"What is it!" I knew from the way the heads swung toward me that my voice was out of control.
"It's nothing," Mrs. Howard said. "A wolf pack's out there crying to get at the bodies of the horses. They smell the cooked flesh, and it's driving them crazy not being able to get at it."
"Yes," one of the boys said, "we lost five horses. Barn was ablaze before we knew it. Couldn't none of us get near it. The horses just roasted, that's all."
"It was terrible," Mrs. Howard said. "You could hear the poor things screaming."
The screaming of the dead horses and the screaming of the wolf pack blended, swelled, receded. I followed the curve of the rising inflection, and when it reached its shrill wailing peak, I screamed too. I jumped up and screamed on the same note as the wolves and the horses.
The men looked at me. I screamed and screamed.
There was a frantic rush for the door. Chairs overturned as the men fought to get out. Away they went, every male Howard, into the night. Mike was on his feet too. He took me by the shoulder.
"Katherine Mary, stop it!" He spoke with a sternness I'd never heard before, and I did stop it. But the wolves didn't. They kept it up. The shrill note of their cry hung in the air, faded and came again. At the window I saw the frightened faces of the Howard
men. I began to laugh, it was so funny. They could listen to tortured horses and wolf pack in full cry, and it didn't bother them. But a girl's screams had chased them from their home in stumbling panic.
"Katherine Mary, stop it!"
I tried to say, "It's all right—I'm just laughing," but I was laughing too hard to say it, and Mike didn't like my laughing any more than he had my screams. Tears were running through my fingers. I guess I was crying too.
Mrs. Howard went to the door, "Freddy!" she called. "Come on in here and play something on the organ. It will calm her." There was no answer from the outside.
"Freddy?" she said again. And Freddy slunk in. He gave me a quick furtive look and sat down at the organ. The tones came low and mellow, but the howling pack held their pitch—making weird dissonant chords. The boy began another song, "I Wandered Today Through the Hills, Maggie." It was my mother's song, one she sang as she fixed flowers for the best room and hummed when she hung the clothes to dry. Maggie was the girl's name in the song, and Maggie was my mother's name, too, Margaret Kennedy O'Fallon, but everybody called her "Maggie."
And then I knew what it was all about. The cry of the wolves had the loneliness in it, and that was why I had to scream and cry with them. I was lonely too because I didn't have any mother. The two-storied house and Uncle Martin and my sisters and Mother's canary—and even Uncle John and Johnny and the little Juno I'd left—were in my thoughts, but under my feet these two months had been only the trackless white of this dead and frozen land, empty with loneliness.
Mike could see that the music wasn't cheering me up any. He leaned over me and very gently lifted me to my feet. "We'll get you to bed, Kathy," he said.
Upstairs I tried to tell him that it was just that I hadn't felt well, that it really didn't mean anything. Mike's face was full of misery, and I knew an unhappy determination was in him. But
he held it in and would say nothing. I put my arms around his neck. "I'm happy, Mike. I love you and I'm happy."
He pushed my head against his shoulder and stroked it.
"Really, Mike," I whispered into his jacket, "I am happy. I don't know why I act like this. I guess I'm crazy."
Mike still stroked my hair. "I'm taking you back in the morning, Kathy."
Mike and I lay awake with our own thoughts. And in the morning he took me on, not hack. It was that night that I really became his wife, for I knew that this white land and its loneliness were a part of Mike. It was a part I feared, that I didn't know or understand. But I knew that I had to know it and understand it, and even love it as Mike did. Because I wanted to be like Mike and then, after our lives had been lived, maybe I'd be Mike.
When he held me, we were crushed into one, one body with one heart beating through us. And that's the way it had to be with our minds and our feelings. It was much harder because they get tangled in thoughts and caught in emotions. But in the end that's the way it had to be.
So I lay there, my second night in Taylor's Flat, and told myself, "If you love Mike, you'll love the things that go with him. And if you can't love them, you'll understand them—and until you do you'll keep the fight to understand them in yourself, and not be carrying on and worrying him like you did tonight." I was cold and trembling under my covers for fear I'd talked to myself too late, that Mike would really send me back.
But Mike must have been talking to himself as hard as I was to myself, and he must have decided that I was still worth the trouble I caused, because in the morning he said nothing about sending me home.
One night cannot dispose of a feeling or settle an attitude, and many a night on the way up to Hudson's Hope I had to fight back thoughts of my home and my mother and the tears that came with them. . . . Yet it was a happy time and an exciting one,
full of love and adventure and a new life opening up. The fears grew smaller, and all they could do was peck at my happiness.
The country, as we approached Hudson's Hope, became more beautiful. We traveled up the frozen river bed, and hills large and small rolled away from us on either side.
Mike told me I was stronger. 1 knew I was.
"The brace helped me."
"And you've adjusted quickly in a country that is usually too hard for women." He was proud of me, and he acted proud in front of the men because where were their wives?
On the north side of the river there were few trees, but on the south side there were forests of poplar and jack pine, large sections of which had been lumbered over. The river bed sank deeper and deeper and finally became a gorge with cliffs of white rising up as walls. We left the ravine and traveled on higher ground over a trail Mike said he knew well. Our dogs were climbing.
"When we reach the top you'll see the flag. Then we're there, Kathy."
There was a flag in front of every Hudson's Bay Company in the Northwest. It meant hot food, rest, fresh supplies, conversation, people, a little oasis of humanity and comfort before going on through the white void. Only this time it would mean more; it would mean our home. After almost three months of travel, we'd have a home. We hadn't reached it any too soon, either. For it was February, and the thaw set in during March. There was no traveling in this country in spring and summer, except by canoe. But we had made it in time. There was the flag coming into view, showing that the log house behind it was a branch store of the Hudson's Bay Company, not one of the half-dozen trappers' cabins that hid themselves among the drooping, snow-laden trees.
I took Mike's hand without saying anything. It was beautiful. The few cabins were grouped on a plateau, and below them hills rolled away, carrying white armies of poplar and pines on their backs. To the north and facing the village was a fifty-foot drop where in spring and summer the Peace River ran the gauntlet of bluffs.
We pulled up in front of the store, and Mike pushed against the door just as it was thrown open by a big brawny giant. The two men collided, laughed, and gave each other a couple of pokes, the way men do. He was as tall as Mike, only thicker and bulkier. He was half in and half out of his furs.
"Son of a gun, son of a gun," he kept saying, and all the time hitting and poking at Mike with his big beaver mitts. Then suddenly he caught sight of me. "I'll be . . ." he said and stood there staring. I got out of the sled and came over to them. Mike took my hand. "Kathy, meet Joe Henderson." I smiled at him and said, "Hello," but the big man was without words.
Mike laughed. "How long are you going to keep us standing out in fifty below, Joe?"
Joe mumbled something in his beard and kicked the door open. No sooner were we in the house than Henderson found his voice.
"Uaawa!" he bellowed. "Uaawa!" A dark Indian woman appeared fr
om the back room and stood poised like a wild thing.
"Where the hell did you go running off to?" And then, as she continued to stand there with frightened eyes, "We'll want some tea, so get busy!" His voice lowered from a bellow to almost a whisper. "You see," he said to me, but without looking at me, "you've got to think out every step for them. We'll want food too, and she could be getting that while the water's boiling. Only you can't never explain that to them."
He sighed and sat down on a packing case, leaving the two chairs to Mike and me. I looked around curiously. The woman worked in the center of the room over the stove. I looked away at once, for she seemed to wince under my glance. I concentrated instead on the room. There was the usual counter with shelves mounting to the ceiling behind it, and a tangle of goods piled and stuffed and jammed into the shelves. Wild masses of cascading flowered cottons tumbled over jelly glasses. Knives speared spools of wire, and a rusty alarm clock sat on top of twelve cans of beans. On the floor were piles of soft, gleaming pelts, and on one of these a naked baby slept, its tawny body blending with the skins.
"What a beautiful baby! Is it yours?" I asked the woman at
the stove. She lifted her head to be sure I meant it, to be sure the white woman spoke to her. When she saw that both these things were true, she smiled, a half-smile that came into her eyes.
Henderson reached for an empty bottle. He had thrown it at her, and she was picking up the shattered pieces before I realized what had happened. A cut over her eye bled onto her hands as she worked. Henderson had not watched to see whether his bottle had landed a blow or not but had turned back to us.
I stood up. "Mike," I said, "I want to see our house."
Mike stood up too.
"But wait." Joe Henderson was upset. "You must eat. You've come a long way today."
I walked toward the door and began putting on my furs. Mike stood uncertainly. No one said anything. The woman looked across at me and then back to the water which had begun to boil. It was to the water she spoke.
"It bring much honor to house if Sergeant Mike and Mrs. Mike eat."
I unbuttoned my jacket and sat down. Preparations for the meal went on. But the woman did not speak again.
After a while the child on the pelts stirred. I took him on my lap, but he wriggled off and walked on fat, unsteady legs to Joe Henderson. I caught my breath as I saw him grab hold with a small brown fist to the giant's pants leg. The child said something, whether in Indian or gibberish I wasn't sure.
"Does he talk?" I asked.
Joe Henderson gave me a strange look.
"Yes; in the language of the Beaver Indian, he calls me 'Father.' " There was a mocking note in the man's voice, but it was very gently that he stroked the dark head of his son.
"Tell the lady your name."
The child turned in his father's hands and regarded me a moment with serious eyes. "Siwah," he said.
Henderson scowled, then turned to the woman, speaking unpleasant sounds in her tongue. She gave no answer, and.,the motions of her hands were not interrupted. He turned to his child.
His voice was no longer harsh, perhaps it was the change back into English. Again he said, "Tell the lady your name."
The reply came promptly. "Tommy Henderson."
"He's a fine little fellow," Mike said.
I was surprised. I didn't know Mike liked children. There were so many things about Mike I didn't know. But about this I was glad.
The Indian woman served us silently, but did not eat herself, and Henderson did not ask her. I was glad when it was over and we were out of the hot room with its smell of food.
Mike grinned down at me. "Which way do you think our house is, right or left?" I looked in both directions. Coming in from the top of the hill I'd seen some cabins, but now a forest of pine hid them.
"Right," I guessed.
Mike laughed. "Right it is. Come on." But I still stood there.
He looked back. "Excited?"
"Yes," I said. "But that Joe Henderson, he mistreats her. Why, you could kill a person with a bottle like that, couldn't you?"
"Well," Mike said, "maybe."
I could see he was disappointed because he thought I wasn't excited about seeing our house. So I put Joe Henderson and Tommy Henderson and the Indian woman into the back of my mind. And I put my fur mittens into Mike's fur mitten.
"Mike, are you really taking me to our home?" He looked at me with blue eyes shading into all the blues there are.
"And does a little chit like you have a house and a husband? And do you think you're going to set up housekeeping with us?"
I laughed. Then I stopped because he had.
"Kathy—I hope it will be all right, the changes I have made in your life!"
"Mike, I love you." It wasn't an answer to his words, but it was the one he wanted.
"It's been all right so far, hasn't it?"
"All right?" I threw my arms around him. "It's been wonderful."
"Come on then, I'll race you to the house."
He's shy, I thought. Yes, he really is, that big hulk of a man. But I said, "How can I race you, when I don't know where it is?"
"Follow me," and he was off on long legs.
"This isn't any kind of race," I said, running after him.
Mike turned into the pines. Ahead of us in a clearing stood a cabin. I stopped running. I approached it, trying to know it all at once, the trees and the rocks, the ground rolling under my feet. This was home. Mike put his arm around my shoulder.
"Don't look so awed, darling, it's just my office."
"Office?" I repeated the word blankly.
"Well, sure. I've got to have some place to lock up the criminals. Unless you want to keep them in the spare room."
He pushed the door open, and there was a large shabby desk and two chairs, one comfortable and one uncomfortable. There was a cupboard too, all padlocked. It didn't look anything like a jail, and I couldn't see why the prisoners couldn't get out of the windows.
"Do you really keep prisoners here?"
Mike laughed. "Never have. In the first place, there's very little crime. The Indians never give trouble unless there's been liquor smuggled in. The 'breeds are a little wilder. Every once in a while there's woman trouble, squaw stealing. Then I bring 'em in and put them to work."
"What kind of work?"
"Oh, usually cutting me a winter's supply of wood."
"Well, if nobody's locked up in it, what do you need an office for?"
Mike made a serious face. "Katherine, you don't realize I'm a big man up here. That's why I stay here. Sit down, girl, and I'll tell you all about it." He pushed me into the comfortable chair.
"This office is the Hudson's Hope court and hospital." He unlocked the cupboard at the back. It was filled with rows of neatly labeled bottles.
"Medicines?"
"Not much. Quinine, disinfectants."
You mean people really come to you when they're sick?
Mike said slowly, "We're seven hundred miles from civilization or a doctor."
"But do you know anything about it?"
"Not much. I bought some books in Calgary."
I looked at this man that I had married. There was more here than a red coat.
"Where's the house? I want to see that."
"It's behind the office." He caught my hands as I started for the door.
"Kathy, I hope you won't be disappointed in it. It's just a house, you know; Government-built."
"I'll love it, Mike." And I did. It was set cozily among the trees, and through a side window I could see Mike's office. There was a large front room and two bedrooms. There was a combination stove and heater, the kind they all had in this country. Logs to keep the room warm were shoved in the back, and the front was a wood stove for cooking meals on. The chinks in the wall were stuffed with moss. Over the bed was a buffalo skin.
"They still have them in these parts."
"Buffalo?" I asked.
"A few herds. Wood bison, we call them, but they're dying out."
I forgot to answer. I ran around and looked at things and planned the cleaning I would give everything, and how I would have more room by moving the table against the wall, and that I'd make new curtains. I whisked by Mike with a head full of ideas, but they were spilled out, for he reached out a sudden hand and caught me to him.
"Like it?" he asked. But how could I answer, with him kissing me so hard?
The rest of the day was spent in cleaning, scrubbing, and scouring. Top and bottom we went over that house, and we went to bed very tired and happy. We were excited, too excited to sleep. We lay there whispering to each other how it would be.
"You'll make me a book case."
"Yes," he said. "In the summer there is the river, and in winter we walk on snowshoes over the white world." I was feeling very drowsy and contented. I closed my eyes and snuggled under Mike's arm. But a face came before my eyes, the dark sullen face of the Henderson woman. I closed my eyes tighter to send it away. I was happy and sleepy, and I didn't want any ugliness from the world to get into our cabin. I couldn't keep it out. I saw again the flash of the bottle as it left Joe Henderson's hand—saw the blood falling in a thin stream to the floor.
"Mike . . ."
"Hmmm?" said Mike in a sleepy, faraway voice.
"Is that Indian woman Joe Henderson's wife?"
"You might call her that."
"But he acts as if he hates her."
There was a long silence. I thought Mike had fallen asleep.
"Yes, I think he does," Mike said slowly, into the pillow.
"Hates her?" I asked.
"Yes."
"But why?"
"Because of the boy. Everything is because of the boy."
"Tommy?" I asked.
"Yes," said Mike, and then he added, "There were two Tommys." I lay still in the dark, waiting for his voice to continue.
"You see, there are many reasons why a man comes to live in a wild land like this. We come, you and I, Katherine Mary, because here we can live the real life, the life men were meant to live. But there are men who are used to the cities, who would never leave them except they are driven. Joe Henderson was driven when Tommy died.