CHAPTER 23
No man has ever looked clearly into the mystery of death as it isimpressed upon the senses of the northern dog. It comes to him,sometimes, with the wind. Most frequently it must come with the wind,and yet there are ten thousand masters in the northland who will swearthat their dogs have given warning of death hours before it actuallycame; and there are many of these thousands who know from experiencethat their teams will stop a quarter or half a mile from a strangecabin in which there lies unburied dead.
Yesterday Baree had smelled death, and he knew without process ofreasoning that the dead was Pierrot. How he knew this, and why heaccepted the fact as inevitable, is one of the mysteries which at timesseems to give the direct challenge to those who concede nothing morethan instinct to the brute mind. He knew that Pierrot was dead withoutexactly knowing what death was. But of one thing he was sure: he wouldnever see Pierrot again. He would never hear his voice again; he wouldnever hear again the swish-swish-swish of his snowshoes in the trailahead, and so on the trap line he did not look for Pierrot. Pierrot wasgone forever. But Baree had not yet associated death with Nepeese. Hewas filled with a great uneasiness. What came to him from out of thechasm had made him tremble with fear and suspense. He sensed the thrillof something strange, of something impending, and yet even as he hadgiven the death howl in the chasm, it must have been for Pierrot. Forhe believed that Nepeese was alive, and he was now just as sure that hewould overtake her on the trap line as he was positive yesterday thathe would find her at the birchbark tepee.
Since yesterday morning's breakfast with the Willow, Baree had gonewithout eating. To appease his hunger meant to hunt, and his mind wastoo filled with his quest of Nepeese for that. He would have gonehungry all that day, but in the third mile from the cabin he came to atrap in which there was a big snowshoe rabbit. The rabbit was stillalive, and he killed it and ate his fill. Until dark he did not miss atrap. In one of them there was a lynx; in another a fishercat. Out onthe white surface of a lake he sniffed at a snowy mound under which laythe body of a red fox killed by one of Pierrot's poison baits. Both thelynx and the fishercat were alive, and the steel chains of their trapsclanked sharply as they prepared to give Baree battle. But Baree wasuninterested. He hurried on, his uneasiness growing as the day darkenedand he found no sign of the Willow.
It was a wonderfully clear night after the storm--cold and brilliant,with the shadows standing out as clearly as living things. The thirdsuggestion came to Baree now. He was, like all animals, largely of oneidea at a time--a creature with whom all lesser impulses were governedby a single leading impulse. And this impulse, in the glow of thestarlit night, was to reach as quickly as possible the first ofPierrot's two cabins on the trap line. There he would find Nepeese!
We won't call the process by which Baree came to this conclusion aprocess of reasoning. Instinct or reasoning, whatever it was, a fixedand positive faith came to Baree just the same. He began to miss thetraps in his haste to cover distance--to reach the cabin. It wastwenty-five miles from Pierrot's burned home to the first trap cabin,and Baree had made ten of these by nightfall. The remaining fifteenwere the most difficult. In the open spaces the snow was belly-deep andsoft. Frequently he plunged through drifts in which for a few momentshe was buried. Three times during the early part of the night Bareeheard the savage dirge of the wolves. Once it was a wild paean oftriumph as the hunters pulled down their kill less than half a mileaway in the deep forest. But the voice no longer called to him. It wasrepellent--a voice of hatred and of treachery. Each time that he heardit he stopped in his tracks and snarled, while his spine stiffened.
At midnight Baree came to the tiny amphitheater in the forest wherePierrot had cut the logs for the first of his trapline cabins. For atleast a minute Baree stood at the edge of the clearing, his ears veryalert, his eyes bright with hope and expectation, while he sniffed theair. There was no smoke, no sound, no light in the one window of thelog shack. His disappointment fell on him even as he stood there. Againhe sensed the fact of his aloneness, of the barrenness of his quest.There was a disheartened slouch to his door. He had traveledtwenty-five miles, and he was tired.
The snow was drifted deep at the doorway, and here Baree sat down andwhined. It was no longer the anxious, questing whine of a few hoursago. Now it voiced hopelessness and a deep despair. For half an hour hesat shivering with his back to the door and his face to the starlitwilderness, as if there still remained the fleeting hope that Nepeesemight follow after him over the trail. Then he burrowed himself a holedeep in the snowdrift and passed the remainder of the night in uneasyslumber.
With the first light of day Baree resumed the trail. He was not soalert this morning. There was the disconsolate droop to his tail whichthe Indians call the Akoosewin--the sign of the sick dog. And Baree wassick--not of body but of soul. The keenness of his hope had died, andhe no longer expected to find the Willow. The second cabin at the farend of the trap line drew him on, but it inspired in him none of theenthusiasm with which he had hurried to the first. He traveled slowlyand spasmodically, his suspicions of the forests again replacing theexcitement of his quest. He approached each of Pierrot's traps and thedeadfalls cautiously, and twice he showed his fangs--once at a martenthat snapped at him from under a root where it had dragged the trap inwhich it was caught, and the second time at a big snowy owl that hadcome to steal bait and was now a prisoner at the end of a steel chain.It may be that Baree thought it was Oohoomisew and that he stillremembered vividly the treacherous assault and fierce battle of thatnight when, as a puppy, he was dragging his sore and wounded bodythrough the mystery and fear of the big timber. For he did more than toshow his fangs. He tore the owl into pieces.
There were plenty of rabbits in Pierrot's traps, and Baree did not gohungry. He reached the second trap-line cabin late in the afternoon,after ten hours of traveling. He met with no very great disappointmenthere, for he had not anticipated very much. The snow had banked thiscabin even higher than the other. It lay three feet deep against thedoor, and the window was white with a thick coating of frost. At thisplace, which was close to the edge of a big barren, and unsheltered bythe thick forests farther back, Pierrot had built a shelter for hisfirewood, and in this shelter Baree made his temporary home. All thenext day he remained somewhere near the end of the trap line, skirtingthe edge of the barren and investigating the short side line of a dozentraps which Pierrot and Nepeese had strung through a swamp in whichthere had been many signs of lynx. It was the third day before he setout on his return to the Gray Loon.
He did not travel very fast, spending two days in covering thetwenty-five miles between the first and the second trap-line cabins. Atthe second cabin he remained for three days, and it was on the ninthday that he reached the Gray Loon. There was no change. There were notracks in the snow but his own, made nine days ago.
Baree's quest for Nepeese became now more or less involuntary, a sortof daily routine. For a week he made his burrow in the dog corral, andat least twice between dawn and darkness he would go to the birchbarktepee and the chasm. His trail, soon beaten hard in the snow, became asfixed as Pierrot's trap line. It cut straight through the forest to thetepee, swinging slightly to the east so that it crossed the frozensurface of the Willow's swimming pool. From the tepee it swung in acircle through a part of the forest where Nepeese had frequentlygathered armfuls of crimson fireflowers, and then to the chasm. Up anddown the edge of the gorge it went, down into the little cup at thebottom of the chasm, and thence straight back to the dog corral.
And then, of a sudden, Baree made a change. He spent a night in thetepee. After that, whenever he was at the Gray Loon, during the day healways slept in the tepee. The two blankets were his bed--and they werea part of Nepeese. And there, all through the long winter, he waited.
If Nepeese had returned in February and could have taken him unaware,she would have found a changed Baree. He was more than ever like awolf; yet he never gave the wolf howl now, and always he snarled deepin his throat whe
n he heard the cry of the pack. For several weeks theold trap line had supplied him with meat, but now he hunted. The tepee,in and out, was scattered with fur and bones. Once--alone--he caught ayoung deer in deep snow and killed it. Again, in the heart of a fierceFebruary storm, he pursued a bull caribou so closely that it plungedover a cliff and broke its neck. He lived well, and in size andstrength he was growing swiftly into a giant of his kind. In anothersix months he would be as large as Kazan, and his jaws were almost aspowerful, even now.
Three times that winter Baree fought--once with a lynx that sprang downupon him from a windfall while he was eating a freshly killed rabbit,and twice with two lone wolves. The lynx tore him unmercifully beforeit fled into the windfall. The younger of the wolves he killed; theother fight was a draw. More and more he became an outcast, livingalone with his dreams and his smoldering hopes.
And Baree did dream. Many times, as he lay in the tepee, he would hearthe voice of Nepeese. He would hear her sweet voice calling, herlaughter, the sound of his name, and often he would start up to hisfeet--the old Baree for a thrilling moment or two--only to lie down inhis nest again with a low, grief-filled whine. And always when he heardthe snap of a twig or some other sound in the forest, it was thought ofNepeese that flashed first into his brain. Some day she would return.That belief was a part of his existence as much as the sun and the moonand the stars.
The winter passed, and spring came, and still Baree continued to haunthis old trails, even going now and then over the old trap line as faras the first of the two cabins. The traps were rusted and sprung now;the thawing snow disclosed bones and feathers between their jaws. Underthe deadfalls were remnants of fur, and out on the ice of the lakeswere picked skeletons of foxes and wolves that had taken the poisonbaits. The last snow went. The swollen streams sang in the forests andcanyons. The grass turned green, and the first flowers came.
Surely this was the time for Nepeese to come home! He watched for herexpectantly. He went still more frequently to their swimming pool inthe forest, and he hung closely to the burned cabin and the dog corral.Twice he sprang into the pool and whined as he swam about, as thoughshe surely must join him in their old water frolic. And now, as thespring passed and summer came, there settled upon him slowly the gloomand misery of utter hopelessness. The flowers were all out now, andeven the bakneesh vines glowed like red fire in the woods. Patches ofgreen were beginning to hide the charred heap where the cabin hadstood, and the blue-flower vines that covered the princess mother'sgrave were reaching out toward Pierrot's, as if the princess motherherself were the spirit of them.
All these things were happening, and the birds had mated and nested,and still Nepeese did not come! And at last something broke inside ofBaree, his last hope, perhaps, his last dream; and one day he badegood-bye to the Gray Loon.
No one can say what it cost him to go. No one can say how he foughtagainst the things that were holding him to the tepee, the old swimmingpool, the familiar paths in the forest, and the two graves that werenot so lonely now under the tall spruce. He went. He had noreason--simply went. It may be that there is a Master whose hand guidesthe beast as well as the man, and that we know just enough of thisguidance to call it instinct. For, in dragging himself away, Bareefaced the Great Adventure.
It was there, in the north, waiting for him--and into the north he went.