CHAPTER XIV
From the edge of the open Pierrot saw what had happened, and he gave a great gasp. He drew back among the balsams. This was not a moment for him to show himself. While his heart drummed like a hammer, his face was filled with joy.
On her hands and knees the Willow was peering over the edge. Bush McTaggart had disappeared. He had gone down like the great clod he was; the water of her pool had closed over him with a dull splash that was like a chuckle of triumph. He appeared now, beating out with his arms and legs to keep himself afloat, while the Willow’s voice came to him in taunting cries.
“Bête noir!Bête noir!Beast! Beast——”
She flung small sticks and tufts of earth down at him fiercely; and McTaggart, looking up as he gained his equilibrium, saw her leaning so far over that she seemed about to fall. Her long braids hung down into the chasm, gleaming in the sun; her eyes were laughing while her lips taunted him; he could see the flash of her white teeth.
“Beast! Beast!”
He began swimming, still looking up at her. It was a hundred yards down the slow-going current to the beach of shale where he could climb out, and a half of that distance she followed him, laughing and taunting him, and flinging down sticks and pebbles. He noted that none of the sticks or stones was large enough to hurt him. When at last his feet touched bottom, she was gone.
Swiftly Nepeese ran back over the trail, and almost into Pierrot’s arms. She was panting and laughing when for a moment she stopped.
“I have given him the answer, Nootawe! He is in the pool!”
Into the balsams she disappeared like a bird. Pierrot made no effort to stop her or to follow.
“Tonnerre de Dieu!” he chuckled—and cut straight across for the other trail.
Nepeese was out of breath when she reached the cabin. Baree, fastened to a table-leg by ababichethong, heard her pause for a moment at the door. Then she entered and came straight to him. During the half-hour of her absence Baree had scarcely moved. That half-hour, and the few minutes that had preceded it, had made tremendous impressions upon him. Nature, heredity, and instinct were at work, clashing and readjusting, impinging on him a new intelligence—the beginning of a new understanding. A swift and savage impulse had made him leap at Bush McTaggart when the Factor put his hand on the Willow’s head. It was not reason. It was a hearkening back of the dog to that day long ago when Kazan, his father, had killed the man-brute in the tent, the man-brute who had dared to attempt the sacrilege of Thorpe’s wife, whom Kazan worshipped. It was the dog—and woman.
And here again it was the woman. She had called to the great hidden passion that was in Baree and that had come to him from Kazan. Of all the living things in the world, he knew that he must not hurt this creature that appeared to him through the door. He trembled as she knelt before him again, and up through the years came the wild and glorious surge of Kazan’s blood, overwhelming the wolf, submerging the savagery of his birth—and with his head flat on the floor he whined softly, andwagged his tail.
Nepeese gave a cry of joy.
“Baree!” she whispered, taking his head in her hands. “Baree!”
Her touch thrilled him. It sent little throbs through his body, a tremulous quivering which she could feel and which deepened the glow in her eyes. Gently her hand stroked his head and his back. It seemed to Nepeese that he did not breathe. Under the caress of her hand his eyes closed. In another moment she was talking to him, and at the sound of her voice his eyes shot open.
“He will come here—that beast—and he will kill us,” she was saying. “He will kill you because you bit him, Baree. Ugh, I wish you were bigger, and stronger, so that you could take off his head for me!”
She was untying thebabichefrom about the table-leg, and under her breath she laughed. She was not frightened. It was a tremendous adventure—and she throbbed with exultation at the thought of having beaten the man-beast in her own way. She could see him in the pool struggling and beating about like a great fish. He was just about crawling out of the chasm now—and she laughed again as she caught Baree up under her arm.
“Oh—oopi-nao—but you are heavy!” she gasped. “And yet I must carry you—because I am going to run!”
She hurried outside. Pierrot had not come, and she darted swiftly into the balsams back of the cabin, with Baree hung in the crook of her arm, like a sack filled at both ends and tied in the middle. He felt like that, too. But he still had no inclination to wriggle himself free. Nepeese ran with him until her arm ached. Then she stopped and put him down on his feet, holding to the end of the caribou-skin thong that was tied about his neck. She was prepared for any lunge he might make to escape. She expected that he would make an attempt, and for a few moments she watched him closely, while Baree, with his feet on earth once more, looked about him. And then the Willow spoke to him softly.
“You are not going to run away, Baree.Non, you are going to stay with me, and we will kill that man-beast if he dares do to me again what he did back there.” She flung back the loose hair from about her flushed face, and for a moment she forgot Baree as she thought of that half-minute at the edge of the chasm. He was looking straight up at her when her glance fell on him again. “Non, you are not going to run away—you are going to follow me,” she whispered. “Come.”
Thebabichestring tightened about Baree’s neck as she urged him to follow. It was like another rabbit-snare, and he braced his forefeet and bared his fangs just a little. The Willow did not pull. Fearlessly she put her hand on his head again. From the direction of the cabin came a shout, and at the sound of it she took Baree up under her arm once more.
“Bête noir—bête noir!” she called back tauntingly, but only loud enough to be heard a few yards away. “Go back to Lac Bain—owases—you wild beast!”
Nepeese began to make her way swiftly through the forest. It grew deeper and darker, and there were no trails. Three times in the next half-hour she stopped to put Baree down and rest her arm. Each time she pleaded with him coaxingly to follow her. The second and third times Baree wriggled and wagged his tail, but beyond those demonstrations of his satisfaction at the turn his affairs had taken he would not go. When the string tightened around his neck, he braced himself; once he growled—again he snapped viciously at thebabiche. So Nepeese continued to carry him.
They came at last into an open. It was a tiny meadow in the heart of the forest, not more than three or four times as big as the cabin; underfoot the grass was soft and green, and thick with flowers. Straight through the heart of this little oasis trickled a streamlet across which the Willow jumped with Baree under her arm, and on the edge of the rill was a small wigwam made of freshly cut spruce- and balsam-boughs. Into her diminutivemekewapthe Willow thrust her head to see that things were as she had left them yesterday. Then, with a long breath of relief, she put down her four-legged burden and fastened the end of thebabicheto one of the cut spruce-limbs.
Baree burrowed himself back into the wall of the wigwam, and with head alert—and eyes wide open—watched attentively what happened after this. Not a movement of the Willow escaped him. She was radiant—and happy. Her laugh, sweet and wild as a bird’s trill, set Baree’s heart throbbing with a desire to jump about with her among the flowers.
For a time Nepeese seemed to forget Baree. Her wild blood raced with the joy of her triumph over the Factor from Lac Bain. She saw him again, floundering about in the pool—pictured him at the cabin now, soaked and angry, demanding ofmon pèrewhere she had gone. Andmon père, with a shrug of his shoulders, was telling him that he didn’t know—that probably she had run off into the forest. It did not enter into her head that in tricking Bush McTaggart in that way she had played with dynamite. She did not foresee the peril that in an instant would have stamped the wild flush from her face and curdled the blood in her veins—did not guess that McTaggart had become for her a deadlier menace than ever.
Nepeese knew that he was angry. But what had she to fear?Mon pèrewould be angry, too, if she told him what had happened at the edge of the chasm. But she would not tell him. He might kill the beast from Lac Bain. A factor was great. But Pierrot, her father, was greater. It was an unlimited faith in her, born of her mother. Perhaps even now Pierrot was sending him back to Lac Bain, telling him that his business was there. But she would not return to the cabin to see. She would wait here.Mon pèrewould understand—and he knew where to find her when the beast was gone. But it would have been such fun to throw sticks at him as he went!
After a little Nepeese returned to Baree. She brought him water and gave him a piece of raw fish. For hours they were alone, and with each hour there grew stronger in Baree the desire to follow the girl in every movement she made, to crawl close to her when she sat down, to feel the touch of her dress, of her hand—and hear her voice. But he did not show this desire. He was still a little savage of the forests—a four-footed barbarian born half of a wolf and half of a dog; and he lay still. With Umisk he would have played. With Oohoomisew he would have fought. At Bush McTaggart he would have bared his fangs, and buried them deep when the chance came. But the girl was different. Like the Kazan of old, he had begun to worship. If the Willow had freed Baree, he would not have run away. If she had left him, he would possibly have followed her—at a distance. His eyes were never away from her. He watched her build a small fire and cook a piece of the fish. He watched her eat her dinner. It was quite late in the afternoon when she came and sat down close to him, with her lap full of flowers which she twined in the long, shining braids of her hair. Then, playfully, she began beating Baree with the end of one of these braids. He shrank under the soft blows, and with that low, birdlike laughter in her throat, Nepeese drew his head into her lap where the scatter of flowers lay. She talked to him. Her hand stroked his head. Then it remained still, so near that he wanted to thrust out his warm red tongue and caress it. He breathed in the flower-scented perfume of it—and lay as if dead. It was a glorious moment. Nepeese, looking down on him, could not see that he was breathing.
There came an interruption. It was the snapping of a dry stick. Through the forest Pierrot had come with the stealth of a cat, and when they looked up, he stood at the edge of the open. Baree knew that it was not Bush McTaggart. But it was a man-beast! Instantly his body stiffened under the Willow’s hand. He drew back slowly and cautiously from her lap, and as Pierrot advanced, Baree snarled. The next instant Nepeese had risen and had run to Pierrot. The look in her father’s face alarmed her.
“What has happened,mon père?” she cried.
Pierrot shrugged his shoulders.
“Nothing,ma Nepeese—except that you have roused a thousand devils in the heart of the Factor from Lac Bain, and that——”
He stopped as he saw Baree, and pointed at him.
“Last night when M’sieu the Factor caught him in a snare, he bit M’sieu’s hand. M’sieu’s hand is swollen twice its size, and I can see his blood turning black. It ispechipoo.”
“Pechipoo!” gasped Nepeese.
She looked into Pierrot’s eyes. They were dark, and filled with a sinister gleam—a flash of exultation, she thought.
“Yes, it is the blood-poison,” said Pierrot. A gleam of cunning shot into his eyes as he looked over his shoulder, and nodded. “I have hidden the medicine—and told him there is no time to lose in getting back to Lac Bain. And he is afraid—that devil! He is waiting. With that blackening hand, he is afraid to start back alone—and so I go with him. And—listen,ma Nepeese. We will be away by sundown, and there is something you must know before I go.”
Baree saw them there, close together in the shadows thrown by the tall spruce trees. He heard the low murmur of their voices—chiefly of Pierrot’s, and at last he saw Nepeese put her two arms up around the man-beast’s neck, and then Pierrot went away again into the forest. He thought that the Willow would never turn her face toward him after that. For a long time she stood looking in the direction which Pierrot had taken. And when after a time she turned and came back to Baree, she did not look like the Nepeese who had been twining flowers in her hair. The laughter was gone from her face and eyes. She knelt down beside him and with sudden fierceness she cried:
“It ispechipoo, Baree! It was you—you—who put the poison in his blood. And I hope he dies! For I am afraid—afraid!”
She shivered.
Perhaps it was in this moment that the Great Spirit of things meant Baree to understand—that at last it was given him to comprehend that his day had dawned, that the rising and the setting of his sun no longer existed in the sky but in this girl whose hand rested on his head. He whined softly, and inch by inch he dragged himself nearer to her until again his head rested in the hollow of her lap.
CHAPTER XV
For a long time after Pierrot left them the Willow did not move from where she had seated herself beside Baree. It was at last the deepening shadows and a near rumble in the sky that roused her from the fear of the things Pierrot had told her. When she looked up, black clouds were massing slowly over the open space above the spruce-tops. Darkness was falling. In the whisper of the wind and the dead stillness of the thickening gloom there was the sullen brewing of storm. To-night there would be no glorious sunset. There would be no twilight hour in which to follow the trail, no moon, no stars—and unless Pierrot and the Factor were already on their way, they would not start in the face of the pitch blackness that would soon shroud the land.
Nepeese shivered and rose to her feet. For the first time Baree got up, and he stood close at her side. Above them a lightning-flash cut the clouds like a knife of fire, followed in an instant by a terrific crash of thunder. Baree shrank back as if struck a blow. He would have slunk into the shelter of the brush wall of the wigwam, but there was something about the Willow as he looked at her which gave him confidence. The thunder crashed again. But he retreated no farther. His eyes were fixed on Nepeese.
She stood straight and slim in that gathering gloom riven by the lightning, her beautiful head thrown back, her lips parted, and her eyes glowing with an almost eager anticipation—a sculptured goddess welcoming with bated breath the onrushing forces of the heavens. Perhaps it was because she was born on a night of storm. Many times Pierrot and the dead princess mother had told her that—how on the night she had come into the world the crash of thunder and the flare of lightning had made the hours an inferno, how the streams had burst over their banks and the stems of ten thousand forest trees had snapped in its fury—and the beat of the deluge on their cabin roof had drowned the sound of her mother’s pain, and of her own first babyish cries.
On that night, it may be, the Spirit of Storm was born in Nepeese. She loved to face it, as she was facing it now. It made her forget all things but the splendid might of nature; her half-wild soul thrilled to the crash and fire of it; often she had reached up her bare arms and laughed with joy as the deluge burst about her. Even now she might have stood there in the little open until the rain fell, if a whine from Baree had not turned her. As the first big drops struck with the dull thud of leaden bullets about them, she went with him into the balsam shelter.
Once before Baree had passed through a night of terrible storm—the night he had hidden himself under a root and saw the tree riven by lightning; but now he had company, and the warmth and soft pressure of the Willow’s hand on his head and neck filled him with a strange courage. He growled softly at the crashing thunder. He wanted to snap at the lightning-flashes. Under her hand Nepeese felt the stiffening of his body, and in a moment of uncanny stillness she heard the sharp, uneasy click of his teeth. Then the rain fell.
It was not like other rains Baree had known. It was an inundation sweeping down out of the blackness of the skies. Within five minutes the interior of the balsam shelter was a shower-bath—half an hour of that torrential downpour, and Nepeese was soaked to the skin. The water ran in little rivulets down her back and breast; it trickled in tiny streams from her drenched braids and dropped from her long lashes, and the blanket under her was wet as a mop. To Baree it was almost as bad as his near-drowning in the stream after his fight with Papayuchisew, and he snuggled closer and closer under the sheltering arm of the Willow. It seemed an interminable time before the thunder rolled far to the east, and the lightning died away into distant and intermittent flashings. Even after that the rain fell for another hour. Then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
With a laughing gasp Nepeese rose to her feet. The water gurgled in her moccasins as she walked out into the open. She paid no attention to Baree—and he followed her. Across the open in the treetops the last of the storm-clouds were drifting away. A star shone—then another; and the Willow stood watching them as they appeared until there were so many she could not count. It was no longer black. A wonderful starlight flooded the open after the inky gloom of the storm.
Nepeese looked down and saw Baree. He was standing clear and unleashed, with freedom on all sides of him. Yet he did not run. He was waiting, wet as a water-rat, with his eyes on her expectantly. Nepeese made a movement toward him, and hesitated.
“No, you will not run away, Baree. I will leave you free. And now we must have a fire!”
A fire! Any one but Pierrot might have said that she was crazy. Not a stem or twig in the forest that was not dripping! They could hear the trickle of running water all about them.
“A fire,” she said again. “Let us hunt for thewuskwi, Baree.”
With her wet clothes clinging to her tightly, she was like a slim shadow as she crossed the soggy open and buried herself among the forest trees. Baree still followed. She went straight to a birch-tree that she had located that day and began tearing off the loose bark. An armful of this bark she carried close to the wigwam, and on it she heaped load after load of wet wood until she had a great pile. From a bottle in the wigwam she secured a dry match, and at the first touch of its tiny flame the birch-bark flared up like paper soaked in oil. Half an hour later the Willow’s fire—if there had been no forest walls to hide it—could have been seen at the cabin a mile away. Not until it was blazing a dozen feet into the air did she cease putting wood on it. Then she drove sticks into the soft ground and over these sticks stretched the blanket out to dry. After that she began to undress.
The rain had cooled the air, and the tonic of it—laden with the breath of the balsam and spruce—set the Willow’s blood dancing in her veins. She forgot the discomfort of the deluge. She forgot the Factor from Lac Bain, and what Pierrot had told her. After all, she was a bird of the forests, wild with the sweet wildness of the flowers under her bare feet—and in the glory of these wonderful hours that had followed the storm she could see nothing and think of nothing that might harm her. She danced about Baree, tossing her sea of hair about her, her naked body shimmering in and out of it, her eyes aglow, her lips laughing in her unreasoning happiness—the happiness of being alive, of drinking into her lungs the perfumed air of the forest, of seeing the stars and the wonderful sky above her. She stopped before Baree, and cried laughingly at him, holding out her arms:
“Ahe, Baree—if you could only throw off your skin as easily as I have thrown off my clothes!”
She drew a deep breath, and her eyes shone with a sudden inspiration. Slowly her mouth formed into a round red O, and leaning still nearer to Baree, she whispered:
“It will be deep—and sweet to-night.Ninga—yes—we will go!”
She called to him softly as she slipped on her wet moccasins and followed the creek into the forest. A hundred yards from the open she came to the edge of a pool. It was deep and full to-night, three times as big as it had been before the storm. She could hear the gurgle and inrush of water. On its ruffled surface the stars shone. For a moment or two she stood poised on a rock with the cool depths half a dozen feet below her. Then she flung back her hair and shot like a slim white arrow through the starlight.
Baree saw her go. He heard the plunge of her body. For half an hour he lay flat and still, close to the edge of the pool, and watched her. Sometimes she was just under him, floating silently, her hair forming a cloud darker than the water about her; again she was cutting over the surface almost as swiftly as the otters he had seen—and then with a sudden plunge she would disappear, and Baree’s heart would quicken its pulse as he waited for her. Once she was gone a long time. He whined. He knew she was not like the beaver and the otter, and he was filled with an immense relief when she came up.
So their first night passed—storm, the cool, deep pool, the big fire; and later, when the Willow’s clothes and the blanket had dried, a few hours’ sleep. At dawn they returned to the cabin. It was a cautious approach. There was no smoke coming from the chimney. The door was closed. Pierrot and Bush McTaggart were gone.
CHAPTER XVI
It was the beginning of August—the Flying-up Moon—when Pierrot returned from Lac Bain, and in three days more it would be the Willow’s seventeenth birthday. He brought back with him many things for Nepeese—ribbons for her hair, real shoes, which she wore at times like the two Englishwomen at Nelson House, and chief glory of all, some wonderful red cloth for a dress. In the three winters she had spent at the Mission these women had made much of Nepeese. They had taught her to sew as well as to spell and read and pray, and at times there came to the Willow a compelling desire to do as they did.
So for three days Nepeese worked hard on her new dress and on her birthday she stood before Pierrot in a fashion that took his breath away. She had piled her hair in great glowing masses and coils on the crown of her head, as Yvonne, the younger of the Englishwomen, had taught her, and in the rich jet of it had half buried a vivid sprig of the crimson fire-flower. Under this, and the glow in her eyes, and the red flush of her lips and cheeks came the wonderful red dress, fitted to the slim and sinuous beauty of her form—as the style had been two winters ago at Nelson House. And under the dress, which reached just below the knees—Nepeese had quite forgotten the proper length, or else her material had run out—came thecoup de maîtreof her toilet, real stockings and the wonderful shoes with high heels! She was a vision before which the gods of the forests might have felt their hearts stop beating. Pierrot turned her round and round without a word, but smiling; but when she left him, followed by Baree, and limping a little in the tightness of her shoes, the smile faded from his face, leaving it cold and staring.
“Mon Dieu,” he whispered to himself in French, with a thought that was like a sharp stab at his heart, “she is not of her mother’s blood—non. It is French. She is—yes—like an angel.”
There was a change in Pierrot. During the three days of her dressmaking Nepeese had been quite too excited to notice this change, and Pierrot had tried to keep it from her. He had been away ten days on the trip to Lac Bain, and he brought back to Nepeese the joyous news that M’sieu McTaggart was very sick withpechipoo—the blood-poison—news that made the Willow clap her hands and laugh happily. But he knew that the Factor would get well, and that he would come again to their cabin on the Gray Loon. And when next time he came——
It was when he was thinking of this that his face grew cold and hard, and his eyes burned. And he was thinking of it on this her birthday, even as her laughter floated to him like a song.Dieu, in spite of her seventeen years, she was nothing but a child—a baby! She could not guess his horrible visions. And the dread of awakening her for all time from that beautiful childhood kept him from telling her the whole truth so that she might have understood fully and completely.Non, it should not be that. His soul beat with a great and gentle love. He, Pierrot Du Quesne, would do the watching. And she should laugh and sing and play—and have no share in the black forebodings that had come to spoil his life.
On this day there came up from the south MacDonald, the government map-maker. He was gray and grizzled, with a great, free laugh and a clean heart. Two days he remained with Pierrot. He told Nepeese of his daughters at home, of their mother, whom he worshipped more than anything else on earth—and before he went on in his quest of the last timber-line of Banksian pine, he took pictures of the Willow as he had first seen her on her birthday: her hair piled in glossy coils and masses, her red dress, the high-heeled shoes. He carried the negatives on with him, promising Pierrot that he would get a picture back in some way. Thus fate works in its strange and apparently innocent ways as it spins its webs of tragedy.
For many weeks after this there followed tranquil days on the Gray Loon. They were wonderful days for Baree. At first he was suspicious of Pierrot. After a little he tolerated him, and at last accepted him as a part of the cabin—and Nepeese. It was the Willow whose shadow he became. Pierrot noted the attachment with the deepest satisfaction.
“Ah, in a few months more, if he should leap at the throat of M’sieu the Factor,” he said to himself one day.
In September, when he was six months old, Baree was almost as large as Gray Wolf—big-boned, long-fanged, with a deep chest, and jaws that could already crack a bone as if it were a stick. He was with Nepeese whenever and wherever she moved. They swam together in the two pools—the pool in the forest and the pool between the chasm walls. At first it alarmed Baree to see Nepeese dive from the rock wall over which she had pushed McTaggart, but at the end of a month she had taught him to plunge after her through that twenty feet of space.
It was late in August when Baree saw the first of his kind outside of Kazan and Gray Wolf. During the summer Pierrot allowed his dogs to run at large on a small island in the centre of a lake two or three miles away, and twice a week he netted fish for them. On one of these trips Nepeese accompanied him and took Baree with her. Pierrot carried his long caribou-gut whip. He expected a fight. But there was none. Baree joined the pack in their rush for fish, and ate with them. This pleased Pierrot more than ever.
“He will make a great sledge-dog,” he chuckled. “It is best to leave him for a week with the pack,ma Nepeese.”
Reluctantly Nepeese gave her consent. While the dogs were still at their fish, they started homeward. Their canoe had stolen well out before Baree discovered the trick they had played on him. Instantly he leaped into the water and swam after them—and the Willow helped him into the canoe.
Early in September a passing Indian brought Pierrot word of Bush McTaggart. The Factor had been very sick. He had almost died from the blood-poison, but he was well now. With the first exhilarating tang of autumn in the air a new dread oppressed Pierrot. But at present he said nothing of what was in his mind to Nepeese. The Willow had almost forgotten the Factor from Lac Bain, for the glory and thrill of wilderness autumn was in her blood. She went on long trips with Pierrot, helping him to blaze out the new trap-lines that would be used when the first snows came, and on these journeys she was always accompanied by Baree.
Most of Nepeese’s spare hours she spent in training him for the sledge. She began with ababichestring and a stick. It was a whole day before she could induce Baree to drag this stick without turning at every other step to snap and growl at it. Then she fastened another length ofbabicheto him, and made him drag two sticks. Thus little by little she trained him to the sledge-harness, until at the end of a fortnight he was tugging heroically at anything she had a mind to fasten him to. Pierrot brought home two of the dogs from the island, and Baree was put into training with these, and helped to drag the empty sledge. Nepeese was delighted. On the day the first light snow fell she clapped her hands and cried to Pierrot:
“By mid-winter I will have him the finest dog in the pack,mon père!”
This was the time for Pierrot to say what was in his mind. He smiled.Diantre—would not that beast the Factor fall into the very devil of a rage when he found how he had been cheated! And yet——
He tried to make his voice quiet and commonplace.
“I am going to send you down to the school at Nelson House again this winter,ma chérie,” he said. “Baree will help draw you down on the first good snow.”
The Willow was tying a knot in Baree’sbabiche, and she rose slowly to her feet and looked at Pierrot. Her eyes were big and dark and steady.
“I am not going,mon père!”
The Willow rose slowly to her feet and looked at Pierrot. Her eyes were big and dark and steady. “I am not going,mon père!”
The Willow rose slowly to her feet and looked at Pierrot. Her eyes were big and dark and steady. “I am not going,mon père!”
The Willow rose slowly to her feet and looked at Pierrot. Her eyes were big and dark and steady. “I am not going,mon père!”
It was the first time Nepeese had ever said that to Pierrot—in just that way. It thrilled him. And he could scarcely face the look in her eyes. He was not good at bluffing. She saw what was in his face; it seemed to him that she was reading what was in his mind, and that she grew a little taller as she stood there. Certainly her breath came quicker, and he could see the throb of her breast. Nepeese did not wait for him to gather speech.
“I am not going!” she repeated with even greater finality, and bent again over Baree.
With a shrug of his shoulders Pierrot watched her. After all, was he not glad? Would his heart not have turned sick if she had been happy at the thought of leaving him? He moved to her side and with great gentleness laid a hand on her glossy head. Up from under it the Willow smiled at him. Between them they heard the click of Baree’s jaws as he rested his muzzle on the Willow’s arm. For the first time in weeks the world seemed suddenly filled with sunshine for Pierrot. When he went back to the cabin he held his head higher. Nepeese would not leave him! He laughed softly. He rubbed his hands together. His fear of the Factor from Lac Bain was gone. From the cabin door he looked back at Nepeese and Baree.
“The Saints be blessed!” he murmured. “Now—now—it is Pierrot Du Quesne who knows what to do!”
CHAPTER XVII
Back to Lac Bain, late in September, came MacDonald the map-maker. For ten days Gregson, the investigating agent, had been Bush McTaggart’s guest at the post, and twice in that time it had come into Marie’s mind to creep upon him while he slept and kill him. The Factor himself paid little attention to her now, a fact which would have made her happy if it had not been for Gregson. He was enraptured with the wild, sinuous beauty of the Cree girl, and McTaggart, without jealousy, encouraged him. He was tired of Marie.
McTaggart told Gregson this. He wanted to get rid of her, and if he—Gregson—could possibly take her on with him it would be a great favour. He explained why. A little later, when the deep snows came, he was going to bring the daughter of Pierrot Du Quesne to the Post. In the rottenness of their brotherhood he told of his visit, of the manner of his reception, and of the incident at the chasm. In spite of all this, he assured Gregson. Pierrot’s girl would soon be at Lac Bain.
It was at this time that MacDonald came. He remained only one night, and without knowing that he was adding fuel to a fire already dangerously blazing, he gave the photograph he had taken of Nepeese to the Factor. It was a splendid picture.
“If you can get it down to that girl some day I’ll be mightily obliged,” he said to McTaggart. “I promised her one. Her father’s name is Du Quesne—Pierrot Du Quesne. You probably know them. And the girl——”
His blood warmed as he described to McTaggart how beautiful she was that day in her red dress, which had taken black in the photograph. He did not guess how near the boiling point McTaggart’s blood was.
The next day MacDonald started for Norway House. McTaggart did not show Gregson the picture. He kept it to himself, and at night, under the glow of his lamp, he looked at it with thoughts that filled him with a growing resolution. There was but one way. The scheme had been in his mind for weeks—and the picture determined him. He dared not whisper his secret even to Gregson. But it was the one way. It would give him Nepeese. Only—he must wait for the deep snows, the mid-winter snows. They buried their tragedies deepest.
McTaggart was glad when Gregson followed the map-maker to Norway House. Out of courtesy he accompanied him a day’s journey on his way. When he returned to the Post, Marie was gone. He was glad. He sent off a runner with a load of presents for her people, and the message: “Don’t beat her. Keep her. She is free.”
Along with the bustle and stir of the beginning of the trapping season McTaggart began to prepare his house for the coming of Nepeese. He knew what she liked in the way of cleanliness and a few other things. He had the log walls painted white with the lead and oil that were intended for his York boats. Certain partitions were torn down, and new ones were built; the Indian wife of his chief runner made curtains for the windows, and he confiscated a small phonograph that should have gone on to Lac la Biche. He had no doubts, and he counted the days as they passed.
Down on the Gray Loon Pierrot and Nepeese were busy at many things, so busy that at times Pierrot’s fears of the Factor at Lac Bain were forgotten, and they went out of the Willow’s mind entirely. It was the Red Moon, and it thrilled with the anticipation and excitement of the winter hunt. Nepeese carefully dipped a hundred traps in boiling caribou-fat mixed with beaver-grease, while Pierrot made fresh deadfalls ready for setting on his trails. When he was gone more than a day from the cabin, she was always with him.
But at the cabin there was much to do, for Pierrot, like all his Northern brotherhood, did not begin to prepare until the keen tang of autumn was in the air. There were snowshoes to be rewebbed with newbabiche, there was wood to be cut in readiness for the winter storms; the cabin had to be banked, a new harness made, skinning-knives sharpened and winter moccasins to be manufactured—a hundred and one affairs to be attended to, even to the repairing of the meat rack at the back of the cabin, where, from the beginning of cold weather until the end, would hang the haunches of deer, caribou, and moose for the family larder and, when fish were scarce, the dogs’ rations.
In the bustle of all this Nepeese was compelled to give less attention to Baree than during the preceding weeks. They did not play so much; they no longer swam, for with the mornings there was deep frost on the ground, and the water was turning icy cold: they no longer wandered deep in the forest after flowers and berries. For hours at a time Baree would now lie at the Willow’s feet, watching her slender fingers as they weaved swiftly in and out with her snowshoebabiche; and now and then Nepeese would pause to lean over and put her hand on his head, and talk to him for a moment—sometimes in her soft Cree, sometimes in English or her father’s French.
It was the Willow’s voice which Baree had learned to understand, and the movement of her lips, her gesture, the poise of her body, the changing moods which brought shadow or sunlight into her face. He knew what it meant when she smiled; he shook himself, and often jumped about her in sympathetic rejoicing, when she laughed; her happiness was a part of him, a stern word from her was worse than a blow. Twice Pierrot had struck him, and twice Baree had sprang back and faced him with bared fangs and an angry snarl, the crest along his back standing up like a brush. Had one of the other dogs done this, Pierrot would have half killed him. It would have been mutiny, and the man must be master. But Baree was always safe. A touch of the Willow’s hand, a word from her lips, and the crest slowly settled and the snarl went out of his throat.
Pierrot was not at all displeased.
“Dieu.I will never go so far as to try and whip that out of him,” he told himself. “He is a barbarian—a wild beast—and her slave. For her he would kill!”
So it came, through Pierrot himself—and without telling his reason for it—that Baree did not become a sledge-dog. He was allowed his freedom, and was never tied, like the others. Nepeese was glad, but did not guess the thought that was in Pierrot’s mind. To himself Pierrot chuckled. She would never know why he kept Baree always suspicious of him, even to the point of hating him. It required considerable skill and cunning on his part. With himself he reasoned: “If I make him hate me, he will hate all men. Mey-oo! That is good.”
So he looked into the future—for Nepeese.
Now the tonic-filled days and cold, frosty nights of the Red Moon brought about the big change in Baree. It was inevitable. Pierrot knew that it would come, and the first night that Baree settled back on his haunches and howled up at the Red Moon, Pierrot prepared Nepeese for it.
“He is a wild dog,Ma Nepeese,” he said to her. “He is half wolf, and the Call will come to him strong. He will go into the forests. He will disappear at times. But we must not fasten him. He will come back.Ka, he will come back!” And he rubbed his hands in the moon-glow until his knuckles cracked.
The Call came to Baree like a thief entering slowly and cautiously into a forbidden place. He did not understand it at first. It made him nervous and uneasy, so restless that Nepeese frequently heard him whine softly in his sleep. He was waiting for something. What was it? Pierrot knew, and smiled in his inscrutable way.
And then it came. It was night, a glorious night filled with moon and stars, under which the earth was whitening with a film of frost, when they heard the first hunt-call of the wolves. Now and then during the summer there had come the lone wolf-howl, but this was the tonguing of the pack; and as it floated through the vast silence and mystery of the night, a song of savagery that had come with each Red Moon down through unending ages, Pierrot knew that at last had come that for which Baree had been waiting.
In an instant Baree had sensed it. His muscles grew taut as pieces of stretched rope as he stood up in the moonlight, facing the direction from which floated the mystery and thrill of the sound. They could hear him whining softly; and Pierrot, bending down so that he caught the light of the night properly, could see him trembling.
“It isMee-Koo!” he said in a whisper to Nepeese.
That was it, the call of the blood that was running swift in Baree’s veins—not alone the call of his species, but the call of Kazan and Gray Wolf and of his forbears for generations unnumbered. It was the voice of his people. So Pierrot had whispered, and he was right. In the golden night the Willow was waiting, for it was she who had gambled most, and it was she who must lose or win. She uttered no sound, replied not to the low voice of Pierrot, but held her breath and watched Baree as he slowly faded away, step by step, in the shadows. In a few moments more he was gone. It was then that she stood straight, and flung back her head, with eyes that glowed in rivalry with the stars.
“Baree!” she called. “Baree! Baree! Baree!”
He must have been near the edge of the forest, for she had drawn a slow, waiting breath or two before he was back at her side. But he had come, straight as an arrow, and he whined up into her face. Nepeese put her hands to his head.
“You are right,mon père,” she said. “He will go to the wolves, but he will come back. He will never leave me for long.” With one hand still on Baree’s head, she pointed with the other into the pitlike blackness of the forest. “Go to them, Baree!” she whispered. “But you must come back. You must.Cheamao!”
With Pierrot she went into the cabin; the door closed behind them, and Baree was alone. There was a long silence. In it he could hear the soft night sounds: the clinking of the chains to which the dogs were fastened, the restless movement of their bodies, the throbbing whir of a pair of wings, the breath of the night itself. For to him this night, even in its stillness, seemed alive. Again he went into it, and close to the forest once more he stopped to listen. The wind had turned, and on it rode the wailing, blood-thrilling cry of the pack. Far off to the west a lone wolf turned his muzzle to the sky and answered that gathering-call of his clan; and then out of the east came a voice, so far beyond the cabin that it was like an echo dying away in the vastness of the night.
A choking note gathered in Baree’s throat. He threw up his head. Straight above him was the Red Moon, inviting him to the thrill and mystery of the open world. The sound grew in his throat, and slowly it rose in volume until his answer was rising to the stars. In their cabin Pierrot and the Willow heard it. Pierrot shrugged his shoulders.
“He is gone,” he said.
“Oui, he is gone,mon père,” replied Nepeese, peering through the window.
CHAPTER XVIII
No longer, as in the days of old, did the darkness of the forests hold a fear for Baree. This night his hunt-cry had risen to the stars and the moon, and in that cry he had, for the first time, sent forth his defiance of night and space, his warning to all the wild, and his acceptance of the Brotherhood. In that cry, and the answers that came back to him, he sensed a new power—the final triumph of nature in impinging on him the fact that the forests and the creatures they held were no longer to be feared, but that all things feared him. Off there, beyond the pale of the cabin and the influence of Nepeese, were all the things that the wolf-blood in him found now most desirable: companionship of his kind, the lure of adventure, the red, sweet blood of the chase—and matehood. This last, after all, was the dominant mystery that was urging him, and yet least of all did he understand it.
He ran straight into the darkness to the north and west, slinking low under the bushes, his tail drooping, his ears aslant—the wolf as the wolf runs on the night trail. The pack had swung due north, and was travelling faster than he, so that at the end of half an hour he could no longer hear it. But the lone wolf-howl to the west was nearer, and three times Baree gave answer to it.
At the end of an hour he heard the pack again, swinging southward. Pierrot would easily have understood. Their quarry had found safety beyond water, or in a lake, and themuhekunswere on a fresh trail. By this time not more than a quarter of a mile of the forest separated Baree from the lone wolf, but the lone wolf was also an old wolf, and with the directness and precision of long experience, he swerved in the direction of the hunters, compassing his trail so that he was heading for a point half or three quarters of a mile in advance of the pack.
This was a trick of the Brotherhood which Baree had yet to learn; and the result of his ignorance, and lack of skill, was that twice within the next half-hour he found himself near to the pack without being able to join it. Then came a long and final silence. The pack had pulled down its kill, and in their feasting they made no sound.
The rest of the night Baree wandered alone, or at least until the moon was well on the wane. He was a long way from the cabin, and his trail had been an uncertain and twisting one, but he was no longer possessed with the discomforting sensation of being lost. The last two or three months had been developing strongly in him the sense of orientation, that “sixth sense” which guides the pigeon unerringly on its way and takes a bear straight as a bird might fly to its last year’s denning-place.
Baree had not forgotten Nepeese. A dozen times he turned his head back and whined, and always he picked out accurately the direction in which the cabin lay. But he did not turn back. As the night lengthened, his search for that mysterious something which he had not found continued. His hunger, even with the fading-out of the moon and the coming of the gray dawn, was not sufficiently keen to make him hunt for food.
It was cold, and it seemed colder when the glow of the moon and stars died out. Under his padded feet, especially in the open spaces, was a thick white frost in which he left clearly at times the imprint of his toes and claws. He had travelled steadily for hours, a great many miles in all, and he was tired when the first light of the day came. And then there came the time when, with a sudden sharp click of his jaws, he stopped like a shot in his tracks.
At last it had come—the meeting with that for which he had been seeking. It was in an open, lighted by the cold dawn—a tiny amphitheatre that lay on the side of a ridge, facing the east. With her head toward him, and waiting for him as he came out of the shadows, his scent strong in her keen nose, stood Maheegun, the young wolf. Baree had not smelled her, but he saw her directly he came out of the rim of young balsams that fringed the open. It was then that he stopped, and for a full minute neither of them moved a muscle or seemed to breathe.
There was not a fortnight’s difference in their age and yet Maheegun was much the smaller of the two; her body was as long, but she was slimmer; she stood on slender legs that were almost like the legs of a fox, and the curve of her back was that of a slightly bent bow, a sign of swiftness almost equal to the wind. She stood poised for flight even as Baree advanced his first step toward her, and then very slowly her body relaxed, and in a direct ratio as he drew nearer her ears lost their alertness and dropped aslant.
Baree whined. His own ears were up, his head alert, his tail aloft and bushy. Cleverness, if not strategy, had already become a part of his masculine superiority, and he did not immediately press the affair. He was within five feet of Maheegun when he casually turned away from her and faced the east, where a faint pencilling of red and gold was heralding the day. For a few moments he sniffed and looked around and pointed the wind with much seriousness, as though impressing on his fair acquaintance—as many a two-legged animal has done before him—his tremendous importance in the world at large.
And Maheegun was properly impressed. Baree’s bluff worked as beautifully as the bluffs of the two-legged animals. He sniffed the air with such thrilling and suspicious zeal that Maheegun’s ears sprang alert, and she sniffed it with him; he turned his head from point to point so sharply and alertly that her feminine curiosity, if not anxiety, made her turn her own head in questioning conjunction; and when he whined, as though in the air he had caught a mystery which she could not possibly understand, a responsive note gathered in her throat, but smothered and low as a woman’s exclamation when she is not quite sure whether she should interrupt her lord or not. At this sound, which Baree’s sharp ears caught, he swung up to her with a light and mincing step, and in another moment they were smelling noses.
When the sun rose, half an hour later, it found them still in the small open on the side of the ridge, with a deep fringe of forest under them, and beyond that a wide, timbered plain which looked like a ghostly shroud in its mantle of frost. Up over this came the first red glow of the day, filling the open with a warmth that grew more and more comfortable as the sun crept higher.
Neither Baree nor Maheegun were inclined to move for a while, and for an hour or two they lay basking in a cup of the slope, looking down with questing and wide-awake eyes upon the wooded plain that stretched away under them like a great sea.
Maheegun, too, had sought the hunt-pack, and like Baree had failed to catch it. They were tired, a little discouraged for the time, and hungry—but still alive with the fine thrill of anticipation, and restlessly sensitive to the new and mysterious consciousness of companionship. Half a dozen times Baree got up and nosed about Maheegun as she lay in the sun, whining to her softly and touching her soft coat with his muzzle, but for a long time she paid little attention to him. At last she followed him. All that day they wandered and rested together. Once more the night came.
It was without moon or stars. Gray masses of clouds swept slowly down out of the north and east, and in the treetops there was scarcely a whisper of wind as night gathered in. The snow began to fall at dusk, thickly, heavily, without a breath of sound. It was not cold, but it was still—so still that Baree and Maheegun travelled only a few yards at a time, and then stopped to listen. In this way all the night-prowlers of the forest were travelling, if they were moving at all. It was the first of the Big Snow.
To the flesh-eating wild things of the forests, clawed and winged, the Big Snow was the beginning of the winter carnival of slaughter and feasting, of wild adventure in the long nights, of merciless warfare on the frozen trails. The days of breeding, of motherhood—the peace of spring and summer—were over; out of the sky came the wakening of the Northland, the call of all flesh-eating creatures to the long hunt, and in the first thrill of it living things were moving but little this night, and that watchfully and with suspicion. Youth made it all new to Baree and Maheegun; their blood ran swiftly; their feet fell softly; their ears were attuned to catch the slightest sounds.
In this first of the Big Snow they felt the exciting pulse of a new life. It lured them on. It invited them to adventure into the white mystery of the silent storm; and inspired by that restlessness of youth and its desires, they went on.
The snow grew deeper under their feet. In the open spaces they waded through it to their knees, and it continued to fall in a vast white cloud that descended steadily out of the sky. It was near midnight when it stopped. The clouds drifted away from under the stars and the moon, and for a long time Baree and Maheegun stood without moving, looking down from the bald crest of a ridge upon a wonderful world.
Never had they seen so far, except in the light of day. Under them was a plain. They could see its forests, lone trees that stood up like shadows out of the snow, a stream—still unfrozen—shimmering like glass with the flicker of firelight on it. Toward this stream Baree led the way. He no longer thought of Nepeese, and he whined with pent-up happiness as he stopped halfway down and turned to muzzle Maheegun. He wanted to roll in the snow and frisk about with his companion; he wanted to bark, to put up his head and howl as he had howled at the Red Moon back at the cabin.
Something held him from doing these things. Perhaps it was Maheegun’s demeanour. She accepted his attentions rigidly. Once or twice she had seemed almost frightened; twice Baree had heard the sharp clicking of her teeth. The previous night, and all through to-night’s storm, their companionship had grown more intimate, but now there was taking its place a mysterious aloofness on the part of Maheegun. Pierrot could have explained. With the white snow under and about him, and the luminous moon and stars above him, Baree, like the night, had undergone a transformation which even the sunlight of day had not made in him before. His coat was like polished jet. Every hair in his body glistened black.Black!That was it. And Nature was trying to tell Maheegun that of all the creatures hated by her kind, the creature which they feared and hated most was black. With her it was not experience, but instinct—telling her of the age-old feud between the gray wolf and the black bear. And Baree’s coat, in the moonlight and the snow, was blacker than Wakayoo’s had ever been in the fish-fattening days of May. Until they struck the broad openings of the plain, the young she-wolf had followed Baree without hesitation; now there was a gathering strangeness and indecision in her manner, and twice she stopped and would have let Baree go on without her.
An hour after they entered the plain there came suddenly out of the west the tonguing of the wolf-pack. It was not far distant, probably not more than a mile along the foot of the ridge, and the sharp, quick yapping that followed the first outburst was evidence that the long-fanged hunters had put up sudden game, a caribou or young moose, and were close at its heels. At the voice of her own people Maheegun laid her ears close to her head and was off like an arrow from a bow.
The unexpectedness of her movement and the swiftness of her flight put Baree well behind her in the race over the plain. She was running blindly, favoured by luck. For an interval of perhaps five minutes the pack were so near to their game that they made no sound, and the chase swung full into the face of Maheegun and Baree. The latter was not half a dozen lengths behind the young wolf when a crashing in the brush directly ahead stopped them so sharply that they tore up the snow with their braced forefeet and squat haunches. Ten seconds later a caribou burst through and flashed across an open not more than twenty yards from where they stood. They could hear its swift panting as it disappeared. And then came the pack.
At sight of those swiftly moving gray bodies Baree’s heart leaped for an instant into his throat. He forgot Maheegun, and that she had run away from him. The moon and the stars went out of existence for him. He no longer sensed the chill of the snow under his feet. He was wolf—all wolf. With the warm scent of the caribou in his nostrils, and the passion to kill sweeping through him like fire, he darted after the pack.
Even at that, Maheegun was a bit ahead of him. He did not miss her; in the excitement of his first chase he no longer felt the desire to have her at his side. Very soon he found himself close to the flanks of one of the gray monsters of the pack; half a minute later a new hunter swept in from the bush behind him, and then a second, and after that a third. At times he was running shoulder to shoulder with his new companions; he heard the whining excitement in their throats; the snap of their jaws as they ran—and in the golden moonlight ahead of him the smash of the caribou as it plunged through thickets and over windfalls in its race for life.
It was as if Baree had belonged to the pack always. He had joined it naturally, as other stray wolves had joined it from out of the bush; there had been no ostentation, no welcome such as Maheegun had given him in the open, and no hostility. He belonged with these slim, swift-footed outlaws of the old forests, and his own jaws snapped and his blood ran hot as the smell of the caribou grew heavier, and the sound of its crashing body nearer.
It seemed to him they were almost at its heel when they swept into an open plain, a stretch of barren without a tree or a shrub, brilliant in the light of the stars and moon. Across its unbroken carpet of snow sped the caribou a spare hundred yards ahead of the pack. Now the two leading hunters no longer followed directly in the trail, but shot out at an angle, one to the right and the other to the left of the pursued, and like well-trained soldiers the pack split in halves and spread out fan-shape in the final charge.
The two ends of the fan forged ahead and closed in, until the leaders were running almost abreast of the caribou, with fifty or sixty feet separating them from the pursued. Thus, adroitly and swiftly, with deadly precision, the pack had formed a horseshoe cordon of fangs from which there was but one course of flight—straight ahead. For the caribou to swerve half a degree to the right or left meant death. It was the duty of the leaders to draw in the ends of the Horseshoe now, until one or both of them could make the fatal lunge for the ham-strings. After that it would be a simple matter. The pack would close in over the caribou like an inundation.
Baree had found his place in the lower rim of the horseshoe, so that he was fairly well in the rear when the climax came. The plain made a sudden dip. Straight ahead was the gleam of water—water shimmering softly in the starglow, and the sight of it sent a final great spurt of blood through the caribou’s bursting heart. Forty seconds would tell the story—forty seconds of a last spurt for life, of a final tremendous effort to escape death. Baree felt the sudden thrill of these moments, and he forged ahead with the others in that lower rim of the horseshoe as one of the leading wolves made a lunge for the young bull’s ham-string. It was a clean miss. A second wolf darted in. And this one also missed.
There was no time for others to take their place. From the broken end of the horseshoe Baree heard the caribou’s heavy plunge into water. When Baree joined the pack, a maddened, mouth-frothing, snarling horde, Napamoos, the young bull, was well out in the river and swimming steadily for the opposite shore.