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THE COUNTRY BEYOND
A ROMANCE OF THE WILDERNESS
By James Oliver Curwood
Author Of The Valley Of Silent Men, The Flaming Forest, Etc.
A glass of wine once lost a kingdom, a nail turned the tide of a mightybattle, and a woman's smile once upon a time destroyed the homes of amillion people. Thus have trivial things played their potent parts inthe history of human lives; yet these things Peter did not know.
THE COUNTRY BEYOND
CHAPTER I
Not far from the rugged and storm-whipped north shore of Lake Superior,and south of the Kaministiqua, yet not as far south as the RainyRiver waterway, there lay a paradise lost in the heart of a wildernessworld--and in that paradise "a little corner of hell."
That was what the girl had called it once upon a time, when sobbing outthe shame and the agony of it to herself. That was before Peter had cometo leaven the drab of her life. But the hell was still there.
One would not have guessed its existence, standing at the bald top ofCragg's Ridge this wonderful thirtieth day of May. In the whiteness ofwinter one could look off over a hundred square miles of freezing forestand swamp and river country, with the gleam of ice-covered lakes hereand there, fringed by their black spruce and cedar and balsam--a countryof storm, of deep snows, and men and women whose blood ran red with thethrill that the hardship and the never-ending adventure of the wild.
But this was spring. And such a spring as had not come to the Canadiannorth country in many years. Until three days ago there had been adeluge of warm rains, and since then the sun had inundated the land withthe golden warmth of summer. The last chill was gone from the air, andthe last bit of frozen earth and muck from the deepest and blackestswamps, North, south, east and west the wilderness world was a glory ofbursting life, of springtime mellowing into summer. Ridge upon ridge ofyellows and greens and blacks swept away into the unknown distances likethe billows of a vast sea; and between them lay the valleys and swamps,the lakes and waterways, glad with the rippling song of running waters,the sweet scents of early flowering time, and the joyous voice of allmating creatures.
Just under Cragg's Ridge lay the paradise, a meadow-like sweep of plainthat reached down to the edge of Clearwater Lake, with clumps of poplarsand white birch and darker tapestries of spruce and balsams dotting itlike islets in a sea of verdant green. The flowers were two weeks aheadof their time and the sweet perfumes of late June, instead of May,rose up out of the plain, and already there was nesting in the velvetysplashes of timber.
In the edge of a clump of this timber, flat on his belly, lay Peter. Thelove of adventure was in him, and today he had sallied forth on his mostdesperate enterprise. For the first time he had gone alone to the edgeof Clearwater Lake, half a mile away; boldly he had trotted up and downthe white strip of beach where the girl's footprints still remained inthe sand, and defiantly he had yipped at the shimmering vastness of thewater, and at the white gulls circling near him in quest of dead fishflung ashore. Peter was three months old. Yesterday he had been a timidpup, shrinking from the bigness and strangeness of everything about him;but today he had braved the lake trail on his own nerve, and nothing haddared to come near him in spite of his yipping, so that a great courageand a great desire were born in him.
Therefore, in returning, he had paused in the edge of a great clump ofbalsams and spruce, and lay flat on his belly, his sharp little eyesleveled yearningly at the black mystery of its deeper shadows. The bitof forest filled a cup-like depression in the plain, and was possiblyhalf a rifle-shot distance from end to end--but to Peter it was as vastas life itself. And something urged him to go in.
And as he lay there, desire and indecision struggling for mastery withinhim, no power could have told Peter that destinies greater than his ownwere working through the soul of the dog that was in him, and that onhis decision to go in or not to go in--on the triumph of courage orcowardice--there rested the fates of lives greater than his own, of men,and women, and of little children still unborn. A glass of wine oncelost a kingdom, a nail turned the tide of a mighty battle, and a woman'ssmile once upon a time destroyed the homes of a million people. Thushave trivial things played their potent parts in the history of humanlives, yet these things Peter did not know--nor that his greatest hourhad come.
At last he rose from his squatting posture, and stood upon his feet.He was not a beautiful pup, this Peter Pied-Bot--or Peter Club-foot, asJolly Roger McKay--who lived over in the big cedar swamp--had namedhim when he gave Peter to the girl. He was, in a way, an accident and ahomely one at that. His father was a blue-blooded fighting Airedale whohad broken from his kennel long enough to commit a MESALLIANCE witha huge big footed and peace-loving Mackenzie hound--and Peter was theresult. He wore the fiercely bristling whiskers of his Airedale fatherat the age of three months; his ears were flappy and big, his tail wasknotted, and his legs were ungainly and loose, with huge feet at the endof them--so big and heavy that he stumbled frequently, and fell on hisnose. One pitied him at first--and then loved him. For Peter, in spiteof his homeliness, had the two best bloods of all dog creation in hisveins. Yet in a way it was like mixing nitro-glycerin with olive oil, ordynamite and saltpeter with milk and honey.
Peter's heart was thumping rapidly as he took a step toward the deepershadows. He swallowed hard, as if to clear a knot out of his scrawnythroat. But he had made up his mind. Something was compelling him,and he would go in. Slowly the gloom engulfed him, and once again thewhimsical spirit of fatalism had chosen a trivial thing to work out itsends in the romance and tragedy of human lives.
Grim shadows began to surround Peter, and his ears shot up, and ascraggly brush stood out along his spine. But he did not bark, as hehad barked along the shore of the lake, and in the green opens. Twicehe looked back to the shimmer of sunshine that was growing more and moreindistinct. As long as he could see this, and knew that his retreatwas open, there still remained a bit of that courage which was swiftlyebbing in the thickening darkness. But the third time he looked back thelight of the sun was utterly gone! For an instant the knot rose up inhis throat and choked him, and his eyes popped, and grew like littleballs of fire in his intense desire to see through the gloom. Even thegirl, who was afraid of only one thing in the world, would have pausedwhere Peter stood, with a little quickening of her heart. For all thelight of the day, it seemed to Peter, had suddenly died out. Over hishead the spruce and cedar and balsam tops grew so thick they were likea canopy of night. Through them the snow never came in winter, and underthem the light of a blazing sun was only a ghostly twilight.
And now, as he stood there, his whole soul burning with a desire to seehis way out, Peter began to hear strange sounds. Strangest of all, andmost fearsome, was a hissing that came and went, sometimes very near tohim, and always accompanied by a grating noise that curdled his blood.Twice after that he saw the shadow of the great owl as it swooped overhim, and he flattened himself down, the knot in his throat growingbigger and more choking. And then he heard the soft and uncanny movementof huge feathered bodies in the thick shroud of boughs overhead, andslowly and cautiously he wormed himself around, determined to get backto sunshine and day as quickly as he could. It was not until he hadmade this movement that the real chill of horror gripped at his heart.Straight behind him, directly in the path he had traveled, he saw twolittle green balls of flame!
It was instinct, and not reason or experience, which told Peter therewas menace and peril in these two tiny spots blazing in the gloom.He did not know that his own eyes, popping half out of his h
ead, wereequally terrifying in that pit of silence, nor that from him emanated astill more terrifying thing--the scent of dog. He trembled on his wobblylegs as the green eyes stared at him, and his back seemed to breakin the middle, so that he sank helplessly down upon the soft spruceneedles, waiting for his doom. In another flash the twin balls of greenfire were gone. In a moment they appeared again, a little farther away.Then a second time they were gone, and a third time they flashed backat him--so distant they appeared like needle-points in the darkness.Something stupendous rose up in Peter. It was the soul of his Airedalefather, telling him the other thing was running away! And in the joy oftriumph Peter let out a yelp. In that night-infested place, alivewith hiding things, the yelp set loose weird rustlings in the tangledtreetops, strange murmurings of chortling voices, and the nasty snappingof beaks that held in them the power to rend Peter's skinny body intoa hundred bits. From deeper in the thicket came the sudden crash ofa heavy body, and with it the chuckling notes of a porcupine, and aHOO-HOO-HOO-EE of startled inquiry that at first Peter took for a humanvoice. And again he lay shivering close to the foot-deep carpet ofneedles under him, while his heart thumped against his ribs, and hiswhiskers stood out in mortal fear. There followed a weird and appallingsilence, and in that stillness Peter quested vainly for the sunlight hehad lost. And then, indistinctly, but bringing with it a new thrill,he heard another sound. It was a soft and distant rippling of runningwater. He knew that sound. It was friendly. He had played among therocks and pebbles and sand where it was made. His courage came back, andhe rose up on his legs, and made his way toward it. Something insidehim told him to go quietly, but his feet were big and clumsy, and half adozen times in the next two minutes he stumbled on his nose. At last hecame to the stream, scarcely wider than a man might have reached across,rippling and plashing its way through the naked roots of trees. Andahead of him Peter saw light. He quickened his pace, until at the lasthe was running when he came out into the edge of the meadowy plain,with its sweetness of flowers and green grass and song of birds, and itsglory of blue sky and sun.
If he had ever been afraid, Peter forgot it now. The choking went out ofhis throat, his heart fell back in its place, and the fierce convictionthat he had vanquished everything in the world possessed him. He peeredback into the dark cavern of evergreen out of which the streamletgurgled, and then trotted straight away from it, growling back hisdefiance as he ran. At a safe distance he stopped, and faced about.Nothing was following him, and the importance of his achievements grewupon him. He began to swell; his fore-legs he planted pugnaciously, hehollowed his back, and began to bark with all the puppyish ferocity thatwas in him. And though he continued to yelp, and pounded the earthwith his paws, and tore up the green grass with his sharp littleteeth, nothing dared to come out of the black forest in answer to hischallenge!
His head was high and his ears cocked jauntily as he trotted up theslope, and for the first time in his three months of existence heyearned to give battle to something that was alive. He was a changedPeter, no longer satisfied with the thought of gnawing sticks or stonesor mauling a rabbit skin. At the crest of the slope he stopped, andyelped down, almost determined to go back to that black patch of forestand chase out everything that was in it. Then he turned toward Cragg'sRidge, and what he saw seemed slowly to shrink up the pugnaciousnessthat was in him, and his stiffened tail drooped until the knotty end ofit touched the ground.
Three or four hundred yards away, out of the heart of that cup-likeparadise which ran back through a break in the ridge, rose a spiralof white smoke, and with the sight of that smoke Peter heard also thechopping of axe. It made him shiver, and yet he made his way toward it.He was not old enough--nor was it in the gentle blood of his Mackenziemother--to know the meaning of hate; but something was growing swiftlyin Peter's shrewd little head, and he sensed impending danger wheneverhe heard the sound of the axe. For always there was associated with thatsound the cat-like, thin-faced man with the red bristle on his upperlip, and the one eye that never opened but was always closed. AndPeter had come to fear this one eyed man more than he feared any of theghostly monsters hidden in the black pit of the forest he had bravedthat day.
But the owls, and the porcupine, and the fiery-eyed fox that hadrun away from him, had put into Peter something which was not in himyesterday, and he did not slink on his belly when he came to the edgeof the cup between the broken ridge, but stood up boldly on his crookedlegs and looked ahead of him. At the far edge of the cup, under thewestern shoulder of the ridge, was a thick scattering of tall cedars andgreen poplars and white birch, and in the shelter of these was a cabinbuilt of logs. A lovelier spot could not have been chosen for the homeof man. The hollow, from where Peter stood, was a velvety carpet ofgreen, thickly strewn with flowers and ferns, sweet with the scentof violets and wild honey-suckle, and filled with the song of birds.Through the middle of it purled a tiny creek which disappeared betweenthe ragged shoulders of rock, and close to this creek stood the cabin,its log walls smothered under a luxuriant growth of wood-vine. ButPeter's quizzical little eyes were not measuring the beauty of theplace, nor were his ears listening to the singing of birds, or thechattering of a red-squirrel on a stub a few yards away. He was lookingbeyond the cabin, to a chalk-white mass of rock that rose like a giantmushroom in the edge of the trees--and he was listening to the ringingof the axe, and straining his ears to catch the sound of a voice.
It was the voice he wanted most of all, and when this did not come hechoked back a whimper in his throat, and went down to the creek, andwaded through it, and came up cautiously behind the cabin, his eyes andears alert and his loosely jointed legs ready for flight at a sign ofdanger. He wanted to set up his sharp yipping signal for the girl, butthe menace of the axe choked back his desire. At the very end of thecabin, where the wood-vine grew thick and dense, Peter had burrowedhimself a hiding-place, and into this he skulked with the quickness ofa rat getting away from its enemies. From this protecting screen hecautiously poked forth his whiskered face, to make what inventory hecould of his chances for supper and a safe home-coming.
And as he looked forth his heart gave a sudden jump.
It was the girl, and not the man who was using the axe today. At thebig wood-pile half a stone's throw away he saw the shimmer of her browncurls in the sun, and a glimpse of her white face as it was turned foran instant toward the cabin. In his gladness he would have leaped out,but the curse of a voice he had learned to dread held him back.
A man had come out of the cabin, and close behind the man, a woman. Theman was a long, lean, cadaverous-faced creature, and Peter knew that thedevil was in him as he stood there at the cabin door. His breath, ifone had stood close enough to smell it, was heavy with whiskey. Tobaccojuice stained the corners of his mouth, and his one eye gleamed withan animal-like exultation as he nodded toward the girl with the shiningcurls.
"Mooney says he'll pay seven-fifty for her when he gets his tie-moneyfrom the Government, an' he paid me fifty down," he said. "It'll helppay for the brat's board these last ten years--an' mebby, when it comesto a show-down, I can stick him for a thousand."
The woman made no answer. She was, in a way, past answering with a mindof her own. The man, as he stood there, was wicked and cruel, every linein his ugly face and angular body a line of sin. The woman was bent,broken, a wreck. In her face there was no sign of a living soul. Hereyes were dull, her heart burned out, her hands gnarled with toil underthe slavedom of a beast. Yet even Peter, quiet as a mouse where he lay,sensed the difference between them. He had seen the girl and this womansobbing in each other's arms. And often he had crawled to the woman'sfeet, and occasionally her hand had touched him, and frequently she hadgiven him things to eat. But it was seldom he heard her voice when theman was near.
The man was biting off a chunk of black tobacco. Suddenly he asked,
"How old is she, Liz?"
And the woman answered in a strange and husky voice.
"Seventeen the twelfth day of this month."
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The man spat.
"Mooney ought to pay a thousand. We've had her better'n ten years--an'Mooney's crazy as a loon to git her. He'll pay!"
"Jed--" The woman's voice rose above its hoarseness. "Jed--it ain'tright!"
The man laughed. He opened his mouth wide, until his yellow fangsgleamed in the sun, and the girl with the axe paused for a moment in herwork, and flung back her head, staring at the two before the cabin door.
"Right?" jeered the man. "Right? That's what you been preachin' me theselast ten years 'bout whiskey-runnin,' but it ain't made me stop sellin'whiskey, has it? An' I guess it ain't a word that'll come between Mooneyand me--not if Mooney gits his thousand." Suddenly he turned upon her,a hand half raised to strike. "An' if you whisper a word to her--if y'double-cross me so much as the length of your little finger--I'll breakevery bone in your body, so help me God! You understand? You won't sayanything to her?"
The woman's uneven shoulders drooped lower.
"I won't say ennything, Jed. I--promise."
The man dropped his uplifted hand with a harsh grunt.
"I'll kill y' if you do," he warned.
The girl had dropped her axe, and was coming toward them. She was aslim, bird-like creature, with a poise to her head and an up-tilt to herchin which warned that the man had not yet beaten her to the level ofthe woman. She was dressed in a faded calico, frayed at the bottom,and with the sleeves bobbed off just above the elbows of her slim whitearms. Her stockings were mottled with patches and mends, and her shoeswere old, and worn out at the toes.
But to Peter, worshipping her from his hiding place, she was the mostbeautiful thing in the world. Jolly Roger had said the same thing, andmost men--and women, too--would have agreed that this slip of a girlpossessed a beauty which it would take a long time for unhappinessand torture to crush entirely out of her. Her eyes were as blue as theviolets Peter had thrust his nose among that day. And her hair was aglory, loosed by her exertion from its bondage of faded ribbon, andfalling about her shoulders and nearly to her waist in a mass of curlingbrown tresses that at times had made even Jed Hawkins' one eye light ofwith admiration. And yet, even in those times, he hated her, and morethan once his bony fingers had closed viciously in that mass of radianthair, but seldom could he wring a scream of pain from Nada. Even now,when she could see the light of the devil in his one gleaming eye, itwas only her flesh--and not her soul--that was afraid.
But the strain had begun to show its mark. In the blue of her eyes wasthe look of one who was never free of haunting visions, her cheeks werepallid, and a little too thin, and the vivid redness of her lips was notof health and happiness, but a touch of the color which should have beenin her face, and which until now had refused to die.
She faced the man, a little out of the reach of his arm.
"I told you never again to raise your hand to strike her," she cried ina fierce, suppressed little voice, her blue eyes flaming loathing andhatred at him. "If you hit her once more--something is going to happen.If you want to hit anyone, hit me. I kin stand it. But--look at her!You've broken her shoulder, you've crippled her--an' you oughta die!"
The man advanced half a step, his eye ablaze. Deep down in him Peterfelt something he had never felt before. For the first time in his lifehe had no desire to run away from the man. Something rose up from hisbony little chest, and grew in his throat, until it was a babyish snarlso low that no human ears could hear it. And in his hiding-place hisneedle-like fangs gleamed under snarling lips.
But the man did not strike, nor did he reach out to grip his fingers inthe silken mass of Nada's hair. He laughed, as if something was chokinghim, and turned away with a toss of his arms.
"You ain't seein' me hit her any more, are you, Nady?" he said, anddisappeared around the end of the cabin.
The girl laid a hand on the woman's arm. Her eyes softened, but she wastrembling.
"I've told him what'll happen, an' he won't dare hit you any more," shecomforted. "If he does, I'll end him. I will! I'll bring the police.I'll show 'em the places where he hides his whiskey. I'll--I'll put himin jail, if I die for it!"
The woman's bony hands clutched at one of Nada's.
"No, no, you mustn't do that," she pleaded. "He was good to me once,a long time ago, Nada. It ain't Jed that's bad--it's the whiskey. Youmustn't tell on him, Nada--you mustn't!"
"I've promised you I won't--if he don't hit you any more. He kin shakeme by the hair if he wants to. But if he hits you--"
She drew a deep breath, and also passed around the end of the cabin.
For a few moments Peter listened. Then he slipped back through thetunnel he had made under the wood-vine, and saw Nada walking swiftlytoward the break in the ridge. He followed, so quietly that she wasthrough the break, and was picking her way among the tumbled massesof rock along the farther foot of the ridge, before she discovered hispresence. With a glad cry she caught him up in her arms and hugged himagainst her breast.
"Peter, Peter, where have you been?" she demanded. "I thought somethinghad happened to you, and I've been huntin' for you, and so has Roger--Imean Mister Jolly Roger."
Peter was hugged tighter, and he hung limply until his mistress cameto a thick little clump of dwarf balsams hidden among the rocks. Itwas their "secret place," and Peter had come to sense the fact that itsmystery was not to be disclosed. Here Nada had made her little bower,and she sat down now upon a thick rug of balsam boughs, and held Peterout in front of her, squatted on his haunches. A new light had come intoher eyes, and they were shining like stars. There was a flush in hercheeks, her red lips were parted, and Peter, looking up--and beingjust dog--could scarcely measure the beauty of her. But he knew thatsomething had happened, and he tried hard to understand.
"Peter, he was here ag'in today--Mister Roger--Mister Jolly Roger," shecried softly, the pink in her cheeks growing brighter. "And he told me Iwas pretty!"
She drew a deep breath, and looked out over the rocks to the valley andthe black forest beyond. And her fingers, under Peter's scrawny armpits,tightened until he grunted.
"And he asked me if he could touch my hair--mind you he asked me that,Peter!--And when I said 'yes' he just put his hand on it, as if he wasafraid, and he said it was beautiful, and that I must take wonderfulcare of it!"
Peter saw a throbbing in her throat.
"Peter--he said he didn't want to do anything wrong to me, that he'd cutoff his hand first. He said that! And then he said--if I didn't think itwas wrong--he'd like to kiss me--"
She hugged Peter up close to her again.
"And--I told him I guessed it wasn't wrong, because I liked him, andnobody else had ever kissed me, and--Peter--he didn't kiss me! And whenhe went away he looked so queer--so white-like--and somethin' inside mehas been singing ever since. I don't know what it is, Peter. But it'sthere!"
And then, after a moment.
"Peter," she whispered, "I wish Mister Jolly Roger would take us away!"
The thought drew a tightening to her lips, and the pucker of a frownbetween her eyes, and she sat Peter down beside her and looked overthe valley to the black forest, in the heart of which was Jolly Roger'scabin.
"It's funny he don't want anybody to know he's there, ain't it--Imean--isn't it, Peter?" she mused. "He's livin' in the old shack IndianTom died in last winter, and I've promised not to tell. He says it's agreat secret, and that only you, and I, and the Missioner over at SuckerCreek know anything about it. I'd like to go over and clean up the shackfor him. I sure would."
Peter, beginning to nose among the rocks, did not see the flash of firethat came slowly into the blue of the girl's eyes. She was looking ather ragged shoes, at the patched stockings, at the poverty of her fadeddress, and her fingers clenched in her lap.
"I'd do it--I'd go away--somewhere--and never come back, if it wasn'tfor her," she breathed. "She treats me like a witch most of the time,but Jed Hawkins made her that way. I kin remember--"
Suddenly she jumped up, and flung back her head defiantly, so
that herhair streamed out in a sun-filled cloud in a gust of wind that came upthe valley.
"Some day, I'll kill 'im," she cried to the black forest across theplain. "Some day--I will!"