Children of the Frost
Page 3
befall him."
Because of Fairfax's instructions in the art of war, the tribesmen did not
hurl themselves forward boldly and with clamor. Instead, there was great
restraint and self-control, and they were content to advance silently,
creeping and crawling from shelter to shelter. By the river bank, and partly
protected by a narrow open space, crouched the Crees and voyageurs.
Their eyes could see nothing, and only in vague ways did their ears hear,
but they felt the thrill of life which ran through the forest, the indistinct,
indefinable movement of an advancing host.
"Damn them," Fairfax muttered. "They've never faced powder, but I
taught them the trick."
Avery Van Brunt laughed, knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and put it
carefully away with the pouch, and loosened the hunting-knife in its
sheath at his hip.
"Wait," he said. "We'll wither the face of the charge and break their
hearts."
"They'll rush scattered if they remember my teaching."
"Let them. Magazine rifles were made to pump. We'll—good! First blood!
Extra tobacco, Loon!"
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Loon, a Cree, had spotted an exposed shoulder and with a stinging bullet
apprised its owner of his discovery.
"If we can tease them into breaking forward,,, Fairfax muttered,—"if we
can only tease them into breaking forward."
Van Brunt saw a head peer from behind a distant tree, and with a quick
shot sent the man sprawling to the ground in a death struggle. Michael
potted a third, and Fairfax and the rest took a hand, firing at every
exposure and into each clump of agitated brush. In crossing one little
swale out of cover, five of the tribesmen remained on their faces, and to
the left, where the covering was sparse, a dozen men were struck. But they
took the punishment with sullen steadiness, coming on cautiously,
deliberately, without haste and without lagging.
Ten minutes later, when they were quite close, all movement was
suspended, the advance ceased abruptly, and the quietness that followed
was portentous, threatening. Only could be seen the green and gold of the
woods and undergrowth, shivering and trembling to the first faint puffs of
the day-wind. The wan white morning sun mottled the earth with long
shadows and streaks of light. A wounded man lifted his head and crawled
painfully out of the swale,Michael following him with his rifle but
forbearing to shoot. A whistle ran along the invisible line from left to
right, and a flight of arrows arched through the air.
"Get ready," Van Brunt commanded, a new metallic note in his voice.
"Now!"
They broke cover simultaneously. The forest heaved into sudden life. A
great yell went up, and the rifles barked back sharp defiance.. Tribesmen
knew their deaths in mid-leap, and as they fell, their brothers surged over
them in a roaring, irresistible wave. In the forefront of the rush, hair flying
and arms swinging free, flashing past the tree-trunks, and leaping the
obstructing logs, came Thom. Fairfax sighted on her and almost pulled
trigger ere he knew her.
"The woman! Don't shoot!" he cried. "See! She is unarmed!"
The Crees never heard, nor Michael and his brother voyageur, nor Van
Brunt, who was keeping one shell continuously in the air. But Thom bore
straight on, unharmed, at the heels of a skin-clad hunter who had veered in
before her from the side. Fairfax emptied his magazine into the men to
right and left of her, and swung his rifle to meet the big hunter. But the
man, seeming to recognize him, swerved suddenly aside and plunged his
spear into the body of Michael. On the moment Thom had one arm passed
around her husband's neck, and twisting half about, with voice and gesture
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was splitting the mass of charging warriors. A score of men hurled past on
either side, and Fairfax, for a brief instant's space, stood looking upon her
and her bronze beauty, thrilling, exulting, stirred to unknown deeps,
visioning strange things, dreaming, immortally dreaming. Snatches and
scraps of old-world philosophies and new-world ethics floated through his
mind, and things wonderfully concrete and wofully incongruous—hunting
scenes, stretches of sombre forest, vastnesses of silent snow, the glittering
of ballroom lights, great galleries and lecture halls, a fleeting shimmer of
glistening testtubes, long rows of book-lined shelves, the throb of
machinery and the roar of traffic, a fragment of forgotten song, faces of
dear women and old chums, a lonely watercourse amid upstanding peaks,
a shattered boat on a pebbly strand, quiet moonlit fields, fat vales, the
smell of hay....
A hunter, struck between the eyes with a rifle-ball, pitched forward
lifeless, and with the momentum of his charge slid along the ground.
Fairfax came back to himself. His comrades, those that lived, had been
swept far back among the trees beyond. He could hear the fierce "Hia!
Hia!" of the hunters as they closed in and cut and thrust with their
weapons of bone and ivory. The cries of the stricken men smote him like
blows. He knew the fight was over, the cause was lost, but all his race
traditions and race loyalty impelled him into the welter that he might die at
least with his kind.
"My man! My man!" Thom cried. "Thou art safe!"
He tried to struggle on, but her dead weight clogged his steps
"There is no need! They are dead, and life be good!"
She held him close around the neck and twined her limbs about his till he
tripped and stumbled, reeled violently to recover footing, tripped again,
and fell backward to the ground. His head struck a jutting root, and he was
half-stunned and could struggle but feebly. In the fall she had heard the
feathered swish of an arrow darting past, and she covered his body with
hers, as with a shield, her arms holding him tightly, her ace and lips
pressed upon his neck.
Then it was that Keen rose up from a tangled thicket a score of feet away.
He looked about him with care. The fight had swept on and the cry of the
last man was dying away. There was no one to see. He fitted an arrow to
the string and glanced at the man and woman. Between her breast and arm
the flesh of the man's side showed white. Keen bent the bow and drew
back the arrow to its head. Twice he did so, calmly and for certainty, and
then drove the bone-barbed missile straight home to the white flesh,
gleaming yet more white in the dark-armed, dark-breasted embrace.
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THE LAW OF LIFE
(First published in McClure's Magazine Vol. 16, March, 1901)
Summary
Old Koskoosh listened greedily. Though his sight had long since faded, his hearing was
still acute, and the slightest sound penetrated to the glimmering intelligence which yet
abode behind the withered forehead, but which no longer gazed forth upon the things o
f
the world. Ah! that was Sit-cum-to-ha, shrilly anathematizing the dogs as she cuffed and
beat them into the harnesses. Sit-cum-to-ha was his daughter's daughter, but she was too
busy to waste a thought upon her broken grandfather, sitting alone there in the snow,
forlorn and helpless. Camp must be broken. The long trail waited while the short day
refused to linger. Life called her, and the duties of life, not death. And he was very close
to death now.
The thought made the old man panicky for the moment, and he stretched forth a palsied
hand which wandered tremblingly over the small heap of dry wood beside him.
Reassured that it was indeed there, his hand returned to the shelter of his mangy furs, and
he again fell to listening. The sulky crackling of half-frozen hides told him that the chief's
moose-skin lodge had been struck, and even then was being rammed and jammed into
portable compass. The chief was his son, stalwart and strong, head man of the tribesmen,
and a mighty hunter. As the women toiled with the camp luggage, his voice rose, chiding
them for their slowness. Old Koskoosh strained his ears. It was the last time he would
hear that voice. There went Geehow's lodge! And Tusken's! Seven, eight, nine; only the
shaman's could be still standing. There! They were at work upon it now. He could hear
the shaman grunt as he piled it on the sled. A child whimpered, and a woman soothed it
with soft, crooning gutturals. Little Koo-tee, the old man thought, a fretful child, and not
overstrong. It would die soon, perhaps, and they would burn a hole through the frozen
tundra and pile rocks above to keep the wolverines away. Well, what did it matter? A few
years at best, and as many an empty belly as a full one. And in the end, Death waited,
ever-hungry and hungriest of them all.
What was that? Oh, the men lashing the sleds and drawing tight the thongs. He listened,
who would listen no more. The whip-lashes snarled and bit among the dogs. Hear them
whine! How they hated the work and the trail! They were off! Sled after sled churned
slowly away into the silence. They were gone. They had passed out of his life, and he
faced the last bitter hour alone. No. The snow crunched beneath a moccasin; a man stood
beside him; upon his head a hand rested gently. His son was good to do this thing. He
remembered other old men whose sons had not waited after the tribe. But his son had. He
wandered away into the past, till the young man's voice brought him back.
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"Is it well with you?" he asked.
And the old man answered, "It is well."
"There be wood beside you," the younger man continued, "and the fire burns bright. The
morning is gray, and the cold has broken. It will snow presently. Even now is it
snowing."
"Ay, even now is it snowing."
"The tribesmen hurry. Their bales are heavy, and their bellies flat with lack of feasting.
The trail is long and they travel fast. go now. It is well?"
"It is well. I am as a last year's leaf, clinging lightly to the stem. The first breath that
blows, and I fall. My voice is become like an old woman's. My eyes no longer show me
the way of my feet, and my feet are heavy, and I am tired. It is well."
He bowed his head in content till the last noise of the complaining snow had died away,
and he knew his son was beyond recall. Then his hand crept out in haste to the wood. It
alone stood between him and the eternity that yawned in upon him. At last the measure of
his life was a handful of fagots. One by one they would go to feed the fire, and just so,
step by step, death would creep upon him. When the last stick had surrendered up its
heat, the frost would begin to gather strength. First his feet would yield, then his hands;
and the numbness would travel, slowly, from the extremities to the body. His head would
fall forward upon his knees, and he would rest. It was easy. All men must die.
He did not complain. It was the way of life, and it was just. He had been born close to the
earth, close to the earth had he lived, and the law thereof was not new to him. It was the
law of all flesh. Nature was not kindly to the flesh. She had no concern for that concrete
thing called the individual. Her interest lay in the species, the race. This was the deepest
abstraction old Koskoosh's barbaric mind was capable of, but he grasped it firmly. He
saw it exemplified in all life. The rise of the sap, the bursting greenness of the willow
bud, the fall of the yellow leaf -- in this alone was told the whole history. But one task did
Nature set the individual. Did he not perform it, he died. Did he perform it, it was all the
same, he died. Nature did not care; there were plenty who were obedient, and it was only
the obedience in this matter, not the obedient, which lived and lived always. The tribe of
Koskoosh was very old. The old men he had known when a boy, had known old men
before them. Therefore it was true that the tribe lived, that it stood for the obedience of all
its members, way down into the forgotten past, whose very resting-places were
unremembered. They did not count; they were episodes. They had passed away like
clouds from a summer sky. He also was an episode, and would pass away. Nature did not
care. To life she set one task, gave one law. To perpetuate was the task of life, its law was
death. A maiden was a good creature to look upon, full-breasted and strong, with spring
to her step and light in her eyes. But her task was yet before her. The light in her eyes
brightened, her step quickened, she was now bold with the young men, now timid, and
she gave them of her own unrest. And ever she grew fairer and yet fairer to look upon, till
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some hunter, able no longer to withhold himself, took her to his lodge to cook and toil for
him and to become the mother of his children. And with the coming of her offspring her
looks left her. Her limbs dragged and shuffled, her eyes dimmed and bleared, and only
the little children found joy against the withered cheek of the old squaw by the fire. Her
task was done. But a little while, on the first pinch of famine or the first long trail, and
she would be left, even as he had been left, in the snow, with a little pile of wood. Such
was the law. He placed a stick carefully upon the fire and resumed his meditations. It was
the same everywhere, with all things. The mosquitoes vanished with the first frost. The
little tree-squirrel crawled away to die. When age settled upon the rabbit it became slow
and heavy, and could no longer outfoot its enemies. Even the big bald-face grew clumsy
and blind and quarrelsome, in the end to be dragged down by a handful of yelping
huskies. He remembered how he had abandoned his own father on an upper reach of the
Klondike one winter, the winter before the missionary came with his talk-books and his
box of medicines. Many a time had Koskoosh smacked his lips over the recollection of
that box, though now his mouth refused to moisten. The "painkiller" had been especially
good. But the missionary was a bother after all, for he brought no meat into the camp, and
he ate heartily, and the hunters grumbled. But he chilled his lung
s on the divide by the
Mayo, and the dogs afterwards nosed the stones away and fought over his bones.
Koskoosh placed another stick on the fire and harked back deeper into the past. There
was the time of the Great Famine, when the old men crouched empty-bellied to the fire,
and let fall from their lips dim traditions of the ancient day when the Yukon ran wide
open for three winters, and then lay frozen for three summers. He had lost his mother in
that famine. In the summer the salmon run had failed, and the tribe looked forward to the
winter and the coming of the caribou. Then the winter came, but with it there were no
caribou. Never had the like been known, not even in the lives of the old men. But the
caribou did not come, and it was the seventh year, and the rabbits had not replenished,
and the dogs were naught but bundles of bones. And through the long darkness the
children wailed and died, and the women, and the old men; and not one in ten of the tribe
lived to meet the sun when it came back in the spring. That was a famine!
But he had seen times of plenty, too, when the meat spoiled on their hands, and the dogs
were fat and worthless with overeating -- times when they let the game go unkilled, and
the women were fertile, and the lodges were cluttered with sprawling men-children and
women-children. Then it was the men became high-stomached, and revived ancient
quarrels, and crossed the divides to the south to kill the Pellys, and to the west that they
might sit by the dead fires of the Tananas. He remembered, when a boy, during a time of
plenty, when he saw a moose pulled down by the wolves. Zing-ha lay with him in the
snow and watched -- Zing-ha, who later became the craftiest of hunters, and who, in the
end, fell through an air-hole on the Yukon. They found him, a month afterward, just as he
had crawled halfway out and frozen stiff to the ice.
But the moose. Zing-ha and he had gone out that day to play at hunting after the manner
of their fathers. On the bed of the creek they struck the fresh track of a moose, and with it
the tracks of many wolves. "An old one," Zing-ha, who was quicker at reading the sign,
said -- "an old one who cannot keep up with the herd. The wolves have cut him out from
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his brothers, and they will never leave him." And it was so. It was their way. By day and