Back to God\'s Country and Other Stories

J >> James Oliver Curwood >> Back to God\'s Country and Other Stories

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Etext prepared by Dianne Bean, Prescott Valley, Arizona.

BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY AND OTHER STORIES

BY

JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

CONTENTS

Back to God's Country

The Yellow-Back

The Fiddling Man

L'ange

The Case of Beauvais

The Other Man's Wife

The Strength of Men

The Match

The Honor of Her People

Bucky Severn

His First Penitent

Peter God

The Mouse

BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY

When Shan Tung, the long-cued Chinaman from Vancouver, started up the
Frazer River in the old days when the Telegraph Trail and the headwaters
of the Peace were the Meccas of half the gold-hunting population of
British Columbia, he did not foresee tragedy ahead of him. He was a
clever man, was Shan Tung, a cha-sukeed, a very devil in the collecting
of gold, and far-seeing. But he could not look forty years into the
future, and when Shan Tung set off into the north, that winter, he was in
reality touching fire to the end of a fuse that was to burn through four
decades before the explosion came.

With Shan Tung went Tao, a Great Dane. The Chinaman had picked him up
somewhere on the coast and had trained him as one trains a horse. Tao was
the biggest dog ever seen about the Height of Land, the most powerful,
and at times the most terrible. Of two things Shan Tung was enormously
proud in his silent and mysterious oriental way--of Tao, the dog, and of
his long, shining cue which fell to the crook of his knees when he let it
down. It had been the longest cue in Vancouver, and therefore it was the
longest cue in British Columbia. The cue and the dog formed the
combination which set the forty-year fuse of romance and tragedy burning.
Shan Tung started for the El Dorados early in the winter, and Tao alone
pulled his sledge and outfit. It was no more than an ordinary task for
the monstrous Great Dane, and Shan Tung subserviently but with hidden
triumph passed outfit after outfit exhausted by the way. He had reached
Copper Creek Camp, which was boiling and frothing with the excitement of
gold-maddened men, and was congratulating himself that he would soon be
at the camps west of the Peace, when the thing happened. A drunken
Irishman, filled with a grim and unfortunate sense of humor, spotted Shan
Tung's wonderful cue and coveted it. Wherefore there followed a bit of
excitement in which Shan Tung passed into his empyrean home with a bullet
through his heart, and the drunken Irishman was strung up for his misdeed
fifteen minutes later. Tao, the Great Dane, was taken by the leader of
the men who pulled on the rope. Tao's new master was a "drifter," and as
he drifted, his face was always set to the north, until at last a new
humor struck him and he turned eastward to the Mackenzie. As the seasons
passed, Tao found mates along the way and left a string of his progeny
behind him, and he had new masters, one after another, until he was grown
old and his muzzle was turning gray. And never did one of these masters
turn south with him. Always it was north, north with the white man first,
north with the Cree, and then wit h the Chippewayan, until in the end the
dog born in a Vancouver kennel died in an Eskimo igloo on the Great Bear.
But the breed of the Great Dane lived on. Here and there, as the years
passed, one would find among the Eskimo trace-dogs, a grizzled-haired,
powerful-jawed giant that was alien to the arctic stock, and in these
occasional aliens ran the blood of Tao, the Dane.

Forty years, more or less, after Shan Tung lost his life and his cue at
Copper Creek Camp, there was born on a firth of Coronation Gulf a dog who
was named Wapi, which means "the Walrus." Wapi, at full growth, was a
throwback of more than forty dog generations. He was nearly as large as
his forefather, Tao. His fangs were an inch in length, his great jaws
could crack the thigh-bone of a caribou, and from the beginning the hands
of men and the fangs of beasts were against him. Almost from the day of
his birth until this winter of his fourth year, life for Wapi had been an
unceasing fight for existence. He was maya-tisew--bad with the badness of
a devil. His reputation had gone from master to master and from igloo to
igloo; women and children were afraid of him, and men always spoke to him
with the club or the lash in their hands. He was hated and feared, and
yet because he could run down a barren-land caribou and kill it within a
mile, and would hold a big white bear at bay until the hunters came, he
was not sacrificed to this hate and fear. A hundred whips and clubs and a
hundred pairs of hands were against him between Cape Perry and the crown
of Franklin Bay--and the fangs of twice as many dogs.

The dogs were responsible. Quick-tempered, clannish with the savage
brotherhood of the wolves, treacherous, jealous of leadership, and with
the older instincts of the dog dead within them, their merciless feud
with what they regarded as an interloper of another breed put the devil
heart in Wapi. In all the gray and desolate sweep of his world he had no
friend. The heritage of Tao, his forefather, had fallen upon him, and he
was an alien in a land of strangers. As the dogs and the men and women
and children hated him, so he hated them. He hated the sight and smell of
the round-faced, blear-eyed creatures who were his master, yet he obeyed
them, sullenly, watchfully, with his lips wrinkled warningly over fangs
which had twice torn out the life of white bears. Twenty times he had
killed other dogs. He had fought them singly, and in pairs, and in packs.
His giant body bore the scars of a hundred wounds. He had been clubbed
until a part of his body was deformed and he traveled with a limp. He
kept to himself even in the mating season. And all this because Wapi, the
Walrus, forty years removed from the Great Dane of Vancouver, was a white
man's dog.

Stirring restlessly within him, sometimes coming to him in dreams and
sometimes in a great and unfulfilled yearning, Wapi felt vaguely the
strange call of his forefathers. It was impossible for him to understand.
It was impossible for him to know what it meant. And yet he did know that
somewhere there was something for which he was seeking and which he never
found. The desire and the questing came to him most compellingly in the
long winter filled with its eternal starlight, when the maddening yap,
yap, yap of the little white foxes, the barking of the dogs, and the
Eskimo chatter oppressed him like the voices of haunting ghosts. In these
long months, filled with the horror of the arctic night, the spirit of
Tao whispered within him that somewhere there was light and sun, that
somewhere there was warmth and flowers, and running streams, and voices
he could understand, and things he could love. And then Wapi would whine,
and perhaps the whine would bring him the blow of a club, or the lash of
a whip, or an Eskimo threat, or the menace of an Eskimo dog's snarl. Of
the latter Wapi was unafraid. With a snap of his jaws, he could break the
back of any other dog on Franklin Bay.

Such was Wapi, the Walrus, when for two sacks of flour, some tobacco, and
a bale of cloth he became the property of Blake, the uta-wawe-yinew, the
trader in seals, whalebone--and women. On this day Wapi's soul took its
flight back through the space of forty years. For Blake was white, which
is to say that at one time or another he had been white. His skin and his
appearance did not betray how black he had turned inside and Wapi's brute
soul cried out to him, telling him how he had waited and watched for this
master he knew would come, how he would fight for him, how he wanted to
lie down and put his great head on the white man's feet in token of his
fealty. But Wapi's bloodshot eyes and battle-scarred face failed to
reveal what was in him, and Blake--following the instructions of those
who should know--ruled him from the beginning with a club that was more
brutal than the club of the Eskimo.

For three months Wapi had been the property of Blake, and it was now the
dead of a long and sunless arctic night. Blake's cabin, built of ship
timber and veneered with blocks of ice, was built in the face of a deep
pit that sheltered it from wind and storm. To this cabin came the
Nanatalmutes from the east, and the Kogmollocks from the west, bartering
their furs and whalebone and seal-oil for the things Blake gave in
exchange, and adding women to their wares whenever Blake announced a
demand. The demand had been excellent this winter. Over in Darnley Bay,
thirty miles across the headland, was the whaler Harpoon frozen up for
the winter with a crew of thirty men, and straight out from the face of
his igloo cabin, less than a mile away, was the Flying Moon with a crew
of twenty more. It was Blake's business to wait and watch like a hawk for
such opportunities as there, and tonight--his watch pointed to the hour
of twelve, midnight--he was sitting in the light of a sputtering seal-oil
lamp adding up figures which told him that his winter, only half gone,
had already been an enormously profitable one.

"If the Mounted Police over at Herschel only knew," he chuckled. "Uppy,
if they did, they'd have an outfit after us in twenty-four hours."

Oopi, his Eskimo right-hand man, had learned to understand English, and
he nodded, his moon-face split by a wide and enigmatic grin. In his way,
"Uppy" was as clever as Shan Tung had been in his.

And Blake added, "We've sold every fur and every pound of bone and oil,
and we've forty Upisk wives to our credit at fifty dollars apiece."

Uppy's grin became larger, and his throat was filled with an exultant
rattle. In the matter of the Upisk wives he knew that he stood ace-high.

"Never," said Blake, "has our wife-by-the-month business been so good. If
it wasn't for Captain Rydal and his love-affair, we'd take a vacation and
go hunting."

He turned, facing the Eskimo, and the yellow flame of the lamp lit up his
face. It was the face of a remarkable man. A black beard concealed much
of its cruelty and its cunning, a beard as carefully Van-dycked as though
Blake sat in a professional chair two thousand miles south, but the beard
could not hide the almost inhuman hardness of the eyes. There was a
glittering light in them as he looked at the Eskimo. "Did you see her
today, Uppy? Of course you did. My Gawd, if a woman could ever tempt me,
she could! And Rydal is going to have her. Unless I miss my guess,
there's going to be money in it for us--a lot of it. The funny part of it
is, Rydal's got to get rid of her husband. And how's he going to do it,
Uppy? Eh? Answer me that. How's he going to do it?"

In a hole he had dug for himself in the drifted snow under a huge scarp
of ice a hundred yards from the igloo cabin lay Wapi. His bed was red
with the stain of blood, and a trail of blood led from the cabin to the
place where he had hidden himself. Not many hours ago, when by God's sun
it should have been day, he had turned at last on a teasing, snarling,
back-biting little kiskanuk of a dog and had killed it. And Blake and
Uppy had beaten him until he was almost dead.

It was not of the beating that Wapi was thinking as he lay in his wallow.
He was thinking of the fur-clad figure that had come between Blake's club
and his body, of the moment when for the first time in his life he had
seen the face of a white woman. She had stopped Blake's club. He had
heard her voice. She had bent over him, and she would have put her hand
on him if his master had not dragged her back with a cry of warning. She
had gone into the cabin then, and he had dragged himself away.

Since then a new and thrilling flame had burned in him. For a time his
senses had been dazed by his punishment, but now every instinct in him
was like a living wire. Slowly he pulled himself from his retreat and sat
down on his haunches. His gray muzzle was pointed to the sky. The same
stars were there, burning in cold, white points of flame as they had
burned week after week in the maddening monotony of the long nights near
the pole. They were like a million pitiless eyes, never blinking, always
watching, things of life and fire, and yet dead. And at those eyes, the
little white foxes yapped so incessantly that the sound of it drove men
mad. They were yapping now. They were never still. And with their yapping
came the droning, hissing monotone of the aurora, like the song of a vast
piece of mechanism in the still farther north. Toward this Wapi turned
his bruised and beaten head. Out there, just beyond the ghostly pale of
vision, was the ship. Fifty times he had slunk out and around it,
cautiously as the foxes themselves. He had caught its smells and its
sounds; he had come near enough to hear the voices of men, and those
voices were like the voice of Blake, his master. Therefore, he had never
gone nearer.

There was a change in him now. His big pads fell noiselessly as he slunk
back to the cabin and sniffed for a scent in the snow. He found it. It
was the trail of the white woman. His blood tingled again, as it had
tingled when her face bent over him and her hand reached out, and in his
soul there rose up the ghost of Tao to whip him on. He followed the
woman's footprints slowly, stopping now and then to listen, and each
moment the spirit in him grew more insistent, and he whined up at the
stars. At last he saw the ship, a wraithlike thing in its piled-up bed of
ice, and he stopped. This was his dead-line. He had never gone nearer.
But tonight--if any one period could be called night--he went on.

It was the hour of sleep, and there was no sound aboard. The foxes, never
tiring of their infuriating sport, were yapping at the ship. They barked
faster and louder when they caught the scent of Wapi, and as he
approached, they drifted farther away. The scent of the woman's trail led
up the wide bridge of ice, and Wapi followed this as he would have
followed a road, until he found himself all at once on the deck of the
Flying Moon. For a space he was startled. His long fangs bared themselves
at the shadows cast by the stars. Then he saw ahead of him a narrow
ribbon of yellow light. Toward this Wapi sniffed out, step by step, the
footprints of the woman. When he stopped again, his muzzle was at the
narrow crack through which came the glimmer of light.

It was the door of a deck-house veneered like an igloo with snow and ice
to protect it from cold and wind. It was, perhaps, half an inch ajar, and
through that aperture Wapi drank the warm, sweet perfume of the woman.
With it he caught also the smell of a man. But in him the woman scent
submerged all else. Overwhelmed by it, he stood trembling, not daring to
move, every inch of him thrilled by a vast and mysterious yearning. He
was no longer Wapi, the Walrus; Wapi, the Killer. Tao was there. And it
may be that the spirit of Shan Tung was there. For after forty years the
change had come, and Wapi, as he stood at the woman's door, was just
dog,--a white man's dog--again the dog of the Vancouver kennel--the dog
of a white man's world.

He thrust open the door with his nose. He slunk in, so silently that he
was not heard. The cabin was lighted. In a bed lay a white-faced,
hollow-cheeked man--awake. On a low stool at his side sat a woman. The
light of the lamp hanging from above warmed with gold fires the thick and
radiant mass of her hair. She was leaning over the sick man. One slim,
white hand was stroking his face gently, and she was speaking to him in a
voice so sweet and soft that it stirred like wonderful music in Wapi's
warped and beaten soul. And then, with a great sigh, he flopped down, an
abject slave, on the edge of her dress.

With a startled cry the woman turned. For a moment she stared at the
great beast wide-eyed, then there came slowly into her face recognition
and understanding. "Why, it's the dog Blake whipped so terribly," she
gasped. "Peter, it's--it's Wapi!" For the first time Wapi felt the caress
of a woman's hand, soft, gentle, pitying, and out of him there came a
wimpering sound that was almost a sob.

"It's the dog--he whipped," she repeated, and, then, if Wapi could have
understood, he would have noted the tense pallor of her lovely face and
the look of a great fear that was away back in the staring blue depths of
her eyes.

From his pillow Peter Keith had seen the look of fear and the paleness of
her cheeks, but he was a long way from guessing the truth. Yet he thought
he knew. For days--yes, for weeks--there had been that growing fear in
her eyes. He had seen her mighty fight to hide it from him. And he
thought he understood.

"I know it has been a terrible winter for you, dear," he had said to her
many times. "But you mustn't worry so much about me. I'll be on my feet
again--soon." He had always emphasized that. "I'll be on my feet again
soon!"

Once, in the breaking terror of her heart, she had almost told him the
truth. Afterward she had thanked God for giving her the strength to keep
it back. It was day--for they spoke in terms of day and night--when
Rydal, half drunk, had dragged her into his cabin, and she had fought him
until her hair was down about her in tangled confusion--and she had told
Peter that it was the wind. After that, instead of evading him, she had
played Rydal with her wits, while praying to God for help. It was
impossible to tell Peter. He had aged steadily and terribly in the last
two weeks. His eyes were sunken into deep pits. His blond hair was
turning gray over the temples. His cheeks were hollowed, and there was a
different sort of luster in his eyes. He looked fifty instead of
thirty-five. Her heart bled in its agony. She loved Peter with a
wonderful love.

The truth! If she told him that! She could see Peter rising up out of his
bed like a ghost. It would kill him. If he could have seen Rydal--only an
hour before--stopping her out on the deck, taking her in his arms, and
kissing her until his drunken breath and his beard sickened her! And if
he could have heard what Rydal had said! She shuddered. And suddenly she
dropped down on her knees beside Wapi and took his great head in her
arms, unafraid of him--and glad that he had come.

Then she turned to Peter. "I'm going ashore to see Blake again--now," she
said. "Wapi will go with me, and I won't be afraid. I insist that I am
right, so please don't object any more, Peter dear."

She bent over and kissed him, and then in spite of his protest, put on
her fur coat and hood, and stood for a moment smiling down at him. The
fear was gone out of her eyes now. It was impossible for him not to smile
at her loveliness. He had always been proud of that. He reached up a thin
hand and plucked tenderly at the shining little tendrils of gold that
crept out from under her hood.

"I wish you wouldn't, dear," he pleaded.

How pathetically white, and thin, and weak he was! She kissed him again
and turned quickly to hide the mist in her eyes. At the door she blew him
a kiss from the tip of her big fur mitten, and as she went out she heard
him say in the thin, strange voice that was so unlike the old Peter:

"Don't be long, Dolores."

She stood silently for a few moments to make sure that no one would see
her. Then she moved swiftly to the ice bridge and out into the
star-lighted ghostliness of the night. Wapi followed close behind her,
and dropping a hand to her side she called softly to him. In an instant
Wapi's muzzle was against her mitten, and his great body quivered with
joy at her direct speech to him. She saw the response in his red eyes and
stopped to stroke him with both mittened hands, and over and over again
she spoke his name. "Wapi--Wapi--Wapi." He whined. She could feel him
under her touch as if alive with an electrical force. Her eyes shone. In
the white starlight there was a new emotion in her face. She had found a
friend, the one friend she and Peter had, and it made her braver.

At no time had she actually been afraid--for herself. It was for Peter.
And she was not afraid now. Her cheeks flushed with exertion and her
breath came quickly as she neared Blake's cabin. Twice she had made
excuses to go ashore--just because she was curious, she had said--and she
believed that she had measured up Blake pretty well. It was a case in
which her woman's intuition had failed her miserably. She was amazed that
such a man had marooned himself voluntarily on the arctic coast. She did
not, of course, understand his business--entirely. She thought him simply
a trader. And he was unlike any man aboard ship. By his carefully clipped
beard, his calm, cold manner of speech, and the unusual correctness with
which he used his words she was convinced that at some time or another he
had been part of what she mentally thought of as "an entirely different
environment."

She was right. There was a time when London and New York would have given
much to lay their hands on the man who now called himself Blake.

Dolores, excited by the conviction that Blake would help her when he
heard her story, still did not lose her caution. Rydal had given her
another twenty-four hours, and that was all. In those twenty-four hours
she must fight out their salvation, her own and Peter's. If Blake should
fail--

Fifty paces from his cabin she stopped, slipped the big fur mitten from
her right hand and unbuttoned her coat so that she could quickly and
easily reach an inside pocket in which was Peter's revolver. She smiled
just a bit grimly, as her fingers touched the cold steel. It was to be
her last resort. And she was thinking in that flash of the days "back
home" when she was counted the best revolver shot at the Piping Rock. She
could beat Peter, and Peter was good. Her fingers twined a bit fondly
about the pearl-handled thing in her pocket. The last resort--and from
the first it had given her courage to keep the truth from Peter!

She knocked at the heavy door of the igloo cabin. Blake was still up, and
when he opened it, he stared at her in wide-eyed amazement. Wapi hung
outside when Dolores entered, and the door closed. "I know you think it
strange for me to come at this hour," she apologized, "but in this
terrible gloom I've lost all count of hours. They have no significance
for me any more. And I wanted to see you--alone."

She emphasized the word. And as she spoke, she loosened her coat and
threw back her hood, so that the glow of the lamp lit up the ruffled mass
of gold the hood had covered. She sat down without waiting for an
invitation, and Blake sat down opposite her with a narrow table between
them. Her face was flushed with cold and wind as she looked at him. Her
eyes were blue with the blue of a steady flame, and they met his own
squarely. She was not nervous. Nor was she afraid.

"Perhaps you can guess--why I have come?" she asked.

He was appraising her almost startling beauty with the lamp glow flooding
down on her. For a moment he hesitated; then he nodded, looking at her
steadily. "Yes, I think I know," he said quietly. "It's Captain Rydal. In
fact, I'm quite positive. It's an unusual situation, you know. Have I
guessed correctly?"

She nodded, drawing in her breath quickly and leaning a little toward
him, wondering how much he knew and how he had come by it.

"A very unusual situation," he repeated. "There's nothing in the world
that makes beasts out of men--most men--more quickly than an arctic
night, Mrs. Keith. And they're all beasts out there--now--all except your
husband, and he is contented because he possesses the one white woman
aboard ship. It's putting it brutally plain, but it's the truth, isn't
it? For the time being they're beasts, every man of the twenty, and
you--pardon me!--are very beautiful. Rydal wants you, and the fact that
your husband is dying--"

"He is not dying," she interrupted him fiercely. "He shall not die! If he
did--"

"Do you love him?" There was no insult in Blake's quiet voice. He asked
the question as if much depended on the answer, as if he must assure
himself of that fact.

"Love him--my Peter? Yes!"

She leaned forward eagerly, gripping her hands in front of him on the
table. She spoke swiftly, as if she must convince him before he asked her
another question. Blake's eyes did not change. They had not changed for
an instant. They were hard, and cold, and searching, unwarmed by her
beauty, by the luster of her shining hair, by the touch of her breath as
it came to him over the table.

"I have gone everywhere with him--everywhere," she began. "Peter writes
books, you know, and we have gone into all sorts of places. We love
it--both of us--this adventuring. We have been all through the country
down there," she swept a hand to the south, "on dog sledges, in canoes,
with snowshoes, and pack-trains. Then we hit on the idea of coming north
on a whaler. You know, of course, Captain Rydal planned to return this
autumn. The crew was rough, but we expected that. We expected to put up
with a lot. But even before the ice shut us in, before this terrible
night came, Rydal insulted me. I didn't dare tell Peter. I thought I
could handle Rydal, that I could keep him in his place, and I knew that
if I told Peter, he would kill the beast. And then the ice--and this
night--" She choked.

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