God\'s Country And the Woman

J >> James Oliver Curwood >> God\'s Country And the Woman

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CHAPTER ONE

Philip Weyman's buoyancy of heart was in face of the fact that he
had but recently looked upon Radisson's unpleasant death, and that
he was still in a country where the water flowed north. He laughed
and he sang. His heart bubbled over with cheer. He talked to
himself frankly and without embarrassment, asked himself
questions, answered them, discussed the beauties of nature and the
possibilities of storm as if there were three or four of him
instead of one.

At the top end of the world a man becomes a multiple being--if he
is white. Two years along the rim of the Arctic had taught Philip
the science by which a man may become acquainted with himself, and
in moments like the present, when both his mental and physical
spirits overflowed, he even went so far as to attempt poor
Radisson's "La Belle Marie" in the Frenchman's heavy basso,
something between a dog's sullen growl and the low rumble of
distant thunder. It made him cough. And then he laughed again,
scanning the narrowing sweep of the lake ahead of him.

He felt like a boy, and he chuckled as he thought of the definite
reason for it. For twenty-three months he had been like a piece of
rubber stretched to a tension--sometimes almost to the snapping
point. Now had come the reaction, and he was going HOME. Home! It
was that one word that caused a shadow to flit over his face, and
only once or twice had he forgotten and let it slip between his
lips. At least he was returning to civilization--getting AWAY from
the everlasting drone of breaking ice and the clack-clack tongue
of the Eskimo.

With the stub of a pencil Philip had figured out on a bit of paper
about where he was that morning. The whalebone hut of his last
Arctic camp was eight hundred miles due north. Fort Churchill,
over on Hudson's Bay, was four hundred miles to the east, and Fort
Resolution, on the Great Slave, was four hundred miles to the
west. On his map he had drawn a heavy circle about Prince Albert,
six hundred miles to the south. That was the nearest line of rail.
Six days back Radisson had died after a mouth's struggle with that
terrible thing they called "le mort rouge," or the Red Death.
Since then Philip had pointed his canoe straight UP the Dubawnt
waterways, and was a hundred and twenty miles nearer to
civilization. He had been through these waterways twice before,
and he knew that there was not a white man within a hundred and
fifty miles of him. And as for a white woman--

Weyman stopped his paddling where there was no current, and leaned
back in his canoe for a breathing space, and to fill his pipe. A
WHITE WOMAN! Would he stare at her like a fool when he saw her
again for the first time? Eighteen months ago he had seen a white
woman over at Fort Churchill--the English clerk's wife, thirty,
with a sprinkle of gray in her blond hair, and pale blue eyes.
Fresh from the Garden of Eden, he had wondered why the half-dozen
white men over there regarded her as they did. Long ago, in the
maddening gloom of the Arctic night, he had learned to understand.
At Fond du Lac, when Weyman had first come up into the forest
country, he had said to the factor: "It's glorious! It's God's
Country!" And the factor had turned his tired, empty eyes upon him
with the words: "It was--before SHE went. But no country is God's
Country without a woman," and then he took Philip to the lonely
grave under a huge lob-stick spruce, and told him in a few words
how one woman had made life for him. Even then Philip could not
fully understand. But he did now.

He resumed his paddling, his gray eyes alert. His aloneness and
the bigness of the world in which, so far as he knew, he was the
only human atom, did not weigh heavily upon him. He loved this
bigness and emptiness and the glory of solitude. It was middle
autumn, and close to noon of a day unmarred by cloud above, and
warm with sunlight. He was following close to the west shore of
the lake. The opposite shore was a mile away. He was so near to
the rock-lined beach that he could hear the soft throat-cries of
the moose-birds. And what he saw, so far as his eyes could see in
all directions, was "God's Country"--a glory of colour that was
like a great master painting. The birch had turned to red and
gold. From out of the rocks rose trees that were great crimson
splashes of mountain-ash berries framed against the dark lustre of
balsam and cedar and spruce.

Without reason, Philip was listening again to the quiet lifeless
words of Jasper, the factor over at Fond du Lac, as he described
the day when he and his young wife first came up through the
wonderland of the North. "No country is God's Country without a
woman!" He found the words running in an unpleasant monotone
through his brain. He had made up his mind that he would strike
Fond du Lac on his way down, for Jasper's words and the hopeless
picture he had made that day beside the little cross under the
spruce had made them brothers in a strange sort of way. Besides,
Jasper would furnish him with a couple of Indians, and a sledge
and dogs if the snows came early.

In a break between the rocks Philip saw a white strip of sand, and
turned his canoe in to shore. He had been paddling since five
o'clock, and in the six hours had made eighteen miles. Yet he felt
no fatigue as he stood up and stretched himself. He remembered how
different it had been four years ago when Hill, the Hudson's Bay
Company's man down at Prince Albert, had looked him over with
skeptical and uneasy eyes, encouraging him with the words: "You're
going to a funeral, young man, and it's your own. You won't make
God's House, much less Hudson's Bay!"

Weyman laughed joyously.

"Fooled 'em--fooled 'em all!" he told himself. "We'll wager a
dollar to a doughnut that we're the toughest looking specimen that
ever drifted down from Coronation Gulf, or any other gulf. A
DOUGHNUT! I'd trade a gold nugget as big as my fist for a doughnut
or a piece of pie right this minute. Doughnuts an' pie--real old
pumpkin pie--an' cranberry sauce, 'n' POTATOES! Good Lord, and
they're only six hundred miles away, carloads of 'em!"

He began to whistle as he pulled his rubber dunnage sack out of
the canoe. Suddenly he stopped, his eyes staring at the smooth
white floor of sand. A bear had been there before him, and quite
recently. Weyman had killed fresh meat the day before, but the
instinct of the naturalist and the woodsman kept him from singing
or whistling, two things which he was very much inclined to do on
this particular day. He had no suspicion that a bear which he was
destined never to see had become the greatest factor in his life.
He was philosopher enough to appreciate the value and importance
of little things, but the bear track did not keep him silent
because he regarded it as significant, because he wanted to kill.
He would have welcomed it to dinner, and would have talked to it
were it as affable and good-mannered as the big pop-eyed moose-
birds that were already flirting about near him.

He emptied a half of the contents of the rubber sack out on the
sand and made a selection for dinner, and he chuckled in his big
happiness as he saw how attenuated his list of supplies was
becoming. There was still a quarter of a pound of tea, no sugar,
no coffee, half a dozen pounds of flour, twenty-seven prunes
jealously guarded in a piece of narwhal skin, a little salt and
pepper mixed, and fresh caribou meat.

"It's a lovely day, and we'll have a treat for dinner," he
informed himself. "No need of starving. We'll have a real feast.
I'll cook SEVEN prunes instead of five!"

He built a small fire, hung two small pots over it, selected his
prunes, and measured out a tablespoonful of black tea. In the
respite he had while the water heated he dug a small mirror out of
the sack and looked at himself. His long, untrimmed hair was
blond, and the inch of stubble on his face was brick red. There
were tiny creases at the corners of his eyes, caused by the
blistering sleet and cold wind of the Arctic coast. He grimaced as
he studied himself. Then his face lighted up with sudden
inspiration.

"I've got it!" he exclaimed. "I need a shave! We'll use the prune
water."

From the rubber bag he fished out his razor, a nubbin of soap, and
a towel. For fifteen minutes after that he sat cross-legged on the
sand, with the mirror on a rock, and worked. When he had finished
he inspected himself closely.

"You're not half bad," he concluded, and he spoke seriously now.
"Four years ago when you started up here you were thirty--and you
looked forty. Now you're thirty-four, and if it wasn't for the
snow lines in your eyes I'd say you were a day or two younger.
That's pretty good."

He had washed his face and was drying it with the towel when a
sound made him look over beyond the rocks. It was the crackling
sound made by a dead stick stepped upon, or a sapling broken down.
Either meant the bear.

Dropping the towel, he unbuttoned the flap to the holster of his
revolver, took a peep to see how long he could leave the water
before it would boil, and stepped cautiously in the direction of
the sound. A dozen paces beyond the bulwark of rocks he came upon
a fairly well-worn moose trail; surveying its direction from the
top of a boulder, he made up his mind that the bear was dining on
mountain-ash berries where he saw one of the huge crimson splashes
of the fruit a hundred yards away.

He went on quietly. Under the big ash tree there was no sign of a
feast, recent or old. He proceeded, the trail turning almost at
right angles from the ash tree, as if about to bury itself in the
deeper forest. His exploratory instinct led him on for another
hundred yards, when the trail swung once more to the left. He
heard the swift trickling run of water among rocks, and again a
sound. But his mind did not associate the sound which he heard
this time with the one made by the bear. It was not the breaking
of a stick or the snapping of brush. It was more a part of the
musical water-sound itself, a strange key struck once to interrupt
the monotone of a rushing stream.

Over a gray hog-back of limestone Philip climbed to look down into
a little valley of smooth-washed boulders and age-crumbled rock
through which the stream picked its way. He descended to the white
margin of sand and turned sharply to the right, where a little
pool had formed at the base of a huge rock. And there he stopped,
his heart in his throat, every fibre in his body charged with a
sudden electrical thrill at what he beheld. For a moment he was
powerless to move. He stood--and stared.

At the edge of the pool twenty steps from him was kneeling a
woman. Her back was toward him, and in that moment she was as
motionless as the rock that towered over her. Along with the
rippling drone of the stream, without reason on his part--without
time for thought-there leaped through his amazed brain the words
of Jasper, the factor, and he knew that he was looking upon the
miracle that makes "God's Country"--a white woman!

The sun shone down upon her bare head. Over her slightly bent
shoulders swept a glory of unbound hair that rippled to the sand.
Black tresses, even velvety as the crow's wing, might have meant
Cree or half-breed. But this at which he stared--all that he saw
of her--was the brown and gold of the autumnal tintings that had
painted pictures for him that day.

Slowly she raised her head, as if something had given her warning
of a presence behind, and as she hesitated in that birdlike,
listening poise a breath of wind from the little valley stirred
her hair in a shimmering veil that caught a hundred fires of the
sun. And then, as he crushed back his first impulse to cry out, to
speak to her, she rose erect beside the pool, her back still to
him, and hidden to the hips in her glorious hair.

Her movement revealed a towel partly spread out on the sand, and a
comb, a brush, and a small toilet bag. Philip did not see these.
She was turning, slowly, scanning the rocks beyond the valley.

Like a thing carven out of stone he stood, still speechless, still
staring, when she faced him.

CHAPTER TWO

A face like that into which Philip looked might have come to him
from out of some dream of paradise. It was a girl's face. Eyes of
the pure blue of the sky above met his own. Her lips were a little
parted and a little laughing. Before he had uttered a word, before
he could rise out of the stupidity of his wonder, the change came.
A fear that he could not have forgotten if he had lived through a
dozen centuries leaped into the lovely eyes. The half-laughing
lips grew tense with terror. Quick as the flash of powder there
had come into her face a look that was not that of one merely
startled. It was fear--horror--a great, gripping thing that for an
instant seemed to crush the life from her soul. In another moment
it was gone, and she swayed back against the face of the rock,
clutching a hand at her breast.

"My God, how I frightened you!" gasped Philip.

"Yes, you frightened me," she said.

Her white throat was bare, and he could see the throb of it as she
made a strong effort to speak steadily. Her eyes did not leave
him. As he advanced a step he saw that unconsciously she cringed
closer to the rock.

"You are not afraid--now?" he asked. "I wouldn't have frightened
you for the world. And sooner than hurt you I'd--I'd kill myself.
I just stumbled here by accident. And I haven't seen a white
woman--for two years. So I stared--stared--and stood there like a
fool."

Relief shot into her eyes at his words.

"Two years? What do you mean?"

"I've been up along the rim of h--I mean the Arctic, on a
government wild-goose chase," he explained. "And I'm just coming
down."

"You're from the North?"

There was an eager emphasis in her question.

"Yes. Straight from Coronation Gulf. I ran ashore to cook a mess
of prunes. While the water was boiling I came down here after a
bear, and found YOU! My name is Philip Weyman; I haven't even an
Indian with me, and there are three things in the world I'd trade
that name for just now: One is pie, another is doughnuts, and the
third--"

She brushed back her hair, and the fear went from her eyes as she
looked at him.

"And the third?" she asked.

"Is the answer to a question," he finished. "How do YOU happen to
be here, six hundred miles from anywhere?"

She stepped out from the rock. And now he saw that she was almost
as tall as himself, and that she was as slim as a reed and as
beautifully poised as the wild narcissus that sways like music to
every call of the wind. She had tucked up her sleeves, baring her
round white arms close to the shoulders, and as she looked
steadily at him before answering his question she flung back the
shining masses of her hair and began to braid it. Her fear for him
was entirely gone. She was calm. And there was something in the
manner of her quiet and soul-deep study of him that held back
other words which he might have spoken.

In those few moments she had taken her place in his life. She
stood before him like a goddess, tall and slender and unafraid,
her head a gold-brown aureole, her face filled with a purity, a
beauty, and a STRENGTH that made him look at her speechless,
waiting for the sound of her voice. In her look there was neither
boldness nor suspicion. Her eyes were clear, deep pools of velvety
blue that defied him to lie to her, He felt that under those eyes
he could have knelt down upon the sand and emptied his soul of its
secrets for their inspection.

"It is not very strange that I should be here" she said at last.
"I have always lived here. It is my home."

"Yes, I believe that," breathed Philip. "It is the last thing in
the world that one would believe--but I do; I believe it.
Something--I don't know what--told me that you belonged to this
world as you stood there beside the rock. But I don't understand.
A thousand miles from a city--and you! It's unreal. It's almost
like the dreams I've been dreaming during the past eighteen
months, and the visions I've seen during that long, maddening
night up on the coast, when for five months we didn't see a glow
of the sun. But--you understand--it's hard to comprehend."

From her he glanced swiftly over the rocks of the coulee, as if
expecting to see some sign of the home she had spoken of, or at
least of some other human presence. She understood his questioning
look. "I am alone," she said.

The quality of her voice startled him more then her words. There
was a deeper, darker glow in her eyes as she watched their effect
upon him. She swept out a gleaming white arm, still moist with the
water of the pool, taking in the wide, autumn-tinted spaces about
them.

"I am alone," she repeated, still keeping her eyes on his face.
"Entirely alone. That is why you startled me--why I was afraid.
This is my hiding-place, and I thought--"

He saw that she had spoken words that she would have recalled. She
hesitated. Her lips trembled. In that moment of suspense a little
gray ermine dislodged a stone from the rock ridge above them, and
at the sound of it as it struck behind her the girl gave a start,
and a quick flash of the old fear leaped for an instant into her
face. And now Philip beheld something in her which he had been too
bewildered and wonder-struck to observe before. Her first terror
had been so acute that he had failed to see what remained after
her fright had passed. But it was clear to him now, and the look
that came into his own face told her that he had made the
discovery.

The beauty of her face, her eyes, her hair--the wonder of her
presence six hundred miles from civilization--had held him
spellbound. He had seen only the deep lustre and the wonderful
blue of her eyes. Now he saw that those eyes, exquisite in their
loveliness, were haunted by something which she was struggling to
fight back--a questing, hunted look that burned there steadily,
and of which he was not the cause. A deep-seated grief, a terror
far back, shone through the forced calmness with which she was
speaking to him. He knew that she was fighting with herself, that
the nervously twitching fingers at her breast told more than her
lips had confessed. He stepped nearer to her and held out a hand,
and when he spoke his voice was vibrant with the thing that made
men respect him and women have faith in him.

"Tell me--what you started to say," he entreated quietly. "This is
your hiding-place, and you thought--what? I think that I can
guess. You thought that I was some one else, whom you have reason
to fear."

She did not answer. It was as if she had not yet completely
measured him. Her eyes told him that. They were not looking AT
him, but INTO him. And they were softly beautiful as wood violets.
He found himself looking steadily into them--close, so close that
he could have reached out and touched her. Slowly there came over
them a filmy softness. And then, marvellously, he saw the tears
gathering, as dew might gather over the sweet petals of a flower.
And still for a moment she did not speak. There came a little
quiver at her throat, and she caught herself with a quick, soft
breath.

"Yes, I thought you were some one else--whom I fear," she said
then. "But why should I tell you? You are from down there, from
what you please to call civilization. I should distrust you
because of that. So why--why should I tell you?"

In an instant Philip was at her side. In his rough, storm-beaten
hand he caught the white fingers that trembled at her breast. And
there was something about him now that made her completely
unafraid.

"Why?" he asked. "Listen, and I will tell you. Four years ago I
came up into this country from down there--the world they call
Civilization. I came up with every ideal and every dream I ever
had broken and crushed. And up here I found God's Country. I found
new ideals and new dreams. I am going back with them. But they can
never be broken as the others were--because--now--I have found
something that will make them live. And that something is YOU!
Don't let my words startle you. I mean them to be as pure as the
sun that shines over our heads. If I leave you now--if I never see
you again--you will have filled this wonderful world for me. And
if I could do something to prove this--to make you happier--why,
I'd thank God for having sent me ashore to cook a mess of prunes."

He released her hand, and stepped back from her.

"That is why you should tell me," he finished.

A swift change had come into her eyes and face. She was breathing
quickly. He saw the sudden throbbing of her throat. A flush of
colour had mounted into her cheeks. Her lips were parted, her eyes
shone like stars.

"You would do a great deal for me?" she questioned breathlessly.
"A great deal--and like--A MAN?"

"Yes."

"A MAN--one of God's men?" she repeated.

He bowed his head.

Slowly, so slowly that she scarcely seemed to move, she drew
nearer to him.

"And when you had done this you would be willing to go away, to
promise never to see me again, to ask no reward? You would swear
that?"

Her hand touched his arm. Her breath came tense and fast as she
waited for him to answer. "If you wished it, yes," he said.

"I almost believe," he heard, as if she were speaking the words to
herself. She turned to him again, and something of faith, of hope
transfigured her face.

"Return to your fire and your prunes," she said quickly, and the
sunlight of a smile passed over her lips. "Then, half an hour from
now, come up the coulee to the turn in the rocks. You will find me
there."

She bent quickly and picked up the little bag and the brush from
the sand. Without looking at him again she sped swiftly beyond the
big rock, and Philip's last vision of her was the radiant glory of
her hair as it rippled cloudlike behind her in the sunlight.

CHAPTER THREE

That he had actually passed through the experience of the last few
minutes, that it was a reality and not some beautiful phantasm of
the red and gold world which again lay quiet and lifeless about
him, Philip could scarcely convince himself as he made his way
back to the canoe and the fire. The discovery of this girl, buried
six hundred miles in a wilderness that was almost a terra
incognita to the white man, was sufficient to bewilder him. And
only now, as he kicked the burning embers from under the pails,
and looked at his watch to time himself, did he begin to realize
that he had not sensed a hundredth part of the miracle of it.

Now that he was alone, question after question leapt unanswered
through his mind, and every vein in his body throbbed with strange
excitement. Not for an instant did he doubt what she had said.
This world--the forests about him, the lakes, the blue skies
above, were her home. And yet, struggling vainly for a solution of
the mystery, he told himself in the next breath that this could
not be possible. Her voice had revealed nothing of the wilderness
--except in its sweetness. Not a break had marred the purity of
her speech. She had risen before him like the queen of some
wonderful kingdom, and not like a forest girl. And in her face he
had seen the soul of one who had looked upon the world as the
world lived outside of its forest walls. Yet he believed her. This
was her home. Her hair, her eyes, the flowerlike lithesomeness of
her beautiful body--and something more, something that he could
not see but which he could FEEL in her presence, told him that
this was so. This wonder-world about him was her home. But why--
how?

He seated himself on a rock, holding the open watch in his hand.
Of one thing he was sure. She was oppressed by a strange fear. It
was not the fear of being alone, of being lost, of some happen-
chance peril that she might fancy was threatening her. It was a
deeper, bigger thing than that. And she had confessed to him--not
wholly, but enough to make him know--that this fear was of man. He
felt at this thought a little thrill of joy, of undefinable
exultation. He sprang from the rock and went down to the shore of
the lake, scanning its surface with eager, challenging eyes. In
these moments he forgot that civilization was waiting for him,
that for eighteen months he had been struggling between life and
death at the naked and barbarous end of the earth. All at once, in
the space of a few minutes, his world had shrunken until it held
but two things for him--the autumn-tinted forests, and the girl.
Beyond these he thought of nothing except the minutes that were
dragging like thirty weights of lead.

As the hand of his watch marked off the twenty-fifth of the
prescribed thirty he turned his steps in the direction of the
pool. He half expected that she would be there when he came over
the ridge of rock. But she had not returned. He looked up the
coulee, end then at the firm white sand close to the water. The
imprints of her feet were there--small, narrow imprints of a
heeled shoe. Unconsciously he smiled, for no other reason than
that each surprise he encountered was a new delight to him. A
forest girl as he had known them would have worn moccasins--six
hundred miles from civilization.

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