Northland Stories

by Jack London

  “Where now is thy god?” the half-breed demanded.

  “I do not know.” He stood straight and rigid, like a child repeating a catechism.

  “Hast thou then a god at all?”

  “I had.”

  “And now?”

  “No.”

  Hay Stockard swept the blood from his eyes and laughed. The missionary looked at him curiously, as in a dream. A feeling of infinite distance came over him, as though of a great remove. In that which had transpired, and which was to transpire, he had no part. He was a spectator—at a distance, yes, at a distance. The words of Baptiste came to him faintly:—

  “Very good. See that this man go free, and that no harm befall him. Let him depart in peace. Give him a canoe and food. Set his face toward the Russians, that he may tell their priests of Baptiste the Red, in whose country there is no god.”

  They led him to the edge of the steep, where they paused to witness the final tragedy. The half-breed turned to Hay Stockard.

  “There is no god,” he prompted.

  The man laughed in reply. One of the young men poised a war-spear for the cast.

  “Hast thou a god?”

  “Ay, the God of my fathers.”

  He shifted the axe for a better grip. Baptiste the Red gave the sign, and the spear hurtled full against his breast. Sturges Owen saw the ivory head stand out beyond his back, saw the man sway, laughing, and snap the shaft short as he fell upon it. Then he went down to the river, that he might carry to the Russians the message of Baptiste the Red, in whose country there was no god.

  Siwash

  “If I was a man—” Her words were in themselves indecisive, but the withering contempt which flashed from her black eyes was not lost upon the men-folk in the tent.

  Tommy, the English sailor, squirmed, but chivalrous old Dick Humphries, Cornish fisherman and erstwhile American salmon capitalist, beamed upon her benevolently as ever. He bore women too large a portion of his rough heart to mind them, as he said, when they were in the doldrums, or when their limited vision would not permit them to see all around a thing. So they said nothing, these two men who had taken the half-frozen woman into their tent three days back, and who had warmed her, and fed her, and rescued her goods from the Indian packers. This latter had necessitated the payment of numerous dollars, to say nothing of a demonstration in force—Dick Humphries squinting along the sights of a Winchester while Tommy apportioned their wages among them at his own appraisement. It had been a little thing in itself, but it meant much to a woman playing a desperate single-hand in the equally desperate Klondike rush of ’97. Men were occupied with their own pressing needs, nor did they approve of women playing, single-handed, the odds of the arctic winter.

  “If I was a man, I know what I would do.” Thus reiterated Molly, she of the flashing eyes, and therein spoke the cumulative grit of five American-born generations.

  In the succeeding silence, Tommy thrust a pan of biscuits into the Yukon stove and piled on fresh fuel. A reddish flood pounded along under his sun-tanned skin, and as he stooped, the skin of his neck was scarlet. Dick palmed a three-cornered sail needle through a set of broken pack straps, his good nature in nowise disturbed by the feminine cataclysm which was threatening to burst in the storm-beaten tent.

  “And if you was a man?” he asked, his voice vibrant with kindness. The three-cornered needle jammed in the damp leather, and he suspended work for the moment.

  “I ’d be a man. I ’d put the straps on my back and light out. I would n’t lay in camp here, with the Yukon like to freeze most any day, and the goods not half over the portage. And you—you are men, and you sit here, holding your hands, afraid of a little wind and wet. I tell you straight, Yankee-men are made of different stuff. They ’d be hitting the trail for Dawson if they had to wade through hell-fire. And you, you—I wish I was a man.”

  “I ’m very glad, my dear, that you ’re not.” Dick Humphries threw the bight of the sail twine over the point of the needle and drew it clear with a couple of deft turns and a jerk.

  A snort of the gale dealt the tent a broad-handed slap as it hurtled past, and the sleet rat-tat-tatted with snappy spite against the thin canvas. The smoke, smothered in its exit, drove back through the fire-box door, carrying with it the pungent odor of green spruce.

  “Good Gawd! Why can’t a woman listen to reason?” Tommy lifted his head from the denser depths and turned upon her a pair of smoke-outraged eyes.

  “And why can’t a man show his manhood?”

  Tommy sprang to his feet with an oath which would have shocked a woman of lesser heart, ripped loose the sturdy reef-knots and flung back the flaps of the tent.

  The trio peered out. It was not a heartening spectacle. A few water-soaked tents formed the miserable foreground, from which the streaming ground sloped to a foaming gorge. Down this ramped a mountain torrent. Here and there, dwarf spruce, rooting and grovelling in the shallow alluvium, marked the proximity of the timber line. Beyond, on the opposing slope, the vague outlines of a glacier loomed dead-white through the driving rain. Even as they looked, its massive front crumbled into the valley, on the breast of some subterranean vomit, and it lifted its hoarse thunder above the screeching voice of the storm. Involuntarily, Molly shrank back.

  “Look, woman! Look with all your eyes! Three miles in the teeth of the gale to Crater Lake, across two glaciers, along the slippery rimrock, knee-deep in a howling river! Look, I say, you Yankee woman! Look! There ’s your Yankee-men!” Tommy pointed a passionate hand in the direction of the struggling tents. “Yankees, the last mother’s son of them. Are they on trail? Is there one of them with the straps to his back? And you would teach us men our work? Look, I say!”

  Another tremendous section of the glacier rumbled earthward. The wind whipped in at the open doorway, bulging out the sides of the tent till it swayed like a huge bladder at its guy ropes. The smoke swirled about them, and the sleet drove sharply into their flesh. Tommy pulled the flaps together hastily, and returned to his tearful task at the fire-box. Dick Humphries threw the mended pack straps into a corner and lighted his pipe. Even Molly was for the moment persuaded.

  “There ’s my clothes,” she half-whimpered, the feminine for the moment prevailing. “They ’re right at the top of the cache, and they ’ll be ruined! I tell you, ruined!”

  “There, there,” Dick interposed, when the last quavering syllable had wailed itself out. “Don’t let that worry you, little woman. I ’m old enough to be your father’s brother, and I ’ve a daughter older than you, and I ’ll tog you out in fripperies when we get to Dawson if it takes my last dollar.”

  “When we get to Dawson!” The scorn had come back to her throat with a sudden surge. “You ’ll rot on the way, first. You ’ll drown in a mudhole. You—you—Britishers!”

  The last word, explosive, intensive, had strained the limits of her vituperation. If that would not stir these men, what could? Tommy’s neck ran red again, but he kept his tongue between his teeth. Dick’s eyes mellowed. He had the advantage over Tommy, for he had once had a white woman for a wife.

  The blood of five American-born generations is, under certain circumstances, an uncomfortable heritage; and among these circumstances might be enumerated that of being quartered with next of kin. These men were Britons. On sea and land her ancestry and the generations thereof had thrashed them and theirs. On sea and land they would continue to do so. The traditions of her race clamored for vindication. She was but a woman of the present, but in her bubbled the whole mighty past. It was not alone Molly Travis who pulled on gum boots, mackintosh, and straps; for the phantom hands of ten thousand forbears drew tight the buckles, just so as they squared her jaw and set her eyes with determination. She, Molly Travis, intended to shame these Britishers; they, the innumerable shades, were asserting the dominance of the common race.

  The men-folk did not interfere. Once Dick suggested that she take his oilskins, as her mackintosh was worth no more than paper in such a st
orm. But she sniffed her independence so sharply that he communed with his pipe till she tied the flaps on the outside and slushed away on the flooded trail.

  “Think she ’ll make it?” Dick’s face belied the indifference of his voice.

  “Make it? If she stands the pressure till she gets to the cache, what of the cold and misery, she ’ll be stark, raving mad. Stand it? She ’ll be dumb-crazed. You know it yourself, Dick. You ’ve wind-jammed round the Horn. You know what it is to lay out on a topsail yard in the thick of it, bucking sleet and snow and frozen canvas till you ’re ready to just let go and cry like a baby. Clothes? She won ’t be able to tell a bundle of skirts from a gold pan or a teakettle.”

  “Kind of think we were wrong in letting her go, then?”

  “Not a bit of it. So help me, Dick, she’d ’a’ made this tent a hell for the rest of the trip if we had n’t. Trouble with her she ’s got too much spirit. This ’ll tone it down a bit.”

  “Yes,” Dick admitted, “she ’s too ambitious. But then Molly’s all right. A cussed little fool to tackle a trip like this, but a plucky sight better than those pick-me-up-and-carry-me kind of women. She ’s the stock that carried you and me, Tommy, and you ’ve got to make allowance for the spirit. Takes a woman to breed a man. You can’t suck manhood from the dugs of a creature whose only claim to womanhood is her petticoats. Takes a she-cat, not a cow, to mother a tiger.”

  “And when they ’re unreasonable we ’ve got to put up with it, eh?”

  “The proposition. A sharp sheath-knife cuts deeper on a slip than a dull one; but that ’s no reason for to hack the edge off over a capstan bar.”

  “All right, if you say so, but when it comes to woman, I guess I ’ll take mine with a little less edge.”

  “What do you know about it?” Dick demanded.

  “Some.” Tommy reached over for a pair of Molly’s wet stockings and stretched them across his knees to dry.

  Dick, eying him querulously, went fishing in her hand satchel, then hitched up to the front of the stove with divers articles of damp clothing spread likewise to the heat.

  “Thought you said you never were married?” he asked.

  “Did I? No more was I—that is—yes, by Gawd! I was. And as good a woman as ever cooked grub for a man.”

  “Slipped her moorings?” Dick symbolized infinity with a wave of his hand.

  “Ay.”

  “Childbirth,” he added, after a moment’s pause.

  The beans bubbled rowdily on the front lid, and he pushed the pot back to a cooler surface. After that he investigated the biscuits, tested them with a splinter of wood, and placed them aside under cover of a damp cloth. Dick, after the manner of his kind, stifled his interest and waited silently.

  “A different woman to Molly. Siwash.”

  Dick nodded his understanding. “Not so proud and wilful, but stick by a fellow through thick and thin. Sling a paddle with the next and starve as contentedly as Job. Go for‘ard when the sloop’s nose was more often under than not, and take in sail like a man. Went prospecting once, up Teslin way, past Surprise Lake and the Little Yellow-Head. Grub gave out, and we ate the dogs. Dogs gave out, and we ate harnesses, moccasins, and furs. Never a whimper; never a pick-me-up-and-carry-me. Before we went she said look out for grub, but when it happened, never a I-told-you-so. ‘Never mind, Tommy,’ she ’d say, day after day, that weak she could bare lift a snowshoe and her feet raw with the work. ‘Never mind. I’d sooner be flat-bellied of hunger and be your woman, Tommy, than have a potlach every day and be Chief George’s klooch.’ George was chief of the Chilcoots, you know, and wanted her bad.

  “Great days, those. Was a likely chap myself when I struck the coast. Jumped a whaler, the Pole Star, at Unalaska, and worked my way down to Sitka on an otter hunter. Picked up with Happy Jack there—know him?”

  “Had charge of my traps for me,” Dick answered, “down on the Columbia. Pretty wild, was n’t he, with a warm place in his heart for whiskey and women?”

  “The very chap. Went trading with him for a couple of seasons—hooch, and blankets, and such stuff. Then got a sloop of my own, and not to cut him out, came down Juneau way. That ’s where I met Killisnoo; I called her Tilly for short. Met her at a squaw dance down on the beach. Chief George had finished the year’s trade with the Sticks over the Passes, and was down from Dyea with half his tribe. No end of Siwashes at the dance, and I the only white. No one knew me, barring a few of the bucks I ’d met over Sitka way, but I ’d got most of their histories from Happy Jack.

  “Everybody talking Chinook, not guessing that I could spit it better than most; and principally two girls who ’d run away from Haine’s Mission up the Lynn Canal. They were trim creatures, good to the eye, and I kind of thought of casting that way; but they were fresh as fresh-caught cod. Too much edge, you see. Being a new-comer, they started to twist me, not knowing I gathered in every word of Chinook they uttered.

  “I never let on, but set to dancing with Tilly, and the more we danced the more our hearts warmed to each other. ‘Looking for a woman,’ one of the girls says, and the other tosses her head and answers, ‘Small chance he ’ll get one when the women are looking for men.’ And the bucks and squaws standing around began to grin and giggle and repeat what had been said. ‘Quite a pretty boy,’ says the first one. I ’ll not deny I was rather smooth-faced and youngish, but I ’d been a man amongst men many ’s the day, and it rankled me. ‘Dancing with Chief George’s girl,’ pipes the second. ‘First thing George ’ll give him the flat of a paddle and send him about his business.’ Chief George had been looking pretty black up to now, but at this he laughed and slapped his knees. He was a husky beggar and would have used the paddle too.

  “‘Who’s the girls?’ I asked Tilly, as we went ripping down the centre in a reel. And as soon as she told me their names I remembered all about them from Happy Jack. Had their pedigree down fine—several things he ’d told me that not even their own tribe knew. But I held my hush, and went on courting Tilly, they a-casting sharp remarks and everybody roaring. ‘Bide a wee, Tommy,’ I says to myself; ‘bide a wee.’

  “And bide I did, till the dance was ripe to break up, and Chief George had brought a paddle all ready for me. Everybody was on the lookout for mischief when we stopped; but I marched, easy as you please, slap into the thick of them. The Mission girls cut me up something clever, and for all I was angry I had to set my teeth to keep from laughing. I turned upon them suddenly.

  “‘Are you done?’ I asked.

  “You should have seen them when they heard me spitting Chinook. Then I broke loose. I told them all about themselves, and their people before them; their fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers —everybody, everything. Each mean trick they ’d played; every scrape they ’d got into; every shame that ’d fallen them. And I burned them without fear or favor. All hands crowded round. Never had they heard a white man sling their lingo as I did. Everybody was laughing save the Mission girls. Even Chief George forgot the paddle, or at least he was swallowing too much respect to dare to use it.

  “But the girls. ‘Oh, don’t, Tommy,’ they cried, the tears running down their cheeks. ‘Please don’t. We ’ll be good. Sure, Tommy, sure.’ But I knew them well, and I scorched them on every tender spot. Nor did I slack away till they came down on their knees, begging and pleading with me to keep quiet. Then I shot a glance at Chief George; but he did not know whether to have at me or not, and passed it off by laughing hollowly.

  “So be. When I passed the parting with Tilly that night I gave her the word that I was going to be around for a week or so, and that I wanted to see more of her. Not thick-skinned, her kind, when it came to showing like and dislike, and she looked her pleasure for the honest girl she was. Ay, a striking lass, and I did n’t wonder that Chief George was taken with her.

  “Everything my way. Took the wind from his sails on the first leg. I was for getting her aboard and sailing down Wrangel way till it blew over, leaving him to whistle; but I
was n’t to get her that easy. Seems she was living with an uncle of hers—guardian, the way such things go—and seems he was nigh to shuffling off with consumption or some sort of lung trouble. He was good and bad by turns, and she would n’t leave him till it was over with. Went up to the tepee just before I left, to speculate on how long it’d be; but the old beggar had promised her to Chief George, and when he clapped eyes on me his anger brought on a hemorrhage.

  “‘Come and take me, Tommy,’ she says when we bid good-by on the beach. ‘Ay,’ I answers; ‘when you give the word.’ And I kissed her, white-man-fashion and lover-fashion, till she was all of a tremble like a quaking aspen, and I was so beside myself I ’d half a mind to go up and give the uncle a lift over the divide.

  “So I went down Wrangel way, past St. Mary’s and even to the Queen Charlottes, trading, running whiskey, turning the sloop to most anything. Winter was on, stiff and crisp, and I was back to Juneau, when the word came. ‘Come,’ the beggar says who brought the news. ‘Killisnoo say, “Come now.”’ ‘What’s the row?’ I asks. ‘Chief George,’ says he. ‘Potlach. Killisnoo, makum klooch.’

  “Ay, it was bitter—the Taku howling down out of the north, the salt water freezing quick as it struck the deck, and the old sloop and I hammering into the teeth of it for a hundred miles to Dyea. Had a Douglass Islander for crew when I started, but midway up he was washed over from the bows. Jibed all over and crossed the course three times, but never a sign of him.”