Love of Life and Other Stories, by Jack London

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Title: Love of Life
       and Other Stories


Author: Jack London



Release Date: April 13, 2007  [eBook #710]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LOVE OF LIFE***




Transcribed from the 1913 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





LOVE OF LIFE
AND OTHER STORIES


BY
JACK LONDON
AUTHOR OF "THE CALL OF THE WILD," "PEOPLE
OF THE ABYSS," ETC., ETC.

New York
PUBLISHED FOR
THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANY
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.
1913
_All rights reserved_

COPYRIGHT, 1906,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

{He watched the play of life before him: p0.jpg}

Set up and electrotyped.  Published September, 1907.  Reprinted December,
1907; December, 1911.  October, 1913.




LOVE OF LIFE


   "This out of all will remain--
      They have lived and have tossed:
   So much of the game will be gain,
      Though the gold of the dice has been lost."

They limped painfully down the bank, and once the foremost of the two men
staggered among the rough-strewn rocks.  They were tired and weak, and
their faces had the drawn expression of patience which comes of hardship
long endured.  They were heavily burdened with blanket packs which were
strapped to their shoulders.  Head-straps, passing across the forehead,
helped support these packs.  Each man carried a rifle.  They walked in a
stooped posture, the shoulders well forward, the head still farther
forward, the eyes bent upon the ground.

"I wish we had just about two of them cartridges that's layin' in that
cache of ourn," said the second man.

His voice was utterly and drearily expressionless.  He spoke without
enthusiasm; and the first man, limping into the milky stream that foamed
over the rocks, vouchsafed no reply.

The other man followed at his heels.  They did not remove their
foot-gear, though the water was icy cold--so cold that their ankles ached
and their feet went numb.  In places the water dashed against their
knees, and both men staggered for footing.

The man who followed slipped on a smooth boulder, nearly fell, but
recovered himself with a violent effort, at the same time uttering a
sharp exclamation of pain.  He seemed faint and dizzy and put out his
free hand while he reeled, as though seeking support against the air.
When he had steadied himself he stepped forward, but reeled again and
nearly fell.  Then he stood still and looked at the other man, who had
never turned his head.

The man stood still for fully a minute, as though debating with himself.
Then he called out:

"I say, Bill, I've sprained my ankle."

Bill staggered on through the milky water.  He did not look around.  The
man watched him go, and though his face was expressionless as ever, his
eyes were like the eyes of a wounded deer.

The other man limped up the farther bank and continued straight on
without looking back.  The man in the stream watched him.  His lips
trembled a little, so that the rough thatch of brown hair which covered
them was visibly agitated.  His tongue even strayed out to moisten them.

"Bill!" he cried out.

It was the pleading cry of a strong man in distress, but Bill's head did
not turn.  The man watched him go, limping grotesquely and lurching
forward with stammering gait up the slow slope toward the soft sky-line
of the low-lying hill.  He watched him go till he passed over the crest
and disappeared.  Then he turned his gaze and slowly took in the circle
of the world that remained to him now that Bill was gone.

Near the horizon the sun was smouldering dimly, almost obscured by
formless mists and vapors, which gave an impression of mass and density
without outline or tangibility.  The man pulled out his watch, the while
resting his weight on one leg.  It was four o'clock, and as the season
was near the last of July or first of August,--he did not know the
precise date within a week or two,--he knew that the sun roughly marked
the northwest.  He looked to the south and knew that somewhere beyond
those bleak hills lay the Great Bear Lake; also, he knew that in that
direction the Arctic Circle cut its forbidding way across the Canadian
Barrens.  This stream in which he stood was a feeder to the Coppermine
River, which in turn flowed north and emptied into Coronation Gulf and
the Arctic Ocean.  He had never been there, but he had seen it, once, on
a Hudson Bay Company chart.

Again his gaze completed the circle of the world about him.  It was not a
heartening spectacle.  Everywhere was soft sky-line.  The hills were all
low-lying.  There were no trees, no shrubs, no grasses--naught but a
tremendous and terrible desolation that sent fear swiftly dawning into
his eyes.

"Bill!" he whispered, once and twice; "Bill!"

He cowered in the midst of the milky water, as though the vastness were
pressing in upon him with overwhelming force, brutally crushing him with
its complacent awfulness.  He began to shake as with an ague-fit, till
the gun fell from his hand with a splash.  This served to rouse him.  He
fought with his fear and pulled himself together, groping in the water
and recovering the weapon.  He hitched his pack farther over on his left
shoulder, so as to take a portion of its weight from off the injured
ankle.  Then he proceeded, slowly and carefully, wincing with pain, to
the bank.

He did not stop.  With a desperation that was madness, unmindful of the
pain, he hurried up the slope to the crest of the hill over which his
comrade had disappeared--more grotesque and comical by far than that
limping, jerking comrade.  But at the crest he saw a shallow valley,
empty of life.  He fought with his fear again, overcame it, hitched the
pack still farther over on his left shoulder, and lurched on down the
slope.

The bottom of the valley was soggy with water, which the thick moss held,
spongelike, close to the surface.  This water squirted out from under his
feet at every step, and each time he lifted a foot the action culminated
in a sucking sound as the wet moss reluctantly released its grip.  He
picked his way from muskeg to muskeg, and followed the other man's
footsteps along and across the rocky ledges which thrust like islets
through the sea of moss.

Though alone, he was not lost.  Farther on he knew he would come to where
dead spruce and fir, very small and weazened, bordered the shore of a
little lake, the _titchin-nichilie_, in the tongue of the country, the
"land of little sticks."  And into that lake flowed a small stream, the
water of which was not milky.  There was rush-grass on that stream--this
he remembered well--but no timber, and he would follow it till its first
trickle ceased at a divide.  He would cross this divide to the first
trickle of another stream, flowing to the west, which he would follow
until it emptied into the river Dease, and here he would find a cache
under an upturned canoe and piled over with many rocks.  And in this
cache would be ammunition for his empty gun, fish-hooks and lines, a
small net--all the utilities for the killing and snaring of food.  Also,
he would find flour,--not much,--a piece of bacon, and some beans.

Bill would be waiting for him there, and they would paddle away south
down the Dease to the Great Bear Lake.  And south across the lake they
would go, ever south, till they gained the Mackenzie.  And south, still
south, they would go, while the winter raced vainly after them, and the
ice formed in the eddies, and the days grew chill and crisp, south to
some warm Hudson Bay Company post, where timber grew tall and generous
and there was grub without end.

These were the thoughts of the man as he strove onward.  But hard as he
strove with his body, he strove equally hard with his mind, trying to
think that Bill had not deserted him, that Bill would surely wait for him
at the cache.  He was compelled to think this thought, or else there
would not be any use to strive, and he would have lain down and died.  And
as the dim ball of the sun sank slowly into the northwest he covered
every inch--and many times--of his and Bill's flight south before the
downcoming winter.  And he conned the grub of the cache and the grub of
the Hudson Bay Company post over and over again.  He had not eaten for
two days; for a far longer time he had not had all he wanted to eat.
Often he stooped and picked pale muskeg berries, put them into his mouth,
and chewed and swallowed them.  A muskeg berry is a bit of seed enclosed
in a bit of water.  In the mouth the water melts away and the seed chews
sharp and bitter.  The man knew there was no nourishment in the berries,
but he chewed them patiently with a hope greater than knowledge and
defying experience.

At nine o'clock he stubbed his toe on a rocky ledge, and from sheer
weariness and weakness staggered and fell.  He lay for some time, without
movement, on his side.  Then he slipped out of the pack-straps and
clumsily dragged himself into a sitting posture.  It was not yet dark,
and in the lingering twilight he groped about among the rocks for shreds
of dry moss.  When he had gathered a heap he built a fire,--a
smouldering, smudgy fire,--and put a tin pot of water on to boil.

He unwrapped his pack and the first thing he did was to count his
matches.  There were sixty-seven.  He counted them three times to make
sure.  He divided them into several portions, wrapping them in oil paper,
disposing of one bunch in his empty tobacco pouch, of another bunch in
the inside band of his battered hat, of a third bunch under his shirt on
the chest.  This accomplished, a panic came upon him, and he unwrapped
them all and counted them again.  There were still sixty-seven.

He dried his wet foot-gear by the fire.  The moccasins were in soggy
shreds.  The blanket socks were worn through in places, and his feet were
raw and bleeding.  His ankle was throbbing, and he gave it an
examination.  It had swollen to the size of his knee.  He tore a long
strip from one of his two blankets and bound the ankle tightly.  He tore
other strips and bound them about his feet to serve for both moccasins
and socks.  Then he drank the pot of water, steaming hot, wound his
watch, and crawled between his blankets.

He slept like a dead man.  The brief darkness around midnight came and
went.  The sun arose in the northeast--at least the day dawned in that
quarter, for the sun was hidden by gray clouds.

At six o'clock he awoke, quietly lying on his back.  He gazed straight up
into the gray sky and knew that he was hungry.  As he rolled over on his
elbow he was startled by a loud snort, and saw a bull caribou regarding
him with alert curiosity.  The animal was not mere than fifty feet away,
and instantly into the man's mind leaped the vision and the savor of a
caribou steak sizzling and frying over a fire.  Mechanically he reached
for the empty gun, drew a bead, and pulled the trigger.  The bull snorted
and leaped away, his hoofs rattling and clattering as he fled across the
ledges.

The man cursed and flung the empty gun from him.  He groaned aloud as he
started to drag himself to his feet.  It was a slow and arduous task.

His joints were like rusty hinges.  They worked harshly in their sockets,
with much friction, and each bending or unbending was accomplished only
through a sheer exertion of will.  When he finally gained his feet,
another minute or so was consumed in straightening up, so that he could
stand erect as a man should stand.

He crawled up a small knoll and surveyed the prospect.  There were no
trees, no bushes, nothing but a gray sea of moss scarcely diversified by
gray rocks, gray lakelets, and gray streamlets.  The sky was gray.  There
was no sun nor hint of sun.  He had no idea of north, and he had
forgotten the way he had come to this spot the night before.  But he was
not lost.  He knew that.  Soon he would come to the land of the little
sticks.  He felt that it lay off to the left somewhere, not far--possibly
just over the next low hill.

He went back to put his pack into shape for travelling.  He assured
himself of the existence of his three separate parcels of matches, though
he did not stop to count them.  But he did linger, debating, over a squat
moose-hide sack.  It was not large.  He could hide it under his two
hands.  He knew that it weighed fifteen pounds,--as much as all the rest
of the pack,--and it worried him.  He finally set it to one side and
proceeded to roll the pack.  He paused to gaze at the squat moose-hide
sack.  He picked it up hastily with a defiant glance about him, as though
the desolation were trying to rob him of it; and when he rose to his feet
to stagger on into the day, it was included in the pack on his back.

He bore away to the left, stopping now and again to eat muskeg berries.
His ankle had stiffened, his limp was more pronounced, but the pain of it
was as nothing compared with the pain of his stomach.  The hunger pangs
were sharp.  They gnawed and gnawed until he could not keep his mind
steady on the course he must pursue to gain the land of little sticks.
The muskeg berries did not allay this gnawing, while they made his tongue
and the roof of his mouth sore with their irritating bite.

He came upon a valley where rock ptarmigan rose on whirring wings from
the ledges and muskegs.  Ker--ker--ker was the cry they made.  He threw
stones at them, but could not hit them.  He placed his pack on the ground
and stalked them as a cat stalks a sparrow.  The sharp rocks cut through
his pants' legs till his knees left a trail of blood; but the hurt was
lost in the hurt of his hunger.  He squirmed over the wet moss,
saturating his clothes and chilling his body; but he was not aware of it,
so great was his fever for food.  And always the ptarmigan rose,
whirring, before him, till their ker--ker--ker became a mock to him, and
he cursed them and cried aloud at them with their own cry.

Once he crawled upon one that must have been asleep.  He did not see it
till it shot up in his face from its rocky nook.  He made a clutch as
startled as was the rise of the ptarmigan, and there remained in his hand
three tail-feathers.  As he watched its flight he hated it, as though it
had done him some terrible wrong.  Then he returned and shouldered his
pack.

As the day wore along he came into valleys or swales where game was more
plentiful.  A band of caribou passed by, twenty and odd animals,
tantalizingly within rifle range.  He felt a wild desire to run after
them, a certitude that he could run them down.  A black fox came toward
him, carrying a ptarmigan in his mouth.  The man shouted.  It was a
fearful cry, but the fox, leaping away in fright, did not drop the
ptarmigan.

Late in the afternoon he followed a stream, milky with lime, which ran
through sparse patches of rush-grass.  Grasping these rushes firmly near
the root, he pulled up what resembled a young onion-sprout no larger than
a shingle-nail.  It was tender, and his teeth sank into it with a crunch
that promised deliciously of food.  But its fibers were tough.  It was
composed of stringy filaments saturated with water, like the berries, and
devoid of nourishment.  He threw off his pack and went into the
rush-grass on hands and knees, crunching and munching, like some bovine
creature.

He was very weary and often wished to rest--to lie down and sleep; but he
was continually driven on--not so much by his desire to gain the land of
little sticks as by his hunger.  He searched little ponds for frogs and
dug up the earth with his nails for worms, though he knew in spite that
neither frogs nor worms existed so far north.

He looked into every pool of water vainly, until, as the long twilight
came on, he discovered a solitary fish, the size of a minnow, in such a
pool.  He plunged his arm in up to the shoulder, but it eluded him.  He
reached for it with both hands and stirred up the milky mud at the
bottom.  In his excitement he fell in, wetting himself to the waist.  Then
the water was too muddy to admit of his seeing the fish, and he was
compelled to wait until the sediment had settled.

The pursuit was renewed, till the water was again muddied.  But he could
not wait.  He unstrapped the tin bucket and began to bale the pool.  He
baled wildly at first, splashing himself and flinging the water so short
a distance that it ran back into the pool.  He worked more carefully,
striving to be cool, though his heart was pounding against his chest and
his hands were trembling.  At the end of half an hour the pool was nearly
dry.  Not a cupful of water remained.  And there was no fish.  He found a
hidden crevice among the stones through which it had escaped to the
adjoining and larger pool--a pool which he could not empty in a night and
a day.  Had he known of the crevice, he could have closed it with a rock
at the beginning and the fish would have been his.

Thus he thought, and crumpled up and sank down upon the wet earth.  At
first he cried softly to himself, then he cried loudly to the pitiless
desolation that ringed him around; and for a long time after he was
shaken by great dry sobs.

He built a fire and warmed himself by drinking quarts of hot water, and
made camp on a rocky ledge in the same fashion he had the night before.
The last thing he did was to see that his matches were dry and to wind
his watch.  The blankets were wet and clammy.  His ankle pulsed with
pain.  But he knew only that he was hungry, and through his restless
sleep he dreamed of feasts and banquets and of food served and spread in
all imaginable ways.

He awoke chilled and sick.  There was no sun.  The gray of earth and sky
had become deeper, more profound.  A raw wind was blowing, and the first
flurries of snow were whitening the hilltops.  The air about him
thickened and grew white while he made a fire and boiled more water.  It
was wet snow, half rain, and the flakes were large and soggy.  At first
they melted as soon as they came in contact with the earth, but ever more
fell, covering the ground, putting out the fire, spoiling his supply of
moss-fuel.

This was a signal for him to strap on his pack and stumble onward, he
knew not where.  He was not concerned with the land of little sticks, nor
with Bill and the cache under the upturned canoe by the river Dease.  He
was mastered by the verb "to eat."  He was hunger-mad.  He took no heed
of the course he pursued, so long as that course led him through the
swale bottoms.  He felt his way through the wet snow to the watery muskeg
berries, and went by feel as he pulled up the rush-grass by the roots.
But it was tasteless stuff and did not satisfy.  He found a weed that
tasted sour and he ate all he could find of it, which was not much, for
it was a creeping growth, easily hidden under the several inches of snow.

He had no fire that night, nor hot water, and crawled under his blanket
to sleep the broken hunger-sleep.  The snow turned into a cold rain.  He
awakened many times to feel it falling on his upturned face.  Day came--a
gray day and no sun.  It had ceased raining.  The keenness of his hunger
had departed.  Sensibility, as far as concerned the yearning for food,
had been exhausted.  There was a dull, heavy ache in his stomach, but it
did not bother him so much.  He was more rational, and once more he was
chiefly interested in the land of little sticks and the cache by the
river Dease.

He ripped the remnant of one of his blankets into strips and bound his
bleeding feet.  Also, he recinched the injured ankle and prepared himself
for a day of travel.  When he came to his pack, he paused long over the
squat moose-hide sack, but in the end it went with him.

The snow had melted under the rain, and only the hilltops showed white.
The sun came out, and he succeeded in locating the points of the compass,
though he knew now that he was lost.  Perhaps, in his previous days'
wanderings, he had edged away too far to the left.  He now bore off to
the right to counteract the possible deviation from his true course.

Though the hunger pangs were no longer so exquisite, he realized that he
was weak.  He was compelled to pause for frequent rests, when he attacked
the muskeg berries and rush-grass patches.  His tongue felt dry and
large, as though covered with a fine hairy growth, and it tasted bitter
in his mouth.  His heart gave him a great deal of trouble.  When he had
travelled a few minutes it would begin a remorseless thump, thump, thump,
and then leap up and away in a painful flutter of beats that choked him
and made him go faint and dizzy.

In the middle of the day he found two minnows in a large pool.  It was
impossible to bale it, but he was calmer now and managed to catch them in
his tin bucket.  They were no longer than his little finger, but he was
not particularly hungry.  The dull ache in his stomach had been growing
duller and fainter.  It seemed almost that his stomach was dozing.  He
ate the fish raw, masticating with painstaking care, for the eating was
an act of pure reason.  While he had no desire to eat, he knew that he
must eat to live.

In the evening he caught three more minnows, eating two and saving the
third for breakfast.  The sun had dried stray shreds of moss, and he was
able to warm himself with hot water.  He had not covered more than ten
miles that day; and the next day, travelling whenever his heart permitted
him, he covered no more than five miles.  But his stomach did not give
him the slightest uneasiness.  It had gone to sleep.  He was in a strange
country, too, and the caribou were growing more plentiful, also the
wolves.  Often their yelps drifted across the desolation, and once he saw
three of them slinking away before his path.

Another night; and in the morning, being more rational, he untied the
leather string that fastened the squat moose-hide sack.  From its open
mouth poured a yellow stream of coarse gold-dust and nuggets.  He roughly
divided the gold in halves, caching one half on a prominent ledge,
wrapped in a piece of blanket, and returning the other half to the sack.
He also began to use strips of the one remaining blanket for his feet.  He
still clung to his gun, for there were cartridges in that cache by the
river Dease.

This was a day of fog, and this day hunger awoke in him again.  He was
very weak and was afflicted with a giddiness which at times blinded him.
It was no uncommon thing now for him to stumble and fall; and stumbling
once, he fell squarely into a ptarmigan nest.  There were four newly
hatched chicks, a day old--little specks of pulsating life no more than a
mouthful; and he ate them ravenously, thrusting them alive into his mouth
and crunching them like egg-shells between his teeth.  The mother
ptarmigan beat about him with great outcry.  He used his gun as a club
with which to knock her over, but she dodged out of reach.  He threw
stones at her and with one chance shot broke a wing.  Then she fluttered
away, running, trailing the broken wing, with him in pursuit.

The little chicks had no more than whetted his appetite.  He hopped and
bobbed clumsily along on his injured ankle, throwing stones and screaming
hoarsely at times; at other times hopping and bobbing silently along,
picking himself up grimly and patiently when he fell, or rubbing his eyes
with his hand when the giddiness threatened to overpower him.

The chase led him across swampy ground in the bottom of the valley, and
he came upon footprints in the soggy moss.  They were not his own--he
could see that.  They must be Bill's.  But he could not stop, for the
mother ptarmigan was running on.  He would catch her first, then he would
return and investigate.

He exhausted the mother ptarmigan; but he exhausted himself.  She lay
panting on her side.  He lay panting on his side, a dozen feet away,
unable to crawl to her.  And as he recovered she recovered, fluttering
out of reach as his hungry hand went out to her.  The chase was resumed.
Night settled down and she escaped.  He stumbled from weakness and
pitched head foremost on his face, cutting his cheek, his pack upon his
back.  He did not move for a long while; then he rolled over on his side,
wound his watch, and lay there until morning.

Another day of fog.  Half of his last blanket had gone into
foot-wrappings.  He failed to pick up Bill's trail.  It did not matter.
His hunger was driving him too compellingly--only--only he wondered if
Bill, too, were lost.  By midday the irk of his pack became too
oppressive.  Again he divided the gold, this time merely spilling half of
it on the ground.  In the afternoon he threw the rest of it away, there
remaining to him only the half-blanket, the tin bucket, and the rifle.

An hallucination began to trouble him.  He felt confident that one
cartridge remained to him.  It was in the chamber of the rifle and he had
overlooked it.  On the other hand, he knew all the time that the chamber
was empty.  But the hallucination persisted.  He fought it off for hours,
then threw his rifle open and was confronted with emptiness.  The
disappointment was as bitter as though he had really expected to find the
cartridge.

He plodded on for half an hour, when the hallucination arose again.  Again
he fought it, and still it persisted, till for very relief he opened his
rifle to unconvince himself.  At times his mind wandered farther afield,
and he plodded on, a mere automaton, strange conceits and whimsicalities
gnawing at his brain like worms.  But these excursions out of the real
were of brief duration, for ever the pangs of the hunger-bite called him
back.  He was jerked back abruptly once from such an excursion by a sight
that caused him nearly to faint.  He reeled and swayed, doddering like a
drunken man to keep from falling.  Before him stood a horse.  A horse!  He
could not believe his eyes.  A thick mist was in them, intershot with
sparkling points of light.  He rubbed his eyes savagely to clear his
vision, and beheld, not a horse, but a great brown bear.  The animal was
studying him with bellicose curiosity.

The man had brought his gun halfway to his shoulder before he realized.
He lowered it and drew his hunting-knife from its beaded sheath at his
hip.  Before him was meat and life.  He ran his thumb along the edge of
his knife.  It was sharp.  The point was sharp.  He would fling himself
upon the bear and kill it.  But his heart began its warning thump, thump,
thump.  Then followed the wild upward leap and tattoo of flutters, the
pressing as of an iron band about his forehead, the creeping of the
dizziness into his brain.

His desperate courage was evicted by a great surge of fear.  In his
weakness, what if the animal attacked him?  He drew himself up to his
most imposing stature, gripping the knife and staring hard at the bear.
The bear advanced clumsily a couple of steps, reared up, and gave vent to
a tentative growl.  If the man ran, he would run after him; but the man
did not run.  He was animated now with the courage of fear.  He, too,
growled, savagely, terribly, voicing the fear that is to life germane and
that lies twisted about life's deepest roots.

The bear edged away to one side, growling menacingly, himself appalled by
this mysterious creature that appeared upright and unafraid.  But the man
did not move.  He stood like a statue till the danger was past, when he
yielded to a fit of trembling and sank down into the wet moss.

He pulled himself together and went on, afraid now in a new way.  It was
not the fear that he should die passively from lack of food, but that he
should be destroyed violently before starvation had exhausted the last
particle of the endeavor in him that made toward surviving.  There were
the wolves.  Back and forth across the desolation drifted their howls,
weaving the very air into a fabric of menace that was so tangible that he
found himself, arms in the air, pressing it back from him as it might be
the walls of a wind-blown tent.

Now and again the wolves, in packs of two and three, crossed his path.
But they sheered clear of him.  They were not in sufficient numbers, and
besides they were hunting the caribou, which did not battle, while this
strange creature that walked erect might scratch and bite.

In the late afternoon he came upon scattered bones where the wolves had
made a kill.  The debris had been a caribou calf an hour before,
squawking and running and very much alive.  He contemplated the bones,
clean-picked and polished, pink with the cell-life in them which had not
yet died.  Could it possibly be that he might be that ere the day was
done!  Such was life, eh?  A vain and fleeting thing.  It was only life
that pained.  There was no hurt in death.  To die was to sleep.  It meant
cessation, rest.  Then why was he not content to die?

But he did not moralize long.  He was squatting in the moss, a bone in
his mouth, sucking at the shreds of life that still dyed it faintly pink.
The sweet meaty taste, thin and elusive almost as a memory, maddened him.
He closed his jaws on the bones and crunched.  Sometimes it was the bone
that broke, sometimes his teeth.  Then he crushed the bones between
rocks, pounded them to a pulp, and swallowed them.  He pounded his
fingers, too, in his haste, and yet found a moment in which to feel
surprise at the fact that his fingers did not hurt much when caught under
the descending rock.

Came frightful days of snow and rain.  He did not know when he made camp,
when he broke camp.  He travelled in the night as much as in the day.  He
rested wherever he fell, crawled on whenever the dying life in him
flickered up and burned less dimly.  He, as a man, no longer strove.  It
was the life in him, unwilling to die, that drove him on.  He did not
suffer.  His nerves had become blunted, numb, while his mind was filled
with weird visions and delicious dreams.

But ever he sucked and chewed on the crushed bones of the caribou calf,
the least remnants of which he had gathered up and carried with him.  He
crossed no more hills or divides, but automatically followed a large
stream which flowed through a wide and shallow valley.  He did not see
this stream nor this valley.  He saw nothing save visions.  Soul and body
walked or crawled side by side, yet apart, so slender was the thread that
bound them.

He awoke in his right mind, lying on his back on a rocky ledge.  The sun
was shining bright and warm.  Afar off he heard the squawking of caribou
calves.  He was aware of vague memories of rain and wind and snow, but
whether he had been beaten by the storm for two days or two weeks he did
not know.

For some time he lay without movement, the genial sunshine pouring upon
him and saturating his miserable body with its warmth.  A fine day, he
thought.  Perhaps he could manage to locate himself.  By a painful effort
he rolled over on his side.  Below him flowed a wide and sluggish river.
Its unfamiliarity puzzled him.  Slowly he followed it with his eyes,
winding in wide sweeps among the bleak, bare hills, bleaker and barer and
lower-lying than any hills he had yet encountered.  Slowly, deliberately,
without excitement or more than the most casual interest, he followed the
course of the strange stream toward the sky-line and saw it emptying into
a bright and shining sea.  He was still unexcited.  Most unusual, he
thought, a vision or a mirage--more likely a vision, a trick of his
disordered mind.  He was confirmed in this by sight of a ship lying at
anchor in the midst of the shining sea.  He closed his eyes for a while,
then opened them.  Strange how the vision persisted!  Yet not strange.  He
knew there were no seas or ships in the heart of the barren lands, just
as he had known there was no cartridge in the empty rifle.

He heard a snuffle behind him--a half-choking gasp or cough.  Very
slowly, because of his exceeding weakness and stiffness, he rolled over
on his other side.  He could see nothing near at hand, but he waited
patiently.  Again came the snuffle and cough, and outlined between two
jagged rocks not a score of feet away he made out the gray head of a
wolf.  The sharp ears were not pricked so sharply as he had seen them on
other wolves; the eyes were bleared and bloodshot, the head seemed to
droop limply and forlornly.  The animal blinked continually in the
sunshine.  It seemed sick.  As he looked it snuffled and coughed again.

This, at least, was real, he thought, and turned on the other side so
that he might see the reality of the world which had been veiled from him
before by the vision.  But the sea still shone in the distance and the
ship was plainly discernible.  Was it reality, after all?  He closed his
eyes for a long while and thought, and then it came to him.  He had been
making north by east, away from the Dease Divide and into the Coppermine
Valley.  This wide and sluggish river was the Coppermine.  That shining
sea was the Arctic Ocean.  That ship was a whaler, strayed east, far
east, from the mouth of the Mackenzie, and it was lying at anchor in
Coronation Gulf.  He remembered the Hudson Bay Company chart he had seen
long ago, and it was all clear and reasonable to him.

He sat up and turned his attention to immediate affairs.  He had worn
through the blanket-wrappings, and his feet were shapeless lumps of raw
meat.  His last blanket was gone.  Rifle and knife were both missing.  He
had lost his hat somewhere, with the bunch of matches in the band, but
the matches against his chest were safe and dry inside the tobacco pouch
and oil paper.  He looked at his watch.  It marked eleven o'clock and was
still running.  Evidently he had kept it wound.

He was calm and collected.  Though extremely weak, he had no sensation of
pain.  He was not hungry.  The thought of food was not even pleasant to
him, and whatever he did was done by his reason alone.  He ripped off his
pants' legs to the knees and bound them about his feet.  Somehow he had
succeeded in retaining the tin bucket.  He would have some hot water
before he began what he foresaw was to be a terrible journey to the ship.

His movements were slow.  He shook as with a palsy.  When he started to
collect dry moss, he found he could not rise to his feet.  He tried again
and again, then contented himself with crawling about on hands and knees.
Once he crawled near to the sick wolf.  The animal dragged itself
reluctantly out of his way, licking its chops with a tongue which seemed
hardly to have the strength to curl.  The man noticed that the tongue was
not the customary healthy red.  It was a yellowish brown and seemed
coated with a rough and half-dry mucus.

After he had drunk a quart of hot water the man found he was able to
stand, and even to walk as well as a dying man might be supposed to walk.
Every minute or so he was compelled to rest.  His steps were feeble and
uncertain, just as the wolf's that trailed him were feeble and uncertain;
and that night, when the shining sea was blotted out by blackness, he
knew he was nearer to it by no more than four miles.

Throughout the night he heard the cough of the sick wolf, and now and
then the squawking of the caribou calves.  There was life all around him,
but it was strong life, very much alive and well, and he knew the sick
wolf clung to the sick man's trail in the hope that the man would die
first.  In the morning, on opening his eyes, he beheld it regarding him
with a wistful and hungry stare.  It stood crouched, with tail between
its legs, like a miserable and woe-begone dog.  It shivered in the chill
morning wind, and grinned dispiritedly when the man spoke to it in a
voice that achieved no more than a hoarse whisper.

The sun rose brightly, and all morning the man tottered and fell toward
the ship on the shining sea.  The weather was perfect.  It was the brief
Indian Summer of the high latitudes.  It might last a week.  To-morrow or
next day it might he gone.

In the afternoon the man came upon a trail.  It was of another man, who
did not walk, but who dragged himself on all fours.  The man thought it
might be Bill, but he thought in a dull, uninterested way.  He had no
curiosity.  In fact, sensation and emotion had left him.  He was no
longer susceptible to pain.  Stomach and nerves had gone to sleep.  Yet
the life that was in him drove him on.  He was very weary, but it refused
to die.  It was because it refused to die that he still ate muskeg
berries and minnows, drank his hot water, and kept a wary eye on the sick
wolf.

He followed the trail of the other man who dragged himself along, and
soon came to the end of it--a few fresh-picked bones where the soggy moss
was marked by the foot-pads of many wolves.  He saw a squat moose-hide
sack, mate to his own, which had been torn by sharp teeth.  He picked it
up, though its weight was almost too much for his feeble fingers.  Bill
had carried it to the last.  Ha! ha!  He would have the laugh on Bill.  He
would survive and carry it to the ship in the shining sea.  His mirth was
hoarse and ghastly, like a raven's croak, and the sick wolf joined him,
howling lugubriously.  The man ceased suddenly.  How could he have the
laugh on Bill if that were Bill; if those bones, so pinky-white and
clean, were Bill?

He turned away.  Well, Bill had deserted him; but he would not take the
gold, nor would he suck Bill's bones.  Bill would have, though, had it
been the other way around, he mused as he staggered on.

He came to a pool of water.  Stooping over in quest of minnows, he jerked
his head back as though he had been stung.  He had caught sight of his
reflected face.  So horrible was it that sensibility awoke long enough to
be shocked.  There were three minnows in the pool, which was too large to
drain; and after several ineffectual attempts to catch them in the tin
bucket he forbore.  He was afraid, because of his great weakness, that he
might fall in and drown.  It was for this reason that he did not trust
himself to the river astride one of the many drift-logs which lined its
sand-spits.

That day he decreased the distance between him and the ship by three
miles; the next day by two--for he was crawling now as Bill had crawled;
and the end of the fifth day found the ship still seven miles away and
him unable to make even a mile a day.  Still the Indian Summer held on,
and he continued to crawl and faint, turn and turn about; and ever the
sick wolf coughed and wheezed at his heels.  His knees had become raw
meat like his feet, and though he padded them with the shirt from his
back it was a red track he left behind him on the moss and stones.  Once,
glancing back, he saw the wolf licking hungrily his bleeding trail, and
he saw sharply what his own end might be--unless--unless he could get the
wolf.  Then began as grim a tragedy of existence as was ever played--a
sick man that crawled, a sick wolf that limped, two creatures dragging
their dying carcasses across the desolation and hunting each other's
lives.

Had it been a well wolf, it would not have mattered so much to the man;
but the thought of going to feed the maw of that loathsome and all but
dead thing was repugnant to him.  He was finicky.  His mind had begun to
wander again, and to be perplexed by hallucinations, while his lucid
intervals grew rarer and shorter.

He was awakened once from a faint by a wheeze close in his ear.  The wolf
leaped lamely back, losing its footing and falling in its weakness.  It
was ludicrous, but he was not amused.  Nor was he even afraid.  He was
too far gone for that.  But his mind was for the moment clear, and he lay
and considered.  The ship was no more than four miles away.  He could see
it quite distinctly when he rubbed the mists out of his eyes, and he
could see the white sail of a small boat cutting the water of the shining
sea.  But he could never crawl those four miles.  He knew that, and was
very calm in the knowledge.  He knew that he could not crawl half a mile.
And yet he wanted to live.  It was unreasonable that he should die after
all he had undergone.  Fate asked too much of him.  And, dying, he
declined to die.  It was stark madness, perhaps, but in the very grip of
Death he defied Death and refused to die.

He closed his eyes and composed himself with infinite precaution.  He
steeled himself to keep above the suffocating languor that lapped like a
rising tide through all the wells of his being.  It was very like a sea,
this deadly languor, that rose and rose and drowned his consciousness bit
by bit.  Sometimes he was all but submerged, swimming through oblivion
with a faltering stroke; and again, by some strange alchemy of soul, he
would find another shred of will and strike out more strongly.

Without movement he lay on his back, and he could hear, slowly drawing
near and nearer, the wheezing intake and output of the sick wolf's
breath.  It drew closer, ever closer, through an infinitude of time, and
he did not move.  It was at his ear.  The harsh dry tongue grated like
sandpaper against his cheek.  His hands shot out--or at least he willed
them to shoot out.  The fingers were curved like talons, but they closed
on empty air.  Swiftness and certitude require strength, and the man had
not this strength.

The patience of the wolf was terrible.  The man's patience was no less
terrible.  For half a day he lay motionless, fighting off unconsciousness
and waiting for the thing that was to feed upon him and upon which he
wished to feed.  Sometimes the languid sea rose over him and he dreamed
long dreams; but ever through it all, waking and dreaming, he waited for
the wheezing breath and the harsh caress of the tongue.

He did not hear the breath, and he slipped slowly from some dream to the
feel of the tongue along his hand.  He waited.  The fangs pressed softly;
the pressure increased; the wolf was exerting its last strength in an
effort to sink teeth in the food for which it had waited so long.  But
the man had waited long, and the lacerated hand closed on the jaw.
Slowly, while the wolf struggled feebly and the hand clutched feebly, the
other hand crept across to a grip.  Five minutes later the whole weight
of the man's body was on top of the wolf.  The hands had not sufficient
strength to choke the wolf, but the face of the man was pressed close to
the throat of the wolf and the mouth of the man was full of hair.  At the
end of half an hour the man was aware of a warm trickle in his throat.  It
was not pleasant.  It was like molten lead being forced into his stomach,
and it was forced by his will alone.  Later the man rolled over on his
back and slept.

* * * * *

There were some members of a scientific expedition on the whale-ship
_Bedford_.  From the deck they remarked a strange object on the shore.  It
was moving down the beach toward the water.  They were unable to classify
it, and, being scientific men, they climbed into the whale-boat alongside
and went ashore to see.  And they saw something that was alive but which
could hardly be called a man.  It was blind, unconscious.  It squirmed
along the ground like some monstrous worm.  Most of its efforts were
ineffectual, but it was persistent, and it writhed and twisted and went
ahead perhaps a score of feet an hour.

* * * * *

Three weeks afterward the man lay in a bunk on the whale-ship _Bedford_,
and with tears streaming down his wasted cheeks told who he was and what
he had undergone.  He also babbled incoherently of his mother, of sunny
Southern California, and a home among the orange groves and flowers.

The days were not many after that when he sat at table with the
scientific men and ship's officers.  He gloated over the spectacle of so
much food, watching it anxiously as it went into the mouths of others.
With the disappearance of each mouthful an expression of deep regret came
into his eyes.  He was quite sane, yet he hated those men at mealtime.  He
was haunted by a fear that the food would not last.  He inquired of the
cook, the cabin-boy, the captain, concerning the food stores.  They
reassured him countless times; but he could not believe them, and pried
cunningly about the lazarette to see with his own eyes.

It was noticed that the man was getting fat.  He grew stouter with each
day.  The scientific men shook their heads and theorized.  They limited
the man at his meals, but still his girth increased and he swelled
prodigiously under his shirt.

The sailors grinned.  They knew.  And when the scientific men set a watch
on the man, they knew too.  They saw him slouch for'ard after breakfast,
and, like a mendicant, with outstretched palm, accost a sailor.  The
sailor grinned and passed him a fragment of sea biscuit.  He clutched it
avariciously, looked at it as a miser looks at gold, and thrust it into
his shirt bosom.  Similar were the donations from other grinning sailors.

The scientific men were discreet.  They let him alone.  But they privily
examined his bunk.  It was lined with hardtack; the mattress was stuffed
with hardtack; every nook and cranny was filled with hardtack.  Yet he
was sane.  He was taking precautions against another possible famine--that
was all.  He would recover from it, the scientific men said; and he did,
ere the _Bedford's_ anchor rumbled down in San Francisco Bay.




A DAY'S LODGING


   It was the gosh-dangdest stampede I ever seen.  A thousand dog-teams
   hittin' the ice.  You couldn't see 'm fer smoke.  Two white men an' a
   Swede froze to death that night, an' there was a dozen busted their
   lungs.  But didn't I see with my own eyes the bottom of the
   water-hole?  It was yellow with gold like a mustard-plaster.  That's
   why I staked the Yukon for a minin' claim.  That's what made the
   stampede.  An' then there was nothin' to it.  That's what I
   said--NOTHIN' to it.  An' I ain't got over guessin' yet.--NARRATIVE OF
   SHORTY.

John Messner clung with mittened hand to the bucking gee-pole and held
the sled in the trail.  With the other mittened hand he rubbed his cheeks
and nose.  He rubbed his cheeks and nose every little while.  In point of
fact, he rarely ceased from rubbing them, and sometimes, as their
numbness increased, he rubbed fiercely.  His forehead was covered by the
visor of his fur cap, the flaps of which went over his ears.  The rest of
his face was protected by a thick beard, golden-brown under its coating
of frost.

Behind him churned a heavily loaded Yukon sled, and before him toiled a
string of five dogs.  The rope by which they dragged the sled rubbed
against the side of Messner's leg.  When the dogs swung on a bend in the
trail, he stepped over the rope.  There were many bends, and he was
compelled to step over it often.  Sometimes he tripped on the rope, or
stumbled, and at all times he was awkward, betraying a weariness so great
that the sled now and again ran upon his heels.

When he came to a straight piece of trail, where the sled could get along
for a moment without guidance, he let go the gee-pole and batted his
right hand sharply upon the hard wood.  He found it difficult to keep up
the circulation in that hand.  But while he pounded the one hand, he
never ceased from rubbing his nose and cheeks with the other.

"It's too cold to travel, anyway," he said.  He spoke aloud, after the
manner of men who are much by themselves.  "Only a fool would travel at
such a temperature.  If it isn't eighty below, it's because it's seventy-
nine."

He pulled out his watch, and after some fumbling got it back into the
breast pocket of his thick woollen jacket.  Then he surveyed the heavens
and ran his eye along the white sky-line to the south.

"Twelve o'clock," he mumbled, "A clear sky, and no sun."

He plodded on silently for ten minutes, and then, as though there had
been no lapse in his speech, he added:

"And no ground covered, and it's too cold to travel."

Suddenly he yelled "Whoa!" at the dogs, and stopped.  He seemed in a wild
panic over his right hand, and proceeded to hammer it furiously against
the gee-pole.

"You--poor--devils!" he addressed the dogs, which had dropped down
heavily on the ice to rest.  His was a broken, jerky utterance, caused by
the violence with which he hammered his numb hand upon the wood.  "What
have you done anyway that a two-legged other animal should come along,
break you to harness, curb all your natural proclivities, and make slave-
beasts out of you?"

He rubbed his nose, not reflectively, but savagely, in order to drive the
blood into it, and urged the dogs to their work again.  He travelled on
the frozen surface of a great river.  Behind him it stretched away in a
mighty curve of many miles, losing itself in a fantastic jumble of
mountains, snow-covered and silent.  Ahead of him the river split into
many channels to accommodate the freight of islands it carried on its
breast.  These islands were silent and white.  No animals nor humming
insects broke the silence.  No birds flew in the chill air.  There was no
sound of man, no mark of the handiwork of man.  The world slept, and it
was like the sleep of death.

John Messner seemed succumbing to the apathy of it all.  The frost was
benumbing his spirit.  He plodded on with bowed head, unobservant,
mechanically rubbing nose and cheeks, and batting his steering hand
against the gee-pole in the straight trail-stretches.

But the dogs were observant, and suddenly they stopped, turning their
heads and looking back at their master out of eyes that were wistful and
questioning.  Their eyelashes were frosted white, as were their muzzles,
and they had all the seeming of decrepit old age, what of the frost-rime
and exhaustion.

The man was about to urge them on, when he checked himself, roused up
with an effort, and looked around.  The dogs had stopped beside a water-
hole, not a fissure, but a hole man-made, chopped laboriously with an axe
through three and a half feet of ice.  A thick skin of new ice showed
that it had not been used for some time.  Messner glanced about him.  The
dogs were already pointing the way, each wistful and hoary muzzle turned
toward the dim snow-path that left the main river trail and climbed the
bank of the island.

"All right, you sore-footed brutes," he said.  "I'll investigate.  You're
not a bit more anxious to quit than I am."

He climbed the bank and disappeared.  The dogs did not lie down, but on
their feet eagerly waited his return.  He came back to them, took a
hauling-rope from the front of the sled, and put it around his shoulders.
Then he _gee'd_ the dogs to the right and put them at the bank on the
run.  It was a stiff pull, but their weariness fell from them as they
crouched low to the snow, whining with eagerness and gladness as they
struggled upward to the last ounce of effort in their bodies.  When a dog
slipped or faltered, the one behind nipped his hind quarters.  The man
shouted encouragement and threats, and threw all his weight on the
hauling-rope.

They cleared the bank with a rush, swung to the left, and dashed up to a
small log cabin.  It was a deserted cabin of a single room, eight feet by
ten on the inside.  Messner unharnessed the animals, unloaded his sled
and took possession.  The last chance wayfarer had left a supply of
firewood.  Messner set up his light sheet-iron stove and starred a fire.
He put five sun-cured salmon into the oven to thaw out for the dogs, and
from the water-hole filled his coffee-pot and cooking-pail.

While waiting for the water to boil, he held his face over the stove.  The
moisture from his breath had collected on his beard and frozen into a
great mass of ice, and this he proceeded to thaw out.  As it melted and
dropped upon the stove it sizzled and rose about him in steam.  He helped
the process with his fingers, working loose small ice-chunks that fell
rattling to the floor.

A wild outcry from the dogs without did not take him from his task.  He
heard the wolfish snarling and yelping of strange dogs and the sound of
voices.  A knock came on the door.

"Come in," Messner called, in a voice muffled because at the moment he
was sucking loose a fragment of ice from its anchorage on his upper lip.

The door opened, and, gazing out of his cloud of steam, he saw a man and
a woman pausing on the threshold.

"Come in," he said peremptorily, "and shut the door!"

Peering through the steam, he could make out but little of their personal
appearance.  The nose and cheek strap worn by the woman and the trail-
wrappings about her head allowed only a pair of black eyes to be seen.
The man was dark-eyed and smooth-shaven all except his mustache, which
was so iced up as to hide his mouth.

"We just wanted to know if there is any other cabin around here," he
said, at the same time glancing over the unfurnished state of the room.
"We thought this cabin was empty."

"It isn't my cabin," Messner answered.  "I just found it a few minutes
ago.  Come right in and camp.  Plenty of room, and you won't need your
stove.  There's room for all."

At the sound of his voice the woman peered at him with quick curiousness.

"Get your things off," her companion said to her.  "I'll unhitch and get
the water so we can start cooking."

Messner took the thawed salmon outside and fed his dogs.  He had to guard
them against the second team of dogs, and when he had reentered the cabin
the other man had unpacked the sled and fetched water.  Messner's pot was
boiling.  He threw in the coffee, settled it with half a cup of cold
water, and took the pot from the stove.  He thawed some sour-dough
biscuits in the oven, at the same time heating a pot of beans he had
boiled the night before and that had ridden frozen on the sled all
morning.

Removing his utensils from the stove, so as to give the newcomers a
chance to cook, he proceeded to take his meal from the top of his grub-
box, himself sitting on his bed-roll.  Between mouthfuls he talked trail
and dogs with the man, who, with head over the stove, was thawing the ice
from his mustache.  There were two bunks in the cabin, and into one of
them, when he had cleared his lip, the stranger tossed his bed-roll.

"We'll sleep here," he said, "unless you prefer this bunk.  You're the
first comer and you have first choice, you know."

"That's all right," Messner answered.  "One bunk's just as good as the
other."

He spread his own bedding in the second bunk, and sat down on the edge.
The stranger thrust a physician's small travelling case under his
blankets at one end to serve for a pillow.

"Doctor?" Messner asked.

"Yes," came the answer, "but I assure you I didn't come into the Klondike
to practise."

The woman busied herself with cooking, while the man sliced bacon and
fired the stove.  The light in the cabin was dim, filtering through in a
small window made of onion-skin writing paper and oiled with bacon
grease, so that John Messner could not make out very well what the woman
looked like.  Not that he tried.  He seemed to have no interest in her.
But she glanced curiously from time to time into the dark corner where he
sat.

"Oh, it's a great life," the doctor proclaimed enthusiastically, pausing
from sharpening his knife on the stovepipe.  "What I like about it is the
struggle, the endeavor with one's own hands, the primitiveness of it, the
realness."

"The temperature is real enough," Messner laughed.

"Do you know how cold it actually is?" the doctor demanded.

The other shook his head.

"Well, I'll tell you.  Seventy-four below zero by spirit thermometer on
the sled."

"That's one hundred and six below freezing point--too cold for
travelling, eh?"

"Practically suicide," was the doctor's verdict.  "One exerts himself.  He
breathes heavily, taking into his lungs the frost itself.  It chills his
lungs, freezes the edges of the tissues.  He gets a dry, hacking cough as
the dead tissue sloughs away, and dies the following summer of pneumonia,
wondering what it's all about.  I'll stay in this cabin for a week,
unless the thermometer rises at least to fifty below."

"I say, Tess," he said, the next moment, "don't you think that coffee's
boiled long enough!"

At the sound of the woman's name, John Messner became suddenly alert.  He
looked at her quickly, while across his face shot a haunting expression,
the ghost of some buried misery achieving swift resurrection.  But the
next moment, and by an effort of will, the ghost was laid again.  His
face was as placid as before, though he was still alert, dissatisfied
with what the feeble light had shown him of the woman's face.

Automatically, her first act had been to set the coffee-pot back.  It was
not until she had done this that she glanced at Messner.  But already he
had composed himself.  She saw only a man sitting on the edge of the bunk
and incuriously studying the toes of his moccasins.  But, as she turned
casually to go about her cooking, he shot another swift look at her, and
she, glancing as swiftly back, caught his look.  He shifted on past her
to the doctor, though the slightest smile curled his lip in appreciation
of the way she had trapped him.

She drew a candle from the grub-box and lighted it.  One look at her
illuminated face was enough for Messner.  In the small cabin the widest
limit was only a matter of several steps, and the next moment she was
alongside of him.  She deliberately held the candle close to his face and
stared at him out of eyes wide with fear and recognition.  He smiled
quietly back at her.

"What are you looking for, Tess?" the doctor called.

"Hairpins," she replied, passing on and rummaging in a clothes-bag on the
bunk.

They served their meal on their grub-box, sitting on Messner's grub-box
and facing him.  He had stretched out on his bunk to rest, lying on his
side, his head on his arm.  In the close quarters it was as though the
three were together at table.

"What part of the States do you come from?" Messner asked.

"San Francisco," answered the doctor.  "I've been in here two years,
though."

"I hail from California myself," was Messner's announcement.

The woman looked at him appealingly, but he smiled and went on:

"Berkeley, you know."

The other man was becoming interested.

"U. C.?" he asked.

"Yes, Class of '86."

"I meant faculty," the doctor explained.  "You remind me of the type."

"Sorry to hear you say so," Messner smiled back.  "I'd prefer being taken
for a prospector or a dog-musher."

"I don't think he looks any more like a professor than you do a doctor,"
the woman broke in.

"Thank you," said Messner.  Then, turning to her companion, "By the way,
Doctor, what is your name, if I may ask?"

"Haythorne, if you'll take my word for it.  I gave up cards with
civilization."

"And Mrs. Haythorne," Messner smiled and bowed.

She flashed a look at him that was more anger than appeal.

Haythorne was about to ask the other's name.  His mouth had opened to
form the question when Messner cut him off.

"Come to think of it, Doctor, you may possibly be able to satisfy my
curiosity.  There was a sort of scandal in faculty circles some two or
three years ago.  The wife of one of the English professors--er, if you
will pardon me, Mrs. Haythorne--disappeared with some San Francisco
doctor, I understood, though his name does not just now come to my lips.
Do you remember the incident?"

Haythorne nodded his head.  "Made quite a stir at the time.  His name was
Womble--Graham Womble.  He had a magnificent practice.  I knew him
somewhat."

"Well, what I was trying to get at was what had become of them.  I was
wondering if you had heard.  They left no trace, hide nor hair."

"He covered his tracks cunningly."  Haythorne cleared his throat.  "There
was rumor that they went to the South Seas--were lost on a trading
schooner in a typhoon, or something like that."

"I never heard that," Messner said.  "You remember the case, Mrs.
Haythorne?"

"Perfectly," she answered, in a voice the control of which was in amazing
contrast to the anger that blazed in the face she turned aside so that
Haythorne might not see.

The latter was again on the verge of asking his name, when Messner
remarked:

"This Dr. Womble, I've heard he was very handsome, and--er--quite a
success, so to say, with the ladies."

"Well, if he was, he finished himself off by that affair," Haythorne
grumbled.

"And the woman was a termagant--at least so I've been told.  It was
generally accepted in Berkeley that she made life--er--not exactly
paradise for her husband."

"I never heard that," Haythorne rejoined.  "In San Francisco the talk was
all the other way."

"Woman sort of a martyr, eh?--crucified on the cross of matrimony?"

The doctor nodded.  Messner's gray eyes were mildly curious as he went
on:

"That was to be expected--two sides to the shield.  Living in Berkeley I
only got the one side.  She was a great deal in San Francisco, it seems."

"Some coffee, please," Haythorne said.

The woman refilled his mug, at the same time breaking into light
laughter.

"You're gossiping like a pair of beldames," she chided them.

"It's so interesting," Messner smiled at her, then returned to the
doctor.  "The husband seems then to have had a not very savory reputation
in San Francisco?"

"On the contrary, he was a moral prig," Haythorne blurted out, with
apparently undue warmth.  "He was a little scholastic shrimp without a
drop of red blood in his body."

"Did you know him?"

"Never laid eyes on him.  I never knocked about in university circles."

"One side of the shield again," Messner said, with an air of weighing the
matter judicially.  "While he did not amount to much, it is true--that
is, physically--I'd hardly say he was as bad as all that.  He did take an
active interest in student athletics.  And he had some talent.  He once
wrote a Nativity play that brought him quite a bit of local appreciation.
I have heard, also, that he was slated for the head of the English
department, only the affair happened and he resigned and went away.  It
quite broke his career, or so it seemed.  At any rate, on our side the
shield, it was considered a knock-out blow to him.  It was thought he
cared a great deal for his wife."

Haythorne, finishing his mug of coffee, grunted uninterestedly and
lighted his pipe.

"It was fortunate they had no children," Messner continued.

But Haythorne, with a glance at the stove, pulled on his cap and mittens.

"I'm going out to get some wood," he said.  "Then I can take off my
moccasins and he comfortable."

The door slammed behind him.  For a long minute there was silence.  The
man continued in the same position on the bed.  The woman sat on the grub-
box, facing him.

"What are you going to do?" she asked abruptly.

Messner looked at her with lazy indecision.  "What do you think I ought
to do?  Nothing scenic, I hope.  You see I am stiff and trail-sore, and
this bunk is so restful."

She gnawed her lower lip and fumed dumbly.

"But--" she began vehemently, then clenched her hands and stopped.

"I hope you don't want me to kill Mr.--er--Haythorne," he said gently,
almost pleadingly.  "It would be most distressing, and, I assure you,
really it is unnecessary."

"But you must do something," she cried.

"On the contrary, it is quite conceivable that I do not have to do
anything."

"You would stay here?"

He nodded.

She glanced desperately around the cabin and at the bed unrolled on the
other bunk.  "Night is coming on.  You can't stop here.  You can't!  I
tell you, you simply can't!"

"Of course I can.  I might remind you that I found this cabin first and
that you are my guests."

Again her eyes travelled around the room, and the terror in them leaped
up at sight of the other bunk.

"Then we'll have to go," she announced decisively.

"Impossible.  You have a dry, hacking cough--the sort Mr.--er--Haythorne
so aptly described.  You've already slightly chilled your lungs.  Besides,
he is a physician and knows.  He would never permit it."

"Then what are you going to do?" she demanded again, with a tense, quiet
utterance that boded an outbreak.

Messner regarded her in a way that was almost paternal, what of the
profundity of pity and patience with which he contrived to suffuse it.

"My dear Theresa, as I told you before, I don't know.  I really haven't
thought about it."

"Oh!  You drive me mad!"  She sprang to her feet, wringing her hands in
impotent wrath.  "You never used to be this way."

"I used to be all softness and gentleness," he nodded concurrence.  "Was
that why you left me?"

"You are so different, so dreadfully calm.  You frighten me.  I feel you
have something terrible planned all the while.  But whatever you do,
don't do anything rash.  Don't get excited--"

"I don't get excited any more," he interrupted.  "Not since you went
away."

"You have improved--remarkably," she retorted.

He smiled acknowledgment.  "While I am thinking about what I shall do,
I'll tell you what you will have to do--tell Mr.--er--Haythorne who I am.
It may make our stay in this cabin more--may I say, sociable?"

"Why have you followed me into this frightful country?" she asked
irrelevantly.

"Don't think I came here looking for you, Theresa.  Your vanity shall not
be tickled by any such misapprehension.  Our meeting is wholly
fortuitous.  I broke with the life academic and I had to go somewhere.  To
be honest, I came into the Klondike because I thought it the place you
were least liable to be in."

There was a fumbling at the latch, then the door swung in and Haythorne
entered with an armful of firewood.  At the first warning, Theresa began
casually to clear away the dishes.  Haythorne went out again after more
wood.

"Why didn't you introduce us?" Messner queried.

"I'll tell him," she replied, with a toss of her head.  "Don't think I'm
afraid."

"I never knew you to be afraid, very much, of anything."

"And I'm not afraid of confession, either," she said, with softening face
and voice.

"In your case, I fear, confession is exploitation by indirection, profit-
making by ruse, self-aggrandizement at the expense of God."

"Don't be literary," she pouted, with growing tenderness.  "I never did
like epigrammatic discussion.  Besides, I'm not afraid to ask you to
forgive me."

"There is nothing to forgive, Theresa.  I really should thank you.  True,
at first I suffered; and then, with all the graciousness of spring, it
dawned upon me that I was happy, very happy.  It was a most amazing
discovery."

"But what if I should return to you?" she asked.

"I should" (he looked at her whimsically), "be greatly perturbed."

"I am your wife.  You know you have never got a divorce."

"I see," he meditated.  "I have been careless.  It will be one of the
first things I attend to."

She came over to his side, resting her hand on his arm.  "You don't want
me, John?"  Her voice was soft and caressing, her hand rested like a
lure.  "If I told you I had made a mistake?  If I told you that I was
very unhappy?--and I am.  And I did make a mistake."

Fear began to grow on Messner.  He felt himself wilting under the lightly
laid hand.  The situation was slipping away from him, all his beautiful
calmness was going.  She looked at him with melting eyes, and he, too,
seemed all dew and melting.  He felt himself on the edge of an abyss,
powerless to withstand the force that was drawing him over.

"I am coming back to you, John.  I am coming back to-day . . . now."

As in a nightmare, he strove under the hand.  While she talked, he seemed
to hear, rippling softly, the song of the Lorelei.  It was as though,
somewhere, a piano were playing and the actual notes were impinging on
his ear-drums.

Suddenly he sprang to his feet, thrust her from him as her arms attempted
to clasp him, and retreated backward to the door.  He was in a panic.

"I'll do something desperate!" he cried.

"I warned you not to get excited."  She laughed mockingly, and went about
washing the dishes.  "Nobody wants you.  I was just playing with you.  I
am happier where I am."

But Messner did not believe.  He remembered her facility in changing
front.  She had changed front now.  It was exploitation by indirection.
She was not happy with the other man.  She had discovered her mistake.
The flame of his ego flared up at the thought.  She wanted to come back
to him, which was the one thing he did not want.  Unwittingly, his hand
rattled the door-latch.

"Don't run away," she laughed.  "I won't bite you."

"I am not running away," he replied with child-like defiance, at the same
time pulling on his mittens.  "I'm only going to get some water."

He gathered the empty pails and cooking pots together and opened the
door.  He looked back at her.

"Don't forget you're to tell Mr.--er--Haythorne who I am."

Messner broke the skin that had formed on the water-hole within the hour,
and filled his pails.  But he did not return immediately to the cabin.
Leaving the pails standing in the trail, he walked up and down, rapidly,
to keep from freezing, for the frost bit into the flesh like fire.  His
beard was white with his frozen breath when the perplexed and frowning
brows relaxed and decision came into his face.  He had made up his mind
to his course of action, and his frigid lips and cheeks crackled into a
chuckle over it.  The pails were already skinned over with young ice when
he picked them up and made for the cabin.

When he entered he found the other man waiting, standing near the stove,
a certain stiff awkwardness and indecision in his manner.  Messner set
down his water-pails.

"Glad to meet you, Graham Womble," he said in conventional tones, as
though acknowledging an introduction.

Messner did not offer his hand.  Womble stirred uneasily, feeling for the
other the hatred one is prone to feel for one he has wronged.

"And so you're the chap," Messner said in marvelling accents.  "Well,
well.  You see, I really am glad to meet you.  I have been--er--curious
to know what Theresa found in you--where, I may say, the attraction lay.
Well, well."

And he looked the other up and down as a man would look a horse up and
down.

"I know how you must feel about me," Womble began.

"Don't mention it," Messner broke in with exaggerated cordiality of voice
and manner.  "Never mind that.  What I want to know is how do you find
her?  Up to expectations?  Has she worn well?  Life been all a happy
dream ever since?"

"Don't be silly," Theresa interjected.

"I can't help being natural," Messner complained.

"You can be expedient at the same time, and practical," Womble said
sharply.  "What we want to know is what are you going to do?"

Messner made a well-feigned gesture of helplessness.  "I really don't
know.  It is one of those impossible situations against which there can
be no provision."

"All three of us cannot remain the night in this cabin."

Messner nodded affirmation.

"Then somebody must get out."

"That also is incontrovertible," Messner agreed.  "When three bodies
cannot occupy the same space at the same time, one must get out."

"And you're that one," Womble announced grimly.  "It's a ten-mile pull to
the next camp, but you can make it all right."

"And that's the first flaw in your reasoning," the other objected.  "Why,
necessarily, should I be the one to get out?  I found this cabin first."

"But Tess can't get out," Womble explained.  "Her lungs are already
slightly chilled."

"I agree with you.  She can't venture ten miles of frost.  By all means
she must remain."

"Then it is as I said," Womble announced with finality.

Messner cleared his throat.  "Your lungs are all right, aren't they?"

"Yes, but what of it?"

Again the other cleared his throat and spoke with painstaking and
judicial slowness.  "Why, I may say, nothing of it, except, ah, according
to your own reasoning, there is nothing to prevent your getting out,
hitting the frost, so to speak, for a matter of ten miles.  You can make
it all right."

Womble looked with quick suspicion at Theresa and caught in her eyes a
glint of pleased surprise.

"Well?" he demanded of her.

She hesitated, and a surge of anger darkened his face.  He turned upon
Messner.

"Enough of this.  You can't stop here."

"Yes, I can."

"I won't let you." Womble squared his shoulders.  "I'm running things."

"I'll stay anyway," the other persisted.

"I'll put you out."

"I'll come back."

Womble stopped a moment to steady his voice and control himself.  Then he
spoke slowly, in a low, tense voice.

"Look here, Messner, if you refuse to get out, I'll thrash you.  This
isn't California.  I'll beat you to a jelly with my two fists."

Messner shrugged his shoulders.  "If you do, I'll call a miners' meeting
and see you strung up to the nearest tree.  As you said, this is not
California.  They're a simple folk, these miners, and all I'll have to do
will be to show them the marks of the beating, tell them the truth about
you, and present my claim for my wife."

The woman attempted to speak, but Womble turned upon her fiercely.

"You keep out of this," he cried.

In marked contrast was Messner's "Please don't intrude, Theresa."

What of her anger and pent feelings, her lungs were irritated into the
dry, hacking cough, and with blood-suffused face and one hand clenched
against her chest, she waited for the paroxysm to pass.

Womble looked gloomily at her, noting her cough.

"Something must be done," he said.  "Yet her lungs can't stand the
exposure.  She can't travel till the temperature rises.  And I'm not
going to give her up."

Messner hemmed, cleared his throat, and hemmed again,
semi-apologetically, and said, "I need some money."

Contempt showed instantly in Womble's face.  At last, beneath him in
vileness, had the other sunk himself.

"You've got a fat sack of dust," Messner went on.  "I saw you unload it
from the sled."

"How much do you want?" Womble demanded, with a contempt in his voice
equal to that in his face.

"I made an estimate of the sack, and I--ah--should say it weighed about
twenty pounds.  What do you say we call it four thousand?"

"But it's all I've got, man!" Womble cried out.

"You've got her," the other said soothingly.  "She must be worth it.
Think what I'm giving up.  Surely it is a reasonable price."

"All right."  Womble rushed across the floor to the gold-sack.  "Can't
put this deal through too quick for me, you--you little worm!"

"Now, there you err," was the smiling rejoinder.  "As a matter of ethics
isn't the man who gives a bribe as bad as the man who takes a bribe?  The
receiver is as bad as the thief, you know; and you needn't console
yourself with any fictitious moral superiority concerning this little
deal."

"To hell with your ethics!" the other burst out.  "Come here and watch
the weighing of this dust.  I might cheat you."

And the woman, leaning against the bunk, raging and impotent, watched
herself weighed out in yellow dust and nuggets in the scales erected on
the grub-box.  The scales were small, making necessary many weighings,
and Messner with precise care verified each weighing.

"There's too much silver in it," he remarked as he tied up the gold-sack.
"I don't think it will run quite sixteen to the ounce.  You got a trifle
the better of me, Womble."

He handled the sack lovingly, and with due appreciation of its
preciousness carried it out to his sled.

Returning, he gathered his pots and pans together, packed his grub-box,
and rolled up his bed.  When the sled was lashed and the complaining dogs
harnessed, he returned into the cabin for his mittens.

"Good-by, Tess," he said, standing at the open door.

She turned on him, struggling for speech but too frantic to word the
passion that burned in her.

"Good-by, Tess," he repeated gently.

"Beast!" she managed to articulate.

She turned and tottered to the bunk, flinging herself face down upon it,
sobbing:  "You beasts!  You beasts!"

John Messner closed the door softly behind him, and, as he started the
dogs, looked back at the cabin with a great relief in his face.  At the
bottom of the bank, beside the water-hole, he halted the sled.  He worked
the sack of gold out between the lashings and carried it to the water-
hole.  Already a new skin of ice had formed.  This he broke with his
fist.  Untying the knotted mouth with his teeth, he emptied the contents
of the sack into the water.  The river was shallow at that point, and two
feet beneath the surface he could see the bottom dull-yellow in the
fading light.  At the sight of it, he spat into the hole.

He started the dogs along the Yukon trail.  Whining spiritlessly, they
were reluctant to work.  Clinging to the gee-pole with his right band and
with his left rubbing cheeks and nose, he stumbled over the rope as the
dogs swung on a bend.

"Mush-on, you poor, sore-footed brutes!" he cried.  "That's it, mush-on!"




THE WHITE MAN'S WAY


"To cook by your fire and to sleep under your roof for the night," I had
announced on entering old Ebbits's cabin; and he had looked at me blear-
eyed and vacuous, while Zilla had favored me with a sour face and a
contemptuous grunt.  Zilla was his wife, and no more bitter-tongued,
implacable old squaw dwelt on the Yukon.  Nor would I have stopped there
had my dogs been less tired or had the rest of the village been
inhabited.  But this cabin alone had I found occupied, and in this cabin,
perforce, I took my shelter.

Old Ebbits now and again pulled his tangled wits together, and hints and
sparkles of intelligence came and went in his eyes.  Several times during
the preparation of my supper he even essayed hospitable inquiries about
my health, the condition and number of my dogs, and the distance I had
travelled that day.  And each time Zilla had looked sourer than ever and
grunted more contemptuously.

Yet I confess that there was no particular call for cheerfulness on their
part.  There they crouched by the fire, the pair of them, at the end of
their days, old and withered and helpless, racked by rheumatism, bitten
by hunger, and tantalized by the frying-odors of my abundance of meat.
They rocked back and forth in a slow and hopeless way, and regularly,
once every five minutes, Ebbits emitted a low groan.  It was not so much
a groan of pain, as of pain-weariness.  He was oppressed by the weight
and the torment of this thing called life, and still more was he
oppressed by the fear of death.  His was that eternal tragedy of the
aged, with whom the joy of life has departed and the instinct for death
has not come.

When my moose-meat spluttered rowdily in the frying-pan, I noticed old
Ebbits's nostrils twitch and distend as he caught the food-scent.  He
ceased rocking for a space and forgot to groan, while a look of
intelligence seemed to come into his face.

Zilla, on the other hand, rocked more rapidly, and for the first time, in
sharp little yelps, voiced her pain.  It came to me that their behavior
was like that of hungry dogs, and in the fitness of things I should not
have been astonished had Zilla suddenly developed a tail and thumped it
on the floor in right doggish fashion.  Ebbits drooled a little and
stopped his rocking very frequently to lean forward and thrust his
tremulous nose nearer to the source of gustatory excitement.

When I passed them each a plate of the fried meat, they ate greedily,
making loud mouth-noises--champings of worn teeth and sucking intakes of
the breath, accompanied by a continuous spluttering and mumbling.  After
that, when I gave them each a mug of scalding tea, the noises ceased.
Easement and content came into their faces.  Zilla relaxed her sour mouth
long enough to sigh her satisfaction.  Neither rocked any more, and they
seemed to have fallen into placid meditation.  Then a dampness came into
Ebbits's eyes, and I knew that the sorrow of self-pity was his.  The
search required to find their pipes told plainly that they had been
without tobacco a long time, and the old man's eagerness for the narcotic
rendered him helpless, so that I was compelled to light his pipe for him.

"Why are you all alone in the village?" I asked.  "Is everybody dead?  Has
there been a great sickness?  Are you alone left of the living?"

Old Ebbits shook his head, saying:  "Nay, there has been no great
sickness.  The village has gone away to hunt meat.  We be too old, our
legs are not strong, nor can our backs carry the burdens of camp and
trail.  Wherefore we remain here and wonder when the young men will
return with meat."

"What if the young men do return with meat?" Zilla demanded harshly.

"They may return with much meat," he quavered hopefully.

"Even so, with much meat," she continued, more harshly than before.  "But
of what worth to you and me?  A few bones to gnaw in our toothless old
age.  But the back-fat, the kidneys, and the tongues--these shall go into
other mouths than thine and mine, old man."

Ebbits nodded his head and wept silently.

"There be no one to hunt meat for us," she cried, turning fiercely upon
me.

There was accusation in her manner, and I shrugged my shoulders in token
that I was not guilty of the unknown crime imputed to me.

"Know, O White Man, that it is because of thy kind, because of all white
men, that my man and I have no meat in our old age and sit without
tobacco in the cold."

"Nay," Ebbits said gravely, with a stricter sense of justice.  "Wrong has
been done us, it be true; but the white men did not mean the wrong."

"Where be Moklan?" she demanded.  "Where be thy strong son, Moklan, and
the fish he was ever willing to bring that you might eat?"

The old man shook his head.

"And where be Bidarshik, thy strong son?  Ever was he a mighty hunter,
and ever did he bring thee the good back-fat and the sweet dried tongues
of the moose and the caribou.  I see no back-fat and no sweet dried
tongues.  Your stomach is full with emptiness through the days, and it is
for a man of a very miserable and lying people to give you to eat."

"Nay," old Ebbits interposed in kindliness, "the white man's is not a
lying people.  The white man speaks true.  Always does the white man
speak true."  He paused, casting about him for words wherewith to temper
the severity of what he was about to say.  "But the white man speaks true
in different ways.  To-day he speaks true one way, to-morrow he speaks
true another way, and there is no understanding him nor his way."

"To-day speak true one way, to-morrow speak true another way, which is to
lie," was Zilla's dictum.

"There is no understanding the white man," Ebbits went on doggedly.

The meat, and the tea, and the tobacco seemed to have brought him back to
life, and he gripped tighter hold of the idea behind his age-bleared
eyes.  He straightened up somewhat.  His voice lost its querulous and
whimpering note, and became strong and positive.  He turned upon me with
dignity, and addressed me as equal addresses equal.

"The white man's eyes are not shut," he began.  "The white man sees all
things, and thinks greatly, and is very wise.  But the white man of one
day is not the white man of next day, and there is no understanding him.
He does not do things always in the same way.  And what way his next way
is to be, one cannot know.  Always does the Indian do the one thing in
the one way.  Always does the moose come down from the high mountains
when the winter is here.  Always does the salmon come in the spring when
the ice has gone out of the river.  Always does everything do all things
in the same way, and the Indian knows and understands.  But the white man
does not do all things in the same way, and the Indian does not know nor
understand.

"Tobacco be very good.  It be food to the hungry man.  It makes the
strong man stronger, and the angry man to forget that he is angry.  Also
is tobacco of value.  It is of very great value.  The Indian gives one
large salmon for one leaf of tobacco, and he chews the tobacco for a long
time.  It is the juice of the tobacco that is good.  When it runs down
his throat it makes him feel good inside.  But the white man!  When his
mouth is full with the juice, what does he do?  That juice, that juice of
great value, he spits it out in the snow and it is lost.  Does the white
man like tobacco?  I do not know.  But if he likes tobacco, why does he
spit out its value and lose it in the snow?  It is a great foolishness
and without understanding."

He ceased, puffed at the pipe, found that it was out, and passed it over
to Zilla, who took the sneer at the white man off her lips in order to
pucker them about the pipe-stem.  Ebbits seemed sinking back into his
senility with the tale untold, and I demanded:

"What of thy sons, Moklan and Bidarshik?  And why is it that you and your
old woman are without meat at the end of your years?"

He roused himself as from sleep, and straightened up with an effort.

"It is not good to steal," he said.  "When the dog takes your meat you
beat the dog with a club.  Such is the law.  It is the law the man gave
to the dog, and the dog must live to the law, else will it suffer the
pain of the club.  When man takes your meat, or your canoe, or your wife,
you kill that man.  That is the law, and it is a good law.  It is not
good to steal, wherefore it is the law that the man who steals must die.
Whoso breaks the law must suffer hurt.  It is a great hurt to die."

"But if you kill the man, why do you not kill the dog?" I asked.

Old Ebbits looked at me in childlike wonder, while Zilla sneered openly
at the absurdity of my question.

"It is the way of the white man," Ebbits mumbled with an air of
resignation.

"It is the foolishness of the white man," snapped Zilla.

"Then let old Ebbits teach the white man wisdom," I said softly.

"The dog is not killed, because it must pull the sled of the man.  No man
pulls another man's sled, wherefore the man is killed."

"Oh," I murmured.

"That is the law," old Ebbits went on.  "Now listen, O White Man, and I
will tell you of a great foolishness.  There is an Indian.  His name is
Mobits.  From white man he steals two pounds of flour.  What does the
white man do?  Does he beat Mobits?  No.  Does he kill Mobits?  No. What
does he do to Mobits?  I will tell you, O White Man.  He has a house.  He
puts Mobits in that house.  The roof is good.  The walls are thick.  He
makes a fire that Mobits may be warm.  He gives Mobits plenty grub to
eat.  It is good grub.  Never in his all days does Mobits eat so good
grub.  There is bacon, and bread, and beans without end.  Mobits have
very good time.

"There is a big lock on door so that Mobits does not run away.  This also
is a great foolishness.  Mobits will not run away.  All the time is there
plenty grub in that place, and warm blankets, and a big fire.  Very
foolish to run away.  Mobits is not foolish.  Three months Mobits stop in
that place.  He steal two pounds of flour.  For that, white man take
plenty good care of him.  Mobits eat many pounds of flour, many pounds of
sugar, of bacon, of beans without end.  Also, Mobits drink much tea.
After three months white man open door and tell Mobits he must go.  Mobits
does not want to go.  He is like dog that is fed long time in one place.
He want to stay in that place, and the white man must drive Mobits away.
So Mobits come back to this village, and he is very fat.  That is the
white man's way, and there is no understanding it.  It is a foolishness,
a great foolishness."

"But thy sons?" I insisted.  "Thy very strong sons and thine old-age
hunger?"

"There was Moklan," Ebbits began.

"A strong man," interrupted the mother.  "He could dip paddle all of a
day and night and never stop for the need of rest.  He was wise in the
way of the salmon and in the way of the water.  He was very wise."

"There was Moklan," Ebbits repeated, ignoring the interruption.  "In the
spring, he went down the Yukon with the young men to trade at Cambell
Fort.  There is a post there, filled with the goods of the white man, and
a trader whose name is Jones.  Likewise is there a white man's medicine
man, what you call missionary.  Also is there bad water at Cambell Fort,
where the Yukon goes slim like a maiden, and the water is fast, and the
currents rush this way and that and come together, and there are whirls
and sucks, and always are the currents changing and the face of the water
changing, so at any two times it is never the same.  Moklan is my son,
wherefore he is brave man--"

"Was not my father brave man?" Zilla demanded.

"Thy father was brave man," Ebbits acknowledged, with the air of one who
will keep peace in the house at any cost.  "Moklan is thy son and mine,
wherefore he is brave.  Mayhap, because of thy very brave father, Moklan
is too brave.  It is like when too much water is put in the pot it spills
over.  So too much bravery is put into Moklan, and the bravery spills
over.

"The young men are much afraid of the bad water at Cambell Fort.  But
Moklan is not afraid.  He laughs strong, Ho! ho! and he goes forth into
the bad water.  But where the currents come together the canoe is turned
over.  A whirl takes Moklan by the legs, and he goes around and around,
and down and down, and is seen no more."

"Ai! ai!" wailed Zilla.  "Crafty and wise was he, and my first-born!"

"I am the father of Moklan," Ebbits said, having patiently given the
woman space for her noise.  "I get into canoe and journey down to Cambell
Fort to collect the debt!"

"Debt!" interrupted.  "What debt?"

"The debt of Jones, who is chief trader," came the answer.  "Such is the
law of travel in a strange country."

I shook my head in token of my ignorance, and Ebbits looked compassion at
me, while Zilla snorted her customary contempt.

"Look you, O White Man," he said.  "In thy camp is a dog that bites.  When
the dog bites a man, you give that man a present because you are sorry
and because it is thy dog.  You make payment.  Is it not so?  Also, if
you have in thy country bad hunting, or bad water, you must make payment.
It is just.  It is the law.  Did not my father's brother go over into the
Tanana Country and get killed by a bear?  And did not the Tanana tribe
pay my father many blankets and fine furs?  It was just.  It was bad
hunting, and the Tanana people made payment for the bad hunting.

"So I, Ebbits, journeyed down to Cambell Fort to collect the debt.  Jones,
who is chief trader, looked at me, and he laughed.  He made great
laughter, and would not give payment.  I went to the medicine-man, what
you call missionary, and had large talk about the bad water and the
payment that should be mine.  And the missionary made talk about other
things.  He talk about where Moklan has gone, now he is dead.  There be
large fires in that place, and if missionary make true talk, I know that
Moklan will be cold no more.  Also the missionary talk about where I
shall go when I am dead.  And he say bad things.  He say that I am blind.
Which is a lie.  He say that I am in great darkness.  Which is a lie.  And
I say that the day come and the night come for everybody just the same,
and that in my village it is no more dark than at Cambell Fort.  Also, I
say that darkness and light and where we go when we die be different
things from the matter of payment of just debt for bad water.  Then the
missionary make large anger, and call me bad names of darkness, and tell
me to go away.  And so I come back from Cambell Fort, and no payment has
been made, and Moklan is dead, and in my old age I am without fish and
meat."

"Because of the white man," said Zilla.

"Because of the white man," Ebbits concurred.  "And other things because
of the white man.  There was Bidarshik.  One way did the white man deal
with him; and yet another way for the same thing did the white man deal
with Yamikan.  And first must I tell you of Yamikan, who was a young man
of this village and who chanced to kill a white man.  It is not good to
kill a man of another people.  Always is there great trouble.  It was not
the fault of Yamikan that he killed the white man.  Yamikan spoke always
soft words and ran away from wrath as a dog from a stick.  But this white
man drank much whiskey, and in the night-time came to Yamikan's house and
made much fight.  Yamikan cannot run away, and the white man tries to
kill him.  Yamikan does not like to die, so he kills the white man.

"Then is all the village in great trouble.  We are much afraid that we
must make large payment to the white man's people, and we hide our
blankets, and our furs, and all our wealth, so that it will seem that we
are poor people and can make only small payment.  After long time white
men come.  They are soldier white men, and they take Yamikan away with
them.  His mother make great noise and throw ashes in her hair, for she
knows Yamikan is dead.  And all the village knows that Yamikan is dead,
and is glad that no payment is asked.

"That is in the spring when the ice has gone out of the river.  One year
go by, two years go by.  It is spring-time again, and the ice has gone
out of the river.  And then Yamikan, who is dead, comes back to us, and
he is not dead, but very fat, and we know that he has slept warm and had
plenty grub to eat.  He has much fine clothes and is all the same white
man, and he has gathered large wisdom so that he is very quick head man
in the village.

"And he has strange things to tell of the way of the white man, for he
has seen much of the white man and done a great travel into the white
man's country.  First place, soldier white men take him down the river
long way.  All the way do they take him down the river to the end, where
it runs into a lake which is larger than all the land and large as the
sky.  I do not know the Yukon is so big river, but Yamikan has seen with
his own eyes.  I do not think there is a lake larger than all the land
and large as the sky, but Yamikan has seen.  Also, he has told me that
the waters of this lake be salt, which is a strange thing and beyond
understanding.

"But the White Man knows all these marvels for himself, so I shall not
weary him with the telling of them.  Only will I tell him what happened
to Yamikan.  The white man give Yamikan much fine grub.  All the time
does Yamikan eat, and all the time is there plenty more grub.  The white
man lives under the sun, so said Yamikan, where there be much warmth, and
animals have only hair and no fur, and the green things grow large and
strong and become flour, and beans, and potatoes.  And under the sun
there is never famine.  Always is there plenty grub.  I do not know.
Yamikan has said.

"And here is a strange thing that befell Yamikan.  Never did the white
man hurt him.  Only did they give him warm bed at night and plenty fine
grub.  They take him across the salt lake which is big as the sky.  He is
on white man's fire-boat, what you call steamboat, only he is on boat
maybe twenty times bigger than steamboat on Yukon.  Also, it is made of
iron, this boat, and yet does it not sink.  This I do not understand, but
Yamikan has said, 'I have journeyed far on the iron boat; behold! I am
still alive.'  It is a white man's soldier-boat with many soldier men
upon it.

"After many sleeps of travel, a long, long time, Yamikan comes to a land
where there is no snow.  I cannot believe this.  It is not in the nature
of things that when winter comes there shall be no snow.  But Yamikan has
seen.  Also have I asked the white men, and they have said yes, there is
no snow in that country.  But I cannot believe, and now I ask you if snow
never come in that country.  Also, I would hear the name of that country.
I have heard the name before, but I would hear it again, if it be the
same--thus will I know if I have heard lies or true talk."

Old Ebbits regarded me with a wistful face.  He would have the truth at
any cost, though it was his desire to retain his faith in the marvel he
had never seen.

"Yes," I answered, "it is true talk that you have heard.  There is no
snow in that country, and its name is California."

"Cal-ee-forn-ee-yeh," he mumbled twice and thrice, listening intently to
the sound of the syllables as they fell from his lips.  He nodded his
head in confirmation.  "Yes, it is the same country of which Yamikan made
talk."

I recognized the adventure of Yamikan as one likely to occur in the early
days when Alaska first passed into the possession of the United States.
Such a murder case, occurring before the instalment of territorial law
and officials, might well have been taken down to the United States for
trial before a Federal court.

"When Yamikan is in this country where there is no snow," old Ebbits
continued, "he is taken to large house where many men make much talk.
Long time men talk.  Also many questions do they ask Yamikan.  By and by
they tell Yamikan he have no more trouble.  Yamikan does not understand,
for never has he had any trouble.  All the time have they given him warm
place to sleep and plenty grub.

"But after that they give him much better grub, and they give him money,
and they take him many places in white man's country, and he see many
strange things which are beyond the understanding of Ebbits, who is an
old man and has not journeyed far.  After two years, Yamikan comes back
to this village, and he is head man, and very wise until he dies.

"But before he dies, many times does he sit by my fire and make talk of
the strange things he has seen.  And Bidarshik, who is my son, sits by
the fire and listens; and his eyes are very wide and large because of the
things he hears.  One night, after Yamikan has gone home, Bidarshik
stands up, so, very tall, and he strikes his chest with his fist, and
says, 'When I am a man, I shall journey in far places, even to the land
where there is no snow, and see things for myself.'"

"Always did Bidarshik journey in far places," Zilla interrupted proudly.

"It be true," Ebbits assented gravely.  "And always did he return to sit
by the fire and hunger for yet other and unknown far places."

"And always did he remember the salt lake as big as the sky and the
country under the sun where there is no snow," quoth Zilla.

"And always did he say, 'When I have the full strength of a man, I will
go and see for myself if the talk of Yamikan be true talk,'" said Ebbits.

"But there was no way to go to the white man's country," said Zilla.

"Did he not go down to the salt lake that is big as the sky?" Ebbits
demanded.

"And there was no way for him across the salt lake," said Zilla.

"Save in the white man's fire-boat which is of iron and is bigger than
twenty steamboats on the Yukon," said Ebbits.  He scowled at Zilla, whose
withered lips were again writhing into speech, and compelled her to
silence.  "But the white man would not let him cross the salt lake in the
fire-boat, and he returned to sit by the fire and hunger for the country
under the sun where there is no snow.'"

"Yet on the salt lake had he seen the fire-boat of iron that did not
sink," cried out Zilla the irrepressible.

"Ay," said Ebbits, "and he saw that Yamikan had made true talk of the
things he had seen.  But there was no way for Bidarshik to journey to the
white man's land under the sun, and he grew sick and weary like an old
man and moved not away from the fire.  No longer did he go forth to kill
meat--"

"And no longer did he eat the meat placed before him," Zilla broke in.
"He would shake his head and say, 'Only do I care to eat the grub of the
white man and grow fat after the manner of Yamikan.'"

"And he did not eat the meat," Ebbits went on.  "And the sickness of
Bidarshik grew into a great sickness until I thought he would die.  It
was not a sickness of the body, but of the head.  It was a sickness of
desire.  I, Ebbits, who am his father, make a great think.  I have no
more sons and I do not want Bidarshik to die.  It is a head-sickness, and
there is but one way to make it well.  Bidarshik must journey across the
lake as large as the sky to the land where there is no snow, else will he
die.  I make a very great think, and then I see the way for Bidarshik to
go.

"So, one night when he sits by the fire, very sick, his head hanging
down, I say, 'My son, I have learned the way for you to go to the white
man's land.'  He looks at me, and his face is glad.  'Go,' I say, 'even
as Yamikan went.'  But Bidarshik is sick and does not understand.  'Go
forth,' I say, 'and find a white man, and, even as Yamikan, do you kill
that white man.  Then will the soldier white men come and get you, and
even as they took Yamikan will they take you across the salt lake to the
white man's land.  And then, even as Yamikan, will you return very fat,
your eyes full of the things you have seen, your head filled with
wisdom.'

"And Bidarshik stands up very quick, and his hand is reaching out for his
gun.  'Where do you go?' I ask.  'To kill the white man,' he says.  And I
see that my words have been good in the ears of Bidarshik and that he
will grow well again.  Also do I know that my words have been wise.

"There is a white man come to this village.  He does not seek after gold
in the ground, nor after furs in the forest.  All the time does he seek
after bugs and flies.  He does not eat the bugs and flies, then why does
he seek after them?  I do not know.  Only do I know that he is a funny
white man.  Also does he seek after the eggs of birds.  He does not eat
the eggs.  All that is inside he takes out, and only does he keep the
shell.  Eggshell is not good to eat.  Nor does he eat the eggshells, but
puts them away in soft boxes where they will not break.  He catch many
small birds.  But he does not eat the birds.  He takes only the skins and
puts them away in boxes.  Also does he like bones.  Bones are not good to
eat.  And this strange white man likes best the bones of long time ago
which he digs out of the ground.

"But he is not a fierce white man, and I know he will die very easy; so I
say to Bidarshik, 'My son, there is the white man for you to kill.'  And
Bidarshik says that my words be wise.  So he goes to a place he knows
where are many bones in the ground.  He digs up very many of these bones
and brings them to the strange white man's camp.  The white man is made
very glad.  His face shines like the sun, and he smiles with much
gladness as he looks at the bones.  He bends his head over, so, to look
well at the bones, and then Bidarshik strikes him hard on the head, with
axe, once, so, and the strange white man kicks and is dead.

"'Now,' I say to Bidarshik, 'will the white soldier men come and take you
away to the land under the sun, where you will eat much and grow fat.'
Bidarshik is happy.  Already has his sickness gone from him, and he sits
by the fire and waits for the coming of the white soldier men.

"How was I to know the way of the white man is never twice the same?" the
old man demanded, whirling upon me fiercely.  "How was I to know that
what the white man does yesterday he will not do to-day, and that what he
does to-day he will not do to-morrow?"  Ebbits shook his head sadly.
"There is no understanding the white man.  Yesterday he takes Yamikan to
the land under the sun and makes him fat with much grub.  To-day he takes
Bidarshik and--what does he do with Bidarshik?  Let me tell you what he
does with Bidarshik.

"I, Ebbits, his father, will tell you.  He takes Bidarshik to Cambell
Fort, and he ties a rope around his neck, so, and, when his feet are no
more on the ground, he dies."

"Ai! ai!" wailed Zilla.  "And never does he cross the lake large as the
sky, nor see the land under the sun where there is no snow."

"Wherefore," old Ebbits said with grave dignity, "there be no one to hunt
meat for me in my old age, and I sit hungry by my fire and tell my story
to the White Man who has given me grub, and strong tea, and tobacco for
my pipe."

"Because of the lying and very miserable white people," Zilla proclaimed
shrilly.

"Nay," answered the old man with gentle positiveness.  "Because of the
way of the white man, which is without understanding and never twice the
same."




THE STORY OF KEESH


Keesh lived long ago on the rim of the polar sea, was head man of his
village through many and prosperous years, and died full of honors with
his name on the lips of men.  So long ago did he live that only the old
men remember his name, his name and the tale, which they got from the old
men before them, and which the old men to come will tell to their
children and their children's children down to the end of time.  And the
winter darkness, when the north gales make their long sweep across the
ice-pack, and the air is filled with flying white, and no man may venture
forth, is the chosen time for the telling of how Keesh, from the poorest
_igloo_ in the village, rose to power and place over them all.

He was a bright boy, so the tale runs, healthy and strong, and he had
seen thirteen suns, in their way of reckoning time.  For each winter the
sun leaves the land in darkness, and the next year a new sun returns so
that they may be warm again and look upon one another's faces.  The
father of Keesh had been a very brave man, but he had met his death in a
time of famine, when he sought to save the lives of his people by taking
the life of a great polar bear.  In his eagerness he came to close
grapples with the bear, and his bones were crushed; but the bear had much
meat on him and the people were saved.  Keesh was his only son, and after
that Keesh lived alone with his mother.  But the people are prone to
forget, and they forgot the deed of his father; and he being but a boy,
and his mother only a woman, they, too, were swiftly forgotten, and ere
long came to live in the meanest of all the _igloos_.

It was at a council, one night, in the big _igloo_ of Klosh-Kwan, the
chief, that Keesh showed the blood that ran in his veins and the manhood
that stiffened his back.  With the dignity of an elder, he rose to his
feet, and waited for silence amid the babble of voices.

"It is true that meat be apportioned me and mine," he said.  "But it is
ofttimes old and tough, this meat, and, moreover, it has an unusual
quantity of bones."

The hunters, grizzled and gray, and lusty and young, were aghast.  The
like had never been known before.  A child, that talked like a grown man,
and said harsh things to their very faces!

But steadily and with seriousness, Keesh went on.  "For that I know my
father, Bok, was a great hunter, I speak these words.  It is said that
Bok brought home more meat than any of the two best hunters, that with
his own hands he attended to the division of it, that with his own eyes
he saw to it that the least old woman and the last old man received fair
share."

"Na! Na!" the men cried.  "Put the child out!"  "Send him off to bed!"
"He is no man that he should talk to men and graybeards!"

He waited calmly till the uproar died down.

"Thou hast a wife, Ugh-Gluk," he said, "and for her dost thou speak.  And
thou, too, Massuk, a mother also, and for them dost thou speak.  My
mother has no one, save me; wherefore I speak.  As I say, though Bok be
dead because he hunted over-keenly, it is just that I, who am his son,
and that Ikeega, who is my mother and was his wife, should have meat in
plenty so long as there be meat in plenty in the tribe.  I, Keesh, the
son of Bok, have spoken."

He sat down, his ears keenly alert to the flood of protest and
indignation his words had created.

"That a boy should speak in council!" old Ugh-Gluk was mumbling.

"Shall the babes in arms tell us men the things we shall do?" Massuk
demanded in a loud voice.  "Am I a man that I should be made a mock by
every child that cries for meat?"

The anger boiled a white heat.  They ordered him to bed, threatened that
he should have no meat at all, and promised him sore beatings for his
presumption.  Keesh's eyes began to flash, and the blood to pound darkly
under his skin.  In the midst of the abuse he sprang to his feet.

"Hear me, ye men!" he cried.  "Never shall I speak in the council again,
never again till the men come to me and say, 'It is well, Keesh, that
thou shouldst speak, it is well and it is our wish.'  Take this now, ye
men, for my last word.  Bok, my father, was a great hunter.  I, too, his
son, shall go and hunt the meat that I eat.  And be it known, now, that
the division of that which I kill shall be fair.  And no widow nor weak
one shall cry in the night because there is no meat, when the strong men
are groaning in great pain for that they have eaten overmuch.  And in the
days to come there shall be shame upon the strong men who have eaten
overmuch.  I, Keesh, have said it!"

Jeers and scornful laughter followed him out of the _igloo_, but his jaw
was set and he went his way, looking neither to right nor left.

The next day he went forth along the shore-line where the ice and the
land met together.  Those who saw him go noted that he carried his bow,
with a goodly supply of bone-barbed arrows, and that across his shoulder
was his father's big hunting-spear.  And there was laughter, and much
talk, at the event.  It was an unprecedented occurrence.  Never did boys
of his tender age go forth to hunt, much less to hunt alone.  Also were
there shaking of heads and prophetic mutterings, and the women looked
pityingly at Ikeega, and her face was grave and sad.

"He will be back ere long," they said cheeringly.

"Let him go; it will teach him a lesson," the hunters said.  "And he will
come back shortly, and he will be meek and soft of speech in the days to
follow."

But a day passed, and a second, and on the third a wild gale blew, and
there was no Keesh.  Ikeega tore her hair and put soot of the seal-oil on
her face in token of her grief; and the women assailed the men with
bitter words in that they had mistreated the boy and sent him to his
death; and the men made no answer, preparing to go in search of the body
when the storm abated.

Early next morning, however, Keesh strode into the village.  But he came
not shamefacedly.  Across his shoulders he bore a burden of fresh-killed
meat.  And there was importance in his step and arrogance in his speech.

"Go, ye men, with the dogs and sledges, and take my trail for the better
part of a day's travel," he said.  "There is much meat on the ice--a she-
bear and two half-grown cubs."

Ikeega was overcome with joy, but he received her demonstrations in
manlike fashion, saying:  "Come, Ikeega, let us eat.  And after that I
shall sleep, for I am weary."

And he passed into their _igloo_ and ate profoundly, and after that slept
for twenty running hours.

There was much doubt at first, much doubt and discussion.  The killing of
a polar bear is very dangerous, but thrice dangerous is it, and three
times thrice, to kill a mother bear with her cubs.  The men could not
bring themselves to believe that the boy Keesh, single-handed, had
accomplished so great a marvel.  But the women spoke of the fresh-killed
meat he had brought on his back, and this was an overwhelming argument
against their unbelief.  So they finally departed, grumbling greatly that
in all probability, if the thing were so, he had neglected to cut up the
carcasses.  Now in the north it is very necessary that this should be
done as soon as a kill is made.  If not, the meat freezes so solidly as
to turn the edge of the sharpest knife, and a three-hundred-pound bear,
frozen stiff, is no easy thing to put upon a sled and haul over the rough
ice.  But arrived at the spot, they found not only the kill, which they
had doubted, but that Keesh had quartered the beasts in true hunter
fashion, and removed the entrails.

Thus began the mystery of Keesh, a mystery that deepened and deepened
with the passing of the days.  His very next trip he killed a young bear,
nearly full-grown, and on the trip following, a large male bear and his
mate.  He was ordinarily gone from three to four days, though it was
nothing unusual for him to stay away a week at a time on the ice-field.
Always he declined company on these expeditions, and the people
marvelled.  "How does he do it?" they demanded of one another.  "Never
does he take a dog with him, and dogs are of such great help, too."

"Why dost thou hunt only bear?" Klosh-Kwan once ventured to ask him.

And Keesh made fitting answer.  "It is well known that there is more meat
on the bear," he said.

But there was also talk of witchcraft in the village.  "He hunts with
evil spirits," some of the people contended, "wherefore his hunting is
rewarded.  How else can it be, save that he hunts with evil spirits?"

"Mayhap they be not evil, but good, these spirits," others said.  "It is
known that his father was a mighty hunter.  May not his father hunt with
him so that he may attain excellence and patience and understanding?  Who
knows?"

None the less, his success continued, and the less skilful hunters were
often kept busy hauling in his meat.  And in the division of it he was
just.  As his father had done before him, he saw to it that the least old
woman and the last old man received a fair portion, keeping no more for
himself than his needs required.  And because of this, and of his merit
as a hunter, he was looked upon with respect, and even awe; and there was
talk of making him chief after old Klosh-Kwan.  Because of the things he
had done, they looked for him to appear again in the council, but he
never came, and they were ashamed to ask.

"I am minded to build me an _igloo_," he said one day to Klosh-Kwan and a
number of the hunters.  "It shall be a large _igloo_, wherein Ikeega and
I can dwell in comfort."

"Ay," they nodded gravely.

"But I have no time.  My business is hunting, and it takes all my time.
So it is but just that the men and women of the village who eat my meat
should build me my _igloo_."

And the _igloo_ was built accordingly, on a generous scale which exceeded
even the dwelling of Klosh-Kwan.  Keesh and his mother moved into it, and
it was the first prosperity she had enjoyed since the death of Bok.  Nor
was material prosperity alone hers, for, because of her wonderful son and
the position he had given her, she came to be looked upon as the first
woman in all the village; and the women were given to visiting her, to
asking her advice, and to quoting her wisdom when arguments arose among
themselves or with the men.

But it was the mystery of Keesh's marvellous hunting that took chief
place in all their minds.  And one day Ugh-Gluk taxed him with witchcraft
to his face.

"It is charged," Ugh-Gluk said ominously, "that thou dealest with evil
spirits, wherefore thy hunting is rewarded."

"Is not the meat good?" Keesh made answer.  "Has one in the village yet
to fall sick from the eating of it?  How dost thou know that witchcraft
be concerned?  Or dost thou guess, in the dark, merely because of the
envy that consumes thee?"

And Ugh-Gluk withdrew discomfited, the women laughing at him as he walked
away.  But in the council one night, after long deliberation, it was
determined to put spies on his track when he went forth to hunt, so that
his methods might be learned.  So, on his next trip, Bim and Bawn, two
young men, and of hunters the craftiest, followed after him, taking care
not to be seen.  After five days they returned, their eyes bulging and
their tongues a-tremble to tell what they had seen.  The council was
hastily called in Klosh-Kwan's dwelling, and Bim took up the tale.

"Brothers!  As commanded, we journeyed on the trail of Keesh, and
cunningly we journeyed, so that he might not know.  And midway of the
first day he picked up with a great he-bear.  It was a very great bear."

"None greater," Bawn corroborated, and went on himself.  "Yet was the
bear not inclined to fight, for he turned away and made off slowly over
the ice.  This we saw from the rocks of the shore, and the bear came
toward us, and after him came Keesh, very much unafraid.  And he shouted
harsh words after the bear, and waved his arms about, and made much
noise.  Then did the bear grow angry, and rise up on his hind legs, and
growl.  But Keesh walked right up to the bear."

"Ay," Bim continued the story.  "Right up to the bear Keesh walked.  And
the bear took after him, and Keesh ran away.  But as he ran he dropped a
little round ball on the ice.  And the bear stopped and smelled of it,
then swallowed it up.  And Keesh continued to run away and drop little
round balls, and the bear continued to swallow them up."

Exclamations and cries of doubt were being made, and Ugh-Gluk expressed
open unbelief.

"With our own eyes we saw it," Bim affirmed.

And Bawn--"Ay, with our own eyes.  And this continued until the bear
stood suddenly upright and cried aloud in pain, and thrashed his fore
paws madly about.  And Keesh continued to make off over the ice to a safe
distance.  But the bear gave him no notice, being occupied with the
misfortune the little round balls had wrought within him."

"Ay, within him," Bim interrupted.  "For he did claw at himself, and leap
about over the ice like a playful puppy, save from the way he growled and
squealed it was plain it was not play but pain.  Never did I see such a
sight!"

"Nay, never was such a sight seen," Bawn took up the strain.  "And
furthermore, it was such a large bear."

"Witchcraft," Ugh-Gluk suggested.

"I know not," Bawn replied.  "I tell only of what my eyes beheld.  And
after a while the bear grew weak and tired, for he was very heavy and he
had jumped about with exceeding violence, and he went off along the shore-
ice, shaking his head slowly from side to side and sitting down ever and
again to squeal and cry.  And Keesh followed after the bear, and we
followed after Keesh, and for that day and three days more we followed.
The bear grew weak, and never ceased crying from his pain."

"It was a charm!" Ugh-Gluk exclaimed.  "Surely it was a charm!"

"It may well be."

And Bim relieved Bawn.  "The bear wandered, now this way and now that,
doubling back and forth and crossing his trail in circles, so that at the
end he was near where Keesh had first come upon him.  By this time he was
quite sick, the bear, and could crawl no farther, so Keesh came up close
and speared him to death."

"And then?" Klosh-Kwan demanded.

"Then we left Keesh skinning the bear, and came running that the news of
the killing might be told."

And in the afternoon of that day the women hauled in the meat of the bear
while the men sat in council assembled.  When Keesh arrived a messenger
was sent to him, bidding him come to the council.  But he sent reply,
saying that he was hungry and tired; also that his _igloo_ was large and
comfortable and could hold many men.

And curiosity was so strong on the men that the whole council, Klosh-Kwan
to the fore, rose up and went to the _igloo_ of Keesh.  He was eating,
but he received them with respect and seated them according to their
rank.  Ikeega was proud and embarrassed by turns, but Keesh was quite
composed.

Klosh-Kwan recited the information brought by Bim and Bawn, and at its
close said in a stern voice:  "So explanation is wanted, O Keesh, of thy
manner of hunting.  Is there witchcraft in it?"

Keesh looked up and smiled.  "Nay, O Klosh-Kwan.  It is not for a boy to
know aught of witches, and of witches I know nothing.  I have but devised
a means whereby I may kill the ice-bear with ease, that is all.  It be
headcraft, not witchcraft."

"And may any man?"

"Any man."

There was a long silence.  The men looked in one another's faces, and
Keesh went on eating.

"And . . . and . . . and wilt thou tell us, O Keesh?" Klosh-Kwan finally
asked in a tremulous voice.

"Yea, I will tell thee."  Keesh finished sucking a marrow-bone and rose
to his feet.  "It is quite simple.  Behold!"

He picked up a thin strip of whalebone and showed it to them.  The ends
were sharp as needle-points.  The strip he coiled carefully, till it
disappeared in his hand.  Then, suddenly releasing it, it sprang straight
again.  He picked up a piece of blubber.

"So," he said, "one takes a small chunk of blubber, thus, and thus makes
it hollow.  Then into the hollow goes the whalebone, so, tightly coiled,
and another piece of blubber is fitted over the whale-bone.  After that
it is put outside where it freezes into a little round ball.  The bear
swallows the little round ball, the blubber melts, the whalebone with its
sharp ends stands out straight, the bear gets sick, and when the bear is
very sick, why, you kill him with a spear.  It is quite simple."

And Ugh-Gluk said "Oh!" and Klosh-Kwan said "Ah!"  And each said
something after his own manner, and all understood.

And this is the story of Keesh, who lived long ago on the rim of the
polar sea.  Because he exercised headcraft and not witchcraft, he rose
from the meanest _igloo_ to be head man of his village, and through all
the years that he lived, it is related, his tribe was prosperous, and
neither widow nor weak one cried aloud in the night because there was no
meat.




THE UNEXPECTED


It is a simple matter to see the obvious, to do the expected.  The
tendency of the individual life is to be static rather than dynamic, and
this tendency is made into a propulsion by civilization, where the
obvious only is seen, and the unexpected rarely happens.  When the
unexpected does happen, however, and when it is of sufficiently grave
import, the unfit perish.  They do not see what is not obvious, are
unable to do the unexpected, are incapable of adjusting their
well-grooved lives to other and strange grooves.  In short, when they
come to the end of their own groove, they die.

On the other hand, there are those that make toward survival, the fit
individuals who escape from the rule of the obvious and the expected and
adjust their lives to no matter what strange grooves they may stray into,
or into which they may be forced.  Such an individual was Edith
Whittlesey.  She was born in a rural district of England, where life
proceeds by rule of thumb and the unexpected is so very unexpected that
when it happens it is looked upon as an immorality.  She went into
service early, and while yet a young woman, by rule-of-thumb progression,
she became a lady's maid.

The effect of civilization is to impose human law upon environment until
it becomes machine-like in its regularity.  The objectionable is
eliminated, the inevitable is foreseen.  One is not even made wet by the
rain nor cold by the frost; while death, instead of stalking about
grewsome and accidental, becomes a prearranged pageant, moving along a
well-oiled groove to the family vault, where the hinges are kept from
rusting and the dust from the air is swept continually away.

Such was the environment of Edith Whittlesey.  Nothing happened.  It
could scarcely be called a happening, when, at the age of twenty-five,
she accompanied her mistress on a bit of travel to the United States.  The
groove merely changed its direction.  It was still the same groove and
well oiled.  It was a groove that bridged the Atlantic with
uneventfulness, so that the ship was not a ship in the midst of the sea,
but a capacious, many-corridored hotel that moved swiftly and placidly,
crushing the waves into submission with its colossal bulk until the sea
was a mill-pond, monotonous with quietude.  And at the other side the
groove continued on over the land--a well-disposed, respectable groove
that supplied hotels at every stopping-place, and hotels on wheels
between the stopping-places.

In Chicago, while her mistress saw one side of social life, Edith
Whittlesey saw another side; and when she left her lady's service and
became Edith Nelson, she betrayed, perhaps faintly, her ability to
grapple with the unexpected and to master it.  Hans Nelson, immigrant,
Swede by birth and carpenter by occupation, had in him that Teutonic
unrest that drives the race ever westward on its great adventure.  He was
a large-muscled, stolid sort of a man, in whom little imagination was
coupled with immense initiative, and who possessed, withal, loyalty and
affection as sturdy as his own strength.

"When I have worked hard and saved me some money, I will go to Colorado,"
he had told Edith on the day after their wedding.  A year later they were
in Colorado, where Hans Nelson saw his first mining and caught the mining-
fever himself.  His prospecting led him through the Dakotas, Idaho, and
eastern Oregon, and on into the mountains of British Columbia.  In camp
and on trail, Edith Nelson was always with him, sharing his luck, his
hardship, and his toil.  The short step of the house-reared woman she
exchanged for the long stride of the mountaineer.  She learned to look
upon danger clear-eyed and with understanding, losing forever that panic
fear which is bred of ignorance and which afflicts the city-reared,
making them as silly as silly horses, so that they await fate in frozen
horror instead of grappling with it, or stampede in blind self-destroying
terror which clutters the way with their crushed carcasses.

Edith Nelson met the unexpected at every turn of the trail, and she
trained her vision so that she saw in the landscape, not the obvious, but
the concealed.  She, who had never cooked in her life, learned to make
bread without the mediation of hops, yeast, or baking-powder, and to bake
bread, top and bottom, in a frying-pan before an open fire.  And when the
last cup of flour was gone and the last rind of bacon, she was able to
rise to the occasion, and of moccasins and the