his head
and shoulders out from the shelter of the fallen trees, but the storm
drove him back. Everything that possessed life had sought shelter,
according to its way and instinct. The furred creatures like the mink
and the ermine were safest, for during the warmer hunting days they were
of the kind that cached meat. The wolves and the foxes had sought out
the windfalls, and the rocks. Winged things, with the exception of the
owls, who were a tenth part body and nine-tenths feathers, burrowed
under snow-drifts or found shelter in thick spruce. To the hoofed and
horned animals the storm meant greatest havoc. The deer, the caribou and
the moose could not crawl under windfalls or creep between rocks. The
best they could do was to lie down in the lee of a drift, and allow
themselves to be covered deep with the protecting snow. Even then they
could not keep their shelter long, for they had to _eat_. For eighteen
hours out of the twenty-four the moose had to feed to keep himself alive
during the winter. His big stomach demanded quantity, and it took him
most of his time to nibble from the tops of bushes the two or three
bushels he needed a day. The caribou required almost as much--the deer
least of the three.
And the storm kept up that day, and the next, and still a third--three
days and three nights--and the third day and night there came with it a
stinging, shot-like snow that fell two feet deep on the level, and in
drifts of eight and ten. It was the "heavy snow" of the Indians--the
snow that lay like lead on the earth, and under which partridges and
rabbits were smothered in thousands.
On the fourth day after the beginning of the storm Kazan and Gray Wolf
issued forth from the windfall. There was no longer a wind--no more
falling snow. The whole world lay under a blanket of unbroken white, and
it was intensely cold.
The plague had worked its havoc with men. Now had come the days of
famine and death for the wild things.