James Oliver Curwood – The Complete Collection

Chapter 24

On the trail, heading for Lac Bain, Bush McTaggart heard that cry and shivered.

It was the smell of smoke, thickening in the air until it stung his nostrils, that drew Baree at last away from the chasm and back to the cabin. There was not much left when he came to the clearing. Where the cabin had been was a red-hot, smoldering mass. For a long time he sat watching it, still waiting and still listening. He no longer felt the effect of the bullet that had stunned him, but his senses were undergoing another change now, as strange and unreal as their struggle against that darkness of near death in the cabin. In a space that had not covered more than an hour the world had twisted itself grotesquely for Baree. That long ago the Willow was sitting before her little mirror in the cabin, talking to him and laughing in her happiness, while he lay in vast contentment on the floor. And now there was no cabin, no Nepeese, no Pierrot. Quietly he struggled to comprehend. It was some time before he moved from under the thick balsams, for already a deep and growing suspicion began to guide his movements. He did not go nearer to the smoldering mass of the cabin, but slinking low, made his way about the circle of the clearing to the dog corral. This took him under the tall spruce. For a full minute he paused here, sniffing at the freshly made mound under its white mantle of snow. When he went on, he slunk still lower, and his ears were flat against his head.

The dog corral was open and empty. McTaggart had seen to that. Again Baree squatted back on his haunches and sent forth the death howl. This time it was for Pierrot. In it there was a different note from that of the howl he had sent forth from the chasm: it was positive, certain. In the chasm his cry had been tempered with doubt--a questioning hope, something that was so almost human that McTaggart had shivered on the trail. But Baree knew what lay in that freshly dug snow-covered grave. A scant three feet of earth could not hide its secret from him. There was death--definite and unequivocal. But for Nepeese he was still hoping and seeking.

Until noon he did not go far from the site of the cabin, but only once did he actually approach and sniff about the black pile of steaming timbers. Again and again he circled the edge of the clearing, keeping just within the bush and timber, sniffing the air and listening. Twice he went hack to the chasm. Late in the afternoon there came to him a sudden impulse that carried him swiftly through the forest. He did not run openly now. Caution, suspicion, and fear had roused in him afresh the instincts of the wolf. With his ears flattened against the side of his head, his tail drooping until the tip of it dragged the snow and his back sagging in the curious, evasive gait of the wolf, he scarcely made himself distinguishable from the shadows of the spruce and balsams.

There was no faltering in the trail Baree made; it was straight as a rope might have been drawn through the forest, and it brought him, early in the dusk, to the open spot where Nepeese had fled with him that day she had pushed McTaggart over the edge of the precipice into the pool. In the place of the balsam shelter of that day there was now a watertight birchbark tepee which Pierrot had helped the Willow to make during the summer. Baree went straight to it and thrust in his head with a low and expectant whine.

There was no answer. It was dark and cold in the tepee. He could make out indistinctly the two blankets that were always in it, the row of big tin boxes in which Nepeese kept their stores, and the stove which Pierrot had improvised out of scraps of iron and heavy tin. But Nepeese was not there. And there was no sign of her outside. The snow was unbroken except by his own trail. It was dark when he returned to the burned cabin. All that night he hung about the deserted dog corral, and all through the night the snow fell steadily, so that by dawn he sank into it to his shoulders when he moved out into the clearing.

But with day the sky had cleared. The sun came up, and the world was almost too dazzling for the eyes. It warmed Baree's blood with new hope and expectation. His brain struggled even more eagerly than yesterday to comprehend. Surely the Willow would be returning soon! He would hear her voice. She would appear suddenly out of the forest. He would receive some signal from her. One of these things, or all of them, must happen. He stopped sharply in his tracks at every sound, and sniffed the air from every point of the wind. He was traveling ceaselessly. His body made deep trails in the snow around and over the huge white mound where the cabin had stood. His tracks led from the corral to the tall spruce, and they were as numerous as the footprints of a wolf pack for half a mile up and down the chasm.

On the afternoon of this day the second strong impulse came to him. It was not reason, and neither was it instinct alone. It was the struggle halfway between, the brute mind righting at its best with the mystery of an intangible thing--something that could not be seen by the eye or heard by the ear. Nepeese was not in the cabin, because there was no cabin. She was not at the tepee. He could find no trace of her in the chasm. She was not with Pierrot under the big spruce.

Therefore, unreasoning but sure, he began to follow the old trap line into the north and west.

CHAPTER 23

No man has ever looked clearly into the mystery of death as it is impressed upon the senses of the northern dog. It comes to him, sometimes, with the wind. Most frequently it must come with the wind, and yet there are ten thousand masters in the northland who will swear that their dogs have given warning of death hours before it actually came; and there are many of these thousands who know from experience that their teams will stop a quarter or half a mile from a strange cabin in which there lies unburied dead.

Yesterday Baree had smelled death, and he knew without process of reasoning that the dead was Pierrot. How he knew this, and why he accepted the fact as inevitable, is one of the mysteries which at times seems to give the direct challenge to those who concede nothing more than instinct to the brute mind. He knew that Pierrot was dead without exactly knowing what death was. But of one thing he was sure: he would never see Pierrot again. He would never hear his voice again; he would never hear again the swish-swish-swish of his snowshoes in the trail ahead, and so on the trap line he did not look for Pierrot. Pierrot was gone forever. But Baree had not yet associated death with Nepeese. He was filled with a great uneasiness. What came to him from out of the chasm had made him tremble with fear and suspense. He sensed the thrill of something strange, of something impending, and yet even as he had given the death howl in the chasm, it must have been for Pierrot. For he believed that Nepeese was alive, and he was now just as sure that he would overtake her on the trap line as he was positive yesterday that he would find her at the birchbark tepee.

Since yesterday morning's breakfast with the Willow, Baree had gone without eating. To appease his hunger meant to hunt, and his mind was too filled with his quest of Nepeese for that. He would have gone hungry all that day, but in the third mile from the cabin he came to a trap in which there was a big snowshoe rabbit. The rabbit was still alive, and he killed it and ate his fill. Until dark he did not miss a trap. In one of them there was a lynx; in another a fishercat. Out on the white surface of a lake he sniffed at a snowy mound under which lay the body of a red fox killed by one of Pierrot's poison baits. Both the lynx and the fishercat were alive, and the steel chains of their traps clanked sharply as they prepared to give Baree battle. But Baree was uninterested. He hurried on, his uneasiness growing as the day darkened and he found no sign of the Willow.

It was a wonderfully clear night after the storm--cold and brilliant, with the shadows standing out as clearly as living things. The third suggestion came to Baree now. He was, like all animals, largely of one idea at a time--a creature with whom all lesser impulses were governed by a single leading impulse. And this impulse, in the glow of the starlit night, was to reach as quickly as possible the first of Pierrot's two cabins on the trap line. There he would find Nepeese!

We won't call the process by which Baree came to this conclusion a process of reasoning. Instinct or reasoning, whatever it was, a fixed and positive faith came to Baree just the same. He began to miss the traps in his haste to cover distance--to reach the cabin. It was twenty-five miles from Pierrot's burned home to the first trap cabin, and Baree had made ten of these by nightfall. The remaining fifteen were the most difficult. In the open spaces the snow was belly-deep and soft. Frequently he plunged through drifts in which for a few moments he was buried. Three times during the early part of the night Baree heard the savage dirge of the wolves. Once it was a wild paean of triumph as the hunters pulled down their kill less than half a mile away in the deep forest. But the voice no longer called to him. It was repellent--a voice of hatred and of treachery. Each time that he heard it he stopped in his tracks and snarled, while his spine stiffened.

At midnight Baree came to the tiny amphitheater in the forest where Pierrot had cut the logs for the first of his trapline cabins. For at least a minute Baree stood at the edge of the clearing, his ears very alert, his eyes bright with hope and expectation, while he sniffed the air. There was no smoke, no sound, no light in the one window of the log shack. His disappointment fell on him even as he stood there. Again he sensed the fact of his aloneness, of the barrenness of his quest. There was a disheartened slouch to his door. He had traveled twenty-five miles, and he was tired.

The snow was drifted deep at the doorway, and here Baree sat down and whined. It was no longer the anxious, questing whine of a few hours ago. Now it voiced hopelessness and a deep despair. For half an hour he sat shivering with his back to the door and his face to the starlit wilderness, as if there still remained the fleeting hope that Nepeese might follow after him over the trail. Then he burrowed himself a hole deep in the snowdrift and passed the remainder of the night in uneasy slumber.

With the first light of day Baree resumed the trail. He was not so alert this morning. There was the disconsolate droop to his tail which the Indians call the Akoosewin--the sign of the sick dog. And Baree was sick--not of body but of soul. The keenness of his hope had died, and he no longer expected to find the Willow. The second cabin at the far end of the trap line drew him on, but it inspired in him none of the enthusiasm with which he had hurried to the first. He traveled slowly and spasmodically, his suspicions of the forests again replacing the excitement of his quest. He approached each of Pierrot's traps and the deadfalls cautiously, and twice he showed his fangs--once at a marten that snapped at him from under a root where it had dragged the trap in which it was caught, and the second time at a big snowy owl that had come to steal bait and was now a prisoner at the end of a steel chain. It may be that Baree thought it was Oohoomisew and that he still remembered vividly the treacherous assault and fierce battle of that night when, as a puppy, he was dragging his sore and wounded body through the mystery and fear of the big timber. For he did more than to show his fangs. He tore the owl into pieces.