Children of the Frost
Page 15
She grunted acknowledgment and gratitude for her lord's condescension,
slipped into the harness, and bent forward to the load.
"The next time I am born, I would be born a white man," he added, and
swung off down the trail which dived into the gorge at his feet.
The dogs followed close at his heels, and Li Wan brought up the rear. But
her thoughts were far away, across the Ice Mountains to the east, to the
little corner of the earth where her childhood had been lived. Ever as a
child, she remembered, she had been looked upon as strange, as one with
an affliction. Truly she had dreamed awake and been scolded and beaten
for the remarkable visions she saw, till, after a time, she had outgrown
them. But not utterly. Though they troubled her no more waking, they
came to her in her sleep, grown woman that she was, and many a night of
nightmare was hers, filled with fluttering shapes, vague and meaningless.
The talk with Canim had excited her, and down all the twisted slant of the
divide she harked back to the mocking fantasies of her dreams.
"Let us take breath," Canim said, when they had tapped midway the bed of
the main creek.
He rested his pack on a jutting rock, slipped the head-strap, and sat down.
Li Wan joined him, and the dogs sprawled panting on the ground beside
them. At their feet rippled the glacial drip of the hills, but it was muddy
and discolored, as if soiled by some commotion of the earth.
"Why is this?" Li Wan asked.
"Because of the white men who work in the ground. Listen!" He held up
his hand, and they heard the ring of pick and shovel, and the sound of
men's voices. "They are made mad by gold, and work without ceasing that
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they may find it. Gold ? It is yellow and comes from the ground, and is
considered of great value. It is also a measure of price."
But Li Wan's roving eyes had called her attention from him. A few yards
below and partly screened by a clump of young spruce, the tiered logs of a
cabin rose to meet its overhanging roof of dirt. A thrill ran through her,
and all her dream-phantoms roused up and stirred about uneasily.
"Canim," she whispered in an agony of apprehension. "Canim, what is
that?"
"The white man's teepee, in which he eats and sleeps."
She eyed it wistfully, grasping its virtues at a glance and thrilling again at
the unaccountable sensations it aroused. "It must be very warm in time of
frost," she said aloud, though she felt that she must make strange sounds
with her lips.
She felt impelled to utter them, but did not, and the next instant Canim
said, "It is called a cabin."
Her heart gave a great leap. The sounds! the very sounds! She looked
about her in sudden awe. How should she know that strange word before
ever she heard it? What could be the matter? And then with a shock, half
of fear and half of delight, she realized that for the first time in her life
there had been sanity and significance in the promptings of her dreams.
"Cabin," she repeated to herself. "Cabin." An incoherent flood of dreamstuff
welled up and up till her head was dizzy and her heart seemed
bursting. Shadows, and looming bulks of things, and unintelligible
associations fluttered and whirled about, and she strove vainly with her
consciousness to grasp and hold them. For she felt that there, in that welter
of memories, was the key of the mystery; could she but grasp and hold it,
all would be clear and plain—
O Canim! O Pow-Wah-Kaan! O shades and shadows, what was that?
She turned to Canim, speechless and trembling, the dream-stuff in mad,
overwhelming riot. She was sick and fainting, and could only listen to the
ravishing sounds which proceeded from the cabin in a wonderful rhythm.
"Hum, fiddle," Canim vouchsafed.
But she did not hear him, for in the ecstasy she was experiencing, it
seemed at last that all things were coming clear. Now! now! she thought.
A sudden moisture swept into her eyes, and the tears trickled down her
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cheeks. The mystery was unlocking, but the faintness was overpowering
her. If only she could hold herself long enough! If only— but the
landscape bent and crumpled up, and the hills swayed back and forth
across the sky as she sprang upright and screamed, "Daddy! Daddy!" Then
the sun reeled, and darkness smote her, and she pitched forward limp and
headlong among the rocks.
Canim looked to see if her neck had been broken by the heavy pack,
grunted his satisfaction, and threw water upon her from the creek. She
came to slowly, with choking sobs, and sat up.
"It is not good, the hot sun on the head," he ventured.
And she answered, "No, it is not good, and the pack bore upon me hard."
"We shall camp early, so that you may sleep long and win strength," he
said gently. "And if we go now, we shall be the quicker to bed."
Li Wan said nothing, but tottered to her feet in obedience and stirred up
the dogs. She took the swing of his pace mechanically, and followed him
past the cabin, scarce daring to breathe. But no sounds issued forth, though
the door was open and smoke curling upward from the sheet-iron
stovepipe.
They came upon a man in the bend of the creek, white of skin and blue of
eye, and for a moment Li Wan saw the other man in the snow. But she saw
dimly, for she was weak and tired from what she had undergone. Still, she
looked at him curiously, and stopped with Canim to watch him at his
work. He was washing gravel in a large pan, with a circular, tilting
movement; and as they looked, giving a deft flirt, he flashed up the yellow
gold in a broad streak across the bottom of the pan.
"Very rich, this creek," Canim told her, as they went on. "Sometime I will
find such a creek, and then I shall be a big man."
Cabins and men grew more plentiful, till they came to where the main
portion of the creek was spread out before them. It was the scene of a vast
devastation. Everywhere the earth was torn and rent as though by a Titan's
struggles. Where there were no upthrown mounds of gravel, great holes
and trenches yawned, and chasms where the thick rime of the earth had
been peeled to bed-rock. There was no worn channel for the creek, and its
waters, dammed up, diverted, flying through the air on giddy flumes,
trickling into sinks and low places, and raised by huge water-wheels, were
used and used again a thousand times. The hills had been stripped of their
trees, and their raw sides gored and perforated by great timber-slides and
prospect holes. And over all, like a monstrous race of ants, was flung an
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army of men—mud-covered, dirty, dishevelled men, who crawled in and
out of the holes of their digging, crept like big bugs along the flumes, and
toiled and sweated at the gravel-heaps which they kept in constant
unrest—men, as far as the eye coul
d see, even to the rims of the hilltops,
digging, tearing, and scouring the face of nature.
Li Wan was appalled at the tremendous upheaval. "Truly, these men are
mad," she said to Canim.
"Small wonder. The gold they dig after is a great thing," he replied. "It is
the greatest thing in the world."
For hours they threaded the chaos of greed, Canim eagerly intent, Li Wan
weak and listless. She knew she had been on the verge of disclosure, and
she felt that she was still on the verge of disclosure, but the nervous strain
she had undergone had tired her, and she passively waited for the thing,
she knew not what, to happen. From every hand her senses snatched up
and conveyed to her innumerable impressions, each of which became a
dull excitation to her jaded imagination. Somewhere within her,
responsive notes were answering to the things without, forgotten and
undreamed-of correspondences were being renewed; and she was aware of
it in an incurious way, and her soul was troubled, but she was not equal to
the mental exultation necessary to transmute and understand. So she
plodded wearily on at the heels of her lord, content to wait for that which
she knew, somewhere, somehow, must happen.
After undergoing the mad bondage of man, the creek finally returned to its
ancient ways, all soiled and smirched from its toil, and coiled lazily among
the broad flats and timbered spaces where the valley widened to its mouth.
Here the "pay" ran out, and men were loth to loiter with the lure yet
beyond. And here, as Li Wan paused to prod Olo with her staff, she heard
the mellow silver of a woman's laughter.
Before a cabin sat a woman, fair of skin and rosy as a child, dimpling with
glee at the words of another woman in the doorway. But the woman who
sat shook about her great masses of dark, wet hair which yielded up its
dampness to the warm caresses of the sun.
For an instant Li Wan stood transfixed. Then she was aware of a blinding
flash, and a snap, as though something gave way; and the woman before
the cabin vanished, and the cabin and the tall spruce timber, and the
jagged sky-line, and Li Wan saw another woman, in the shine of another
sun, brushing great masses of black hair, and singing as she brushed. And
Li Wan heard the words of the song, and understood, and was a child
again. She was smitten with a vision, wherein all the troublesome dreams
merged and became one, and shapes and shadows took up their
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accustomed round, and all was clear and plain and real. Many pictures
jostled past, strange scenes, and trees, and flowers, and people; and she
saw them and knew them all.
"When you were a little bird, a little moose-bird," Canim said, his eyes
upon her and burning into her.
"When I was a little moose-bird," she whispered, so faint and low he
scarcely heard. And she knew she lied, as she bent her head to the strap
and took the swing of the trail.
And such was the strangeness of it, the real now became unreal. The mile
tramp and the pitching of camp by the edge of the stream seemed like a
passage in a nightmare. She cooked the meat, fed the dogs, and unlashed
the packs as in a dream, and it was not until Canim began to sketch his
next wandering that she became herself again.
"The Klondike runs into the Yukon," he was saying; "a mighty river,
mightier than the Mackenzie, of which you know. So we go, you and I,
down to Fort o' Yukon. With dogs, in time of winter, it is twenty sleeps.
Then we follow the Yukon away into the west—one hundred sleeps, two
hundred—I have never heard. It is very far. And then we come to the sea.
You know nothing of the sea, so let me tell you. As the lake is to the
island, so the sea is to the land; all the rivers run to it, and it is without
end. I have seen it at Hudson Bay; I have yet to see * in Alaska. And then
we may take a great canoe upon the sea, you and I, Li Wan, or we may
follow the land into the south many a hundred sleeps. And after that I do
not know, save that I am Canim, the Canoe, wanderer and far-journeyer
over the earth!"
She sat and listened, and fear ate into her heart as she pondered over this
plunge into the illimitable wilderness. "It is a weary way," was all she
said, head bowed on knee in resignation.
Then it was a splendid thought came to her, and at the wonder of it she
was all aglow. She went down to the stream and washed the dried clay
from her face. When the ripples died away, she stared long at her mirrored
features; but sun and weather-beat had done their work, and, what of
roughness and bronze, her skin was not soft and dimpled as a child's. But
the thought was still splendid and the glow unabated as she crept in beside
her husband under the sleeping-robe.
She lay awake, staring up at the blue of the sky and waiting for Canim to
sink into the first deep sleep. When this came about, she wormed slowly
and carefully away, tucked the robe around him, and stood up. At her
second step, Bash growled savagely. She whispered persuasively to him
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and glanced at the man. Canim was snoring profoundly. Then she turned,
and with swift, noiseless feet sped up the back trail.
Mrs. Evelyn Van Wyck was just preparing for bed. Bored by the duties
put upon her by society, her wealth, and widowed blessedness, she had
journeyed into the Northland and gone to housekeeping in a cosy cabin on
the edge of the diggings. Here, aided and abetted by her friend and
companion, Myrtle Giddings, she played at living close to the soil, and
cultivated the primitive with refined abandon.
She strove to get away from the generations of culture and parlor
selection, and sought the earth-grip her ancestors had forfeited. Likewise
she induced mental states which she fondly believed to approximate those
of the stone-folk, and just now, as she put up her hair for the pillow, she
was indulging her fancy with a Paleolithic wooing. The de- tails consisted
principally of cave-dwellings and cracked marrow-bones, intersprinkled
with fierce carnivora, hairy mammoths, and combats with rude flaked
knives of flint; but the sensations were delicious. And as Evelyn Van
Wyck fled through the sombre forest aisles before the too arduous
advances of her slant-browed, skin-clad wooer, the door of the cabin
opened, without the courtesy of a knock, and a skin-clad woman, savage
and primitive, came in.
"Mercy!"
With a leap that would have done credit to a cave-woman, Miss Giddings
landed in safety behind the table. But Mrs. Van Wyck held her ground.
She noticed that the intruder was laboring under a strong excitement, and
cast a swift glance backward to assure herself that the way was clear to the
bunk, where the big Colt's revolver lay beneath a pillow.
"Greeting, O Woman of the Wondrous Hair," said Li Wan.
But she said it in her own tongue, the tongue spoken in but a little corner
"Shall I go for help?" Miss Giddings quavered.
"The poor creature is harmless, I think," Mrs. Van Wyck replied. "And
just look at her skin-clothes, ragged and trail-worn and all that. They are
certainly unique. I shall buy them for my collection. Get my sack, Myrtle,
please, and set up the scales."
Li Wan followed the shaping of the lips, but the words were unintelligible,
and then, and for the first time, she realized, in a moment of suspense and
indecision, that there was no medium of communication between them.
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And at the passion of her dumbness she cried out, with arms stretched
wide apart, "O Woman, thou art sister of mine!"
The tears coursed down her cheeks as she yearned toward them, and the
break in her voice carried the sorrow she could not utter. But Miss
Giddings was trembling, and even Mrs. Van Wyck was disturbed.
"I would live as you live. Thy ways are my ways, and our ways be one.
My husband is Canim, the Canoe, and he is big and strange, and I am
afraid. His trail is all the world and never ends, and I am weary. My
mother was like you, and her hair was as shine, and her eyes. And life was
soft to me then, and the sun warm."
She knelt humbly, and bent her head at Mrs. Van Wyck's feet. But Mrs.
Van Wyck drew away, frightened at her vehemence.
Li Wan stood up, panting for speech. Her dumb lips could not articulate
her overmastering consciousness of kind.
"Trade? you trade?" Mrs. Van Wyck questioned, slipping, after the
fashion of the superior peoples, into pigeon tongue.
She touched Li Wan's ragged skins to indicate her choice, and poured
several hundreds of gold into the blower. She stirred the dust about and
trickled its yellow lustre temptingly through her fingers. But Li Wan saw
only the fingers, milk-white and shapely, tapering daintily to the rosy,
jewel-like nails. She placed her own hand alongside, all work-worn and
calloused, and wept.
Mrs. Van Wyck misunderstood. "Gold," she encouraged. "Good gold!
You trade? You changee for changee?" And she laid her hand again on Li
Wan's skin garments.
"How much ? You sell ? How much ?" she persisted, running her hand
against the way of the hair so that she might make sure of the sinewthread