ON SNARE LAKE
When Bob MacNair left Chloe Elliston's camp, he swung around by the way
of Mackay Lake, a detour that required two weeks' time and added
immeasurably to the discomfort of the journey. Day by day, upon lake,
river, and portage, Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack wondered much at
his silence and the unwonted hardness of his features.
These two Indians knew MacNair. For ten years, day and night, they had
stood at his beck and call; had followed him through all the vast
wilderness that lies between the railways and the frozen sea. They had
slept with him, had feasted and starved with him, at his shoulder faced
death in a hundred guises, and they loved him as men love their God.
They had followed him during the lean years when, contrary to the
wishes of his father, the stern-eyed factor at Fort Norman, he had
refused the offers of the company and devoted his time, winter and
summer, to the exploration of rivers and lakes, rock ridges and
mountains, and the tundra that lay between, in search of the lost
copper mines of the Indians; the mines that lured Hearne into the North
in 1771, and which Hearne forgot in the discovery of a fur empire so
vast as to stagger belief.
But, as the canoe forged northward, Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack
held their peace, and when they arrived at the fort, MacNair growled an
order, and sought his cabin beside the wall of the stockade.
A half hour later, when the Indians had gathered in response to the
hurried word of Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack, MacNair stepped from
his cabin and addressed them in their own language, or rather in the
jargon--the compromise language of the North--by means of which the
minds of white men and Indians meet on common ground. He warned them
against Pierre Lapierre, the _kultus_ breed of whom most of them
already knew, and he told them of the girl and her school at the mouth
of the Yellow Knife. And then, in no uncertain terms, he commanded
them to have nothing whatever to do with the school, nor with Lapierre.
Whereupon, Sotenah, a leader among the young men, arose, and after a
long and flowery harangue in which he lauded and extolled the wisdom of
MacNair and the benefits and advantages that accrued to the Indians by
reason of his patronage, vociferously counselled a summary descent upon
the fort of the _Mesahchee Kloochman_.
The proclamation was received with loud acclaim, and it was with no
little difficulty that MacNair succeeded in quieting the turbulence and
restoring order. After which he rebuked Sotenah severely and laid
threat upon the Indians that if so much as a hair of the white
_kloochman_ was harmed he would kill, with his own hand, the man who
wrought the harm.
As for Pierre Lapierre and his band, they must be crushed and driven
out of the land of the lakes and the rivers, but the time was not yet.
He, MacNair, would tell them when to strike, and only if Lapierre's
Indians were found prowling about the vicinity of Snare Lake were they
to be molested.
The Indians dispersed and, slinging a rifle over his shoulder, MacNair
swung off alone into the bush.
Bob MacNair knew the North; knew its lakes and its rivers, its forests
and its treeless barrens. He knew its hardships, dangers and
limitations, and he knew its gentler moods, its compensations, and its
possibilities. Also, he knew its people, its savage primitive children
who call it home, and its invaders--good and bad, and worse than bad.
The men who infest the last frontier, pushing always northward for
barter, or for the saving of souls.
He understood Pierre Lapierre, his motives and his methods. But the
girl he did not understand, and her presence on the Yellow Knife
disturbed him not a little. Had chance thrown her into the clutches of
Lapierre? And had the man set about deliberately to use her school as
an excuse for the establishment of a trading-post within easy reach of
his Indians? MacNair was inclined to believe so--and the matter caused
him grave concern. He foresaw trouble ahead, and a trouble that might
easily involve the girl who, he felt, was entirely innocent of
wrongdoing.
His jaw clamped hard as he swung on and on through the scrub. He had
no particular objective, a problem faced him and, where other men would
have sat down to work its solution, he walked.
In many things was Bob MacNair different from other men. Just and
stern beyond his years, with a sternness that was firmness rather than
severity; slow to anger, but once his anger was fairly aroused terrible
in meting out his vengeance. Yet, withal, possessed of an
understanding and a depth of sympathy, entirely unsuspected by himself,
but which enshrined him in the hearts of his Indians, who, in all the
world were the men and women who knew him.
Even his own father had not understood this son, who devoured books as
ravenously as his dogs devoured salmon. Again and again he
remonstrated with him for wasting his time when he might be working for
the company. Always the younger man listened respectfully, and
continued to read his books and to search for the lost mines with a
determination and singleness of purpose that aroused the secret
approbation of the old Scotchman, and the covert sneers and scoffings
of others.
And then, after four years of fruitless search, at the base of a ridge
that skirted the shore of an unmapped lake, he uncovered the mouth of
an ancient tunnel with rough-hewn sides and a floor that sloped from
the entrance. Imbedded in the slime on the bottom of a pool of
stinking water, he found curious implements, rudely chipped from flint
and slate, and a few of bone and walrus ivory. Odd-shaped,
half-finished tools of hammered copper were strewn about the floor, and
the walls were thickly coated with verdigris. Instead of the sharp
ring of steel on stone, a dull thud followed the stroke of his pick,
and its scars glowed with a red lustre in the flare of the smoking
torches.
Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack looked on in stolid silence, while the
young man, with wildly beating heart, crammed a pack-sack with samples.
He had found the ancient mine--the lost mine of the Indians, which men
said existed only in the fancy of Bob MacNair's brain! Carefully
sealing the tunnel, the young man headed for Fort Norman; and never did
Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack face such a trail. Down the raging
torrent of the Coppermine, across the long portage to the Dismal Lakes,
and then by portage and river to Dease Bay, across the two hundred
miles of Great Bear Lake, and down the Bear River to their destination.
Seven hundred long miles they covered, at a man-killing pace that
brought them into the fort, hollow-eyed and gaunt, and with their
bodies swollen and raw from the sting of black flies and mosquitoes
that swarmed through the holes in their tattered garments.
The men wolfed down the food that was set before them by an Indian
woman, and then, while Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack slept, the
chief trader led Bob MacNair to the grave of his father.
"'Twas his heart, lad, or somethin' busted inside him," explained the
old man. "After supper it was, two weeks agone. He was sittin' i' his
chair wi' his book an' his pipe, an' me in anither beside him. He gi'
a deep sigh, like, an' his book fell to the ground and his pipe. When
I got to him his head was leant back ag'in his chair--and he was dead."
Bob MacNair nodded, and the chief trader returned to the store, leaving
the young man standing silent beside the fresh-turned mound with its
rudely fashioned wooden cross, that stood among the other grass-grown
mounds whose wooden crosses, with their burned inscriptions, were
weather-grey and old. For a long time he stood beside the little
crosses that lent a solemn dignity to the rugged heights of Fort Norman.
It cannot be said that Bob MacNair had loved his father, in the
generally accepted sense of the word. But he had admired and respected
him above all other men, and his first thought upon the discovery of
the lost mine was to vindicate his course in the eyes of this stern,
just man who had so strongly advised against it.
For the opinion of others he cared not the snap of his fingers. But,
to read approval in the deep-set eyes of his father, and to hear the
deep, rich voice of him raised, at last, in approbation, rather than
reproach, he had defied death and pushed himself and his Indians to the
limit of human endurance. And he had arrived too late. The bitterness
of the young man's soul found expression only in a hardening of the jaw
and a clenching of the mighty fists. For, in the heart of him, he knew
that in the future, no matter what the measure of the world might be,
always, deep within him would rankle the bitter disappointment--the
realization that this old man had gone to his grave believing that his
son was a fool and a wastrel.
Slowly he turned from the spot and, with heavy steps, entered the
post-store. He raised the pack that contained the samples from the
floor, and, walking to the verge of the high cliff that overlooked the
river, hurled it far out over the water, where it fell with a dull
splash that was drowned in the roar of the rapids.
"Ye'll tak' charge here the noo, laddie?" asked McTurk, the grizzled
chief trader, the following day when MacNair had concluded the
inspection of his father's papers. "'Twad be what _he'd_ ha'
counselled!"
"No," answered the young man shortly, and, without a word as to the
finding of the lost mine, hurried Old Elk and Wee Johnnie Tamarack into
a canoe and headed southward.
A month later the officers of the Hudson Bay Company in Winnipeg gasped
in surprise at the offer of young MacNair to trade the broad acres to
which his father had acquired title in the wheat belt of Saskatchewan
and Alberta for a vast tract of barren ground in the subarctic. They
traded gladly, and when the young man heard that his dicker had earned
for him the name of Fool MacNair in the conclave of the mighty, he
smiled--and bought more barrens.
All of which had happened eight years before Chloe Elliston defied him
among the stumps of her clearing, and in the interim much had
transpired. In the heart of his barrens he built a post and collected
about him a band of Indians who soon learned that those who worked in
the mines had a far greater number of brass tokens of "made beaver" to
their credit than those who trapped fur.
Those were hard years for Bob MacNair; years in which he worked day and
night with his Indians, and paid them, for the most part, in promises.
But always he fed them and clothed them and their women and children,
although to do so stretched his credit to the limit--raised the
limit--and raised it again.
He uncovered vast deposits of copper, only to realize that, until he
could devise a cheaper method of transportation, the metal might as
well have remained where the forgotten miners had left it. And it was
while he was at work upon his transportation problem that the shovels
of his Indians began to throw out golden grains from the bed of a
buried creek.
When the news of gold reached the river, there was a stampede. But
MacNair owned the land and his Indians were armed. There was a short,
sharp battle, and the stampeders returned to the rivers to nurse their
grievance and curse Brute MacNair.
He paid his debt to the Company and settled with his Indians, who
suddenly found themselves rich. And then Bob MacNair learned a lesson
which he never forgot--his Indians could not stand prosperity. Most of
those who had stood by him all through the lean years when he had
provided them only a bare existence, took their newly acquired wealth
and departed for the white man's country. Some returned--broken husks
of the men who departed. Many would never return, and for their
undoing MacNair reproached himself unsparingly, the while he devised an
economic system of his own, and mined his gold and worked out his
transportation problem upon a more elaborate scale. The harm had been
done, however; his Indians were known to be rich, and MacNair found his
colony had become the cynosure of the eyes of the whiskey-runners, the
chiefest among whom was Pierre Lapierre. It was among these men that
the name of Brute, first used by the beaten stampeders, came into
general use--a fitting name, from their viewpoint--for when one of them
chanced to fall into his hands, his moments became at once fraught with
tribulation.
And so MacNair had become a power in the Northland, respected by the
officers of the Hudson Bay Company, a friend of the Indians, and a
terror to those who looked upon the red man as their natural prey.
Step by step, the events that had been the milestones of this man's
life recurred to his mind as he tramped tirelessly through the scrub
growth of the barrens toward a spot upon the shore of the lake--the
only grass plot within a radius of five hundred miles. Throwing
himself down beside a low, sodded mound in the centre of the plot, he
idly watched the great flocks of water fowls disport themselves upon
the surface of the lake.
How long he lay there, he had no means of knowing, when suddenly his
ears detected the soft swish of paddles. He leaped to his feet and,
peering toward the water, saw, close to the shore, a canoe manned by
four stalwart paddlers. He looked closer, scarcely able to credit his
eyes. And at the same moment, in response to a low-voiced order, the
canoe swung abruptly shoreward and grated upon the shingle of the
beach. Two figures stepped out, and Chloe Elliston, followed by Big
Lena, advanced boldly toward him. MacNair's jaw closed with a snap as
the girl approached smiling. For in the smile was no hint of
friendliness--only defiance, not unmingled with contempt.
"You see, Mr. Brute MacNair," she said, "I have kept my word. I told
you I would invade your kingdom--and here I am."
MacNair did not reply, but stood leaning upon his rifle. His attitude
angered her.
"Well," she said, "what are you going to do about it?" Still the man
did not answer, and, stooping, plucked a tiny weed from among the
blades of grass. The girl's eyes followed his movements. She started
and looked searchingly into his face. For the first time she noticed
that the mound was a grave.