Romany of the Snows - Gilbert Parker
Suddenly, something he saw made him lurch backward. At an angle in almost
equal distance from him and Shon, upon a small peninsula of rock, a
strange thing was happening. Old Pourcette was kneeling, engaged with his
moccasin. Behind him was the sun, against which he was abruptly defined,
looking larger than usual. Clear space and air soft with colour were
about him. Across this space, on a little sloping plateau near him, there
crept an animal. It seemed to Lawless that he could see the lithe
stealthiness of its muscles and the ripple of its skin. But that was
imagination, because he was too far away. He cried out, and swung his gun
shoulderwards in desperation. But, at the moment, Pourcette turned
sharply round, saw his danger, caught his gun, and fired as the puma
sprang. There had been no chance for aim, and the beast was only wounded.
It dropped upon the man. He let the gun fall; it rolled and fell over the
cliff. Then came a scene, wicked in its peril to Pourcette, for whom no
aid could come, though two men stood watching the great fight--Shon
M'Gann, awake now, and Lawless--with their guns silent in their hands.
They dare not fire, for fear of injuring the man, and they could not
reach him in time to be of help.
There against the weird solitary sky the man and the puma fought. When
the animal dropped on him, Pourcette caught it by the throat with both
hands, and held back its fangs; but its claws were furrowing the flesh of
his breast and legs. His long arms were of immense strength, and though
the pain of his torn flesh was great he struggled grandly with the beast,
and bore it away, from his body. As he did so he slightly changed the
position of one hand. It came upon a welt-a scar. When he felt that, new
courage and strength seemed given him. He gave a low growl like an
animal, and then, letting go one hand, caught at the knife in his belt.
As he did so the puma sprang away from him, and crouched upon the rock,
making ready for another leap. Lawless and Shon could see its tail
curving and beating. But now, to their astonishment, the man was the
aggressor. He was filled with a fury which knows nothing of fear. The
welt his fingers had felt burned them.
He came slowly upon the puma. Lawless could see the hard glitter of his
knife. The puma's teeth sawed together, its claws picked at the rocks,
its body curved for a spring. The man sprang first, and ran the knife in;
but not into a mortal corner. Once more they locked. The man's fingers
were again at the puma's throat, and they swayed together, the claws of
the beast making surface havoc. But now as they stood up, to the eyes of
the fearful watchers inextricably mixed, the man lunged again with his
knife, and this time straight into the heart of the murderer. The puma
loosened, quivered, fell back dead. The man rose to his feet with a cry,
and his hands stretched above his head, as it were in a kind of ecstasy.
Shon forgot his gold and ran; Lawless hurried also.
When the two men got to the spot they found Pourcette binding up his
wounds. He came to his feet, heedless of his hurts, and grasped their
hands. "Come, come, my friends, and see," he cried.
He pulled forward the loose skin on the puma's breast and showed them the
scar of a knife-wound above the one his own knife had made.
"I've got the other murderer," he said; "Gordineer's knife went in here.
Sacre, but it is good!"
Pourcette's flesh needed little medicine; he did not feel his pain and
stiffness. When they reached Clear Mountain, bringing with them the skin
which was to hang above the fireplace, Pourcette prepared to go to Fort
St. John, as he had said he would, to sell all the skins and give the
proceeds to the girl.
"When that's done," said Lawless, "you will have no reason for staying
here. If you will come with us after, we will go to the Fort with you. We
three will then come back in the spring to the valley of gold for sport
and riches."
He spoke lightly, yet seriously too. The old man shook his head. "I have
thought," he said. "I cannot go to the south. I am a hunter now, nothing
more. I have been long alone; I do not wish for change. I shall remain at
Clear Mountain when these skins have gone to Fort St. John, and if you
come to me in the spring or at any time, my door will open to you, and I
will share all with you. Gordineer was a good man. You are good men. I'll
remember you, but I can't go with you--no.
"Some day you would leave me to go to the women who wait for you, and
then I should be alone again. I will not change--vraiment!"
On the morning they left, he took Jo Gordineer's cup from the shelf, and
from a hidden place brought out a flask half filled with liquor. He
poured out a little in the cup gravely, and handed it to Lawless, but
Lawless gave it back to him.
"You must drink from it," he said, "not me."
He held out the cup of his own flask. When each of the three had a share,
the old man raised his long arm solemnly, and said in a tone so gentle
that the others hardly recognised his voice: "To a lost comrade!" They
drank in silence.
"A little gentleman!" said Lawless, under his breath. When they were
ready to start, Lawless said to him at the last: "What will you do here,
comrade, as the days go on?"
"There are pumas in the mountains," he replied. They parted from him upon
the ledge where the great fight had occurred, and travelled into the
east. Turning many times, they saw him still standing there. At a point
where they must lose sight of him, they looked for the last time. He was
alone with his solitary hills, leaning on his rifle. They fired two shots
into the air. They saw him raise his rifle, and two faint reports came in
reply. He became again immovable: as much a part of those hills as the
shining glacier; never to leave them.
In silence the two rounded the cliff, and saw him no more.
THE TRAIL OF THE SUN DOGS
"Swell, you see," said Jacques Parfaite, as he gave Whiskey Wine, the
leading dog, a cut with the whip and twisted his patois to the uses of
narrative, "he has been alone there at the old Fort for a long time. I
remember when I first see him. It was in the summer. The world smell
sweet if you looked this way or that. If you drew in your breath quick
from the top of a hill you felt a great man. Ridley, the chief trader,
and myself have come to the Fort on our way to the Mackenzie River. In
the yard of the Fort the grass have grown tall, and sprung in the cracks
under the doors and windows; the Fort have not been use for a long time.
Once there was plenty of buffalo near, and the caribou sometimes; but
they were all gone--only a few. The Indians never went that way, only
when the seasons were the best. The Company have close the Post; it did
not pay. Still, it was pleasant after a long tramp to come to even an
empty fort. We know dam' well there is food buried in the yard or under
the floor, and it would be droll to open the place for a day--Lost Man's
Tavern, we called it. Well--"
"Well, what?" said Sir Duke Lawless, who had travelled up to the Barren
Grounds for the sake of adventure and game; and, with his old friend,
Shon M'Gann, had trusted himself to the excellent care of Jacques
Parfaite, the half-breed.
Jacques cocked his head on one side and shook it wisely and mysteriously.
"Tres bien, we trailed through the long grass, pried open the shutters
and door, and went in. It is cool in the north of an evening, as you
know. We build a fire, and soon there is very fine times. Ridley pried up
the floor, and we found good things. Holy! but it was a feast. We had a
little rum also. As we talk and a great laugh swim round, there come a
noise behind us like shuffling feet. We got to our legs quick. Mon Dieu,
a strange sight! A man stand looking at us with something in his face
that make my fingers cold all at once--a look--well you would think it
was carved in stone--it never change. Once I was at Fort Garry; the
Church of St. Mary is there. They have a picture in it of the great
scoundrel Judas as he went to hang himself. Judas was a fool--what was
thirty dollars!--you give me hunder' to take you to the Barren Grounds.
Pah!"
The half-breed chuckled, shook his head sagely, swore half-way through
his vocabulary at Whiskey Wine, gratefully received a pipe of tobacco
from Shon M'Gann, and continued: "He come in on us slow and still, and
push out long thin hands, the fingers bent like claws, towards the pot.
He was starving. Yes, it was so; but I nearly laugh. It was spring--a man
is a fool to starve in the spring. But he was differen'. There was a
cause. The factor give him soup from the pot and a little rum. He was mad
for meat, but that would have kill him--yes. He did not look at you like
a man.
"When you are starving, you are an animal. But there was something more
with this.--He made the flesh creep, he was so thin, and strange, and
sulky--eh, is that a word when the face looks dark and never smiles? So.
He would not talk. When we ask him where he come from, he points to the
north; when we ask him where he is going, he shake his head as he not
know. A man is mad not to know where he travel to up here; something
comes quick to him unless, and it is not good to die too soon. The trader
said, 'Come with us.' He shake his head, No. 'P'r'aps you want to stay
here,' said Ridley loud, showing his teeth all in a minute. He nod. Then
the trader laugh thick in his throat and give him more soup. After, he
try to make the man talk; but he was stubborn like that dirty Whiskey
Wine--ah, sacre bleu!"
Whiskey Wine had his usual portion of whip and anathema before Jacques
again took up the thread. "It was no use. He would not talk. When the
trader get angry once more, he turned to me, and the look in his face
make me sorry. I swore--Ridley did not mind that, I was thick friends
with him. I say, 'Keep still. It is no good. He has had bad times. He has
been lost, and seen mad things. He will never be again like when God make
him.' Very well, I spoke true. He was like a sun dog."
"What's that ye say, Parfaite?" said Shon--"a sun dog?"
Sir Duke Lawless, puzzled, listened eagerly for the reply.
The half-breed in delight ran before them, cracking his whip and jingling
the bells at his knees. "Ah, that's it! It is a name we have for some.
You do not know? It is easy. In the high-up country"--pointing
north"--you see sometimes many suns. But it is not many after all; it is
only one; and the rest are the same as your face in looking-glasses--one,
two, three, plenty. You see?"
"Yes," said Sir Duke, "reflections of the real sun." Parfaite tapped him
on the arm. "So: you have the thing. Well, this man is not himself--he
have left himself where he seen his bad times. It makes your flesh creep
sometimes when you see the sun dogs in the sky--this man did the same.
You shall see him tonight."
Sir Duke looked at the little half-breed, and wondered that the product
of so crude a civilisation should be so little crude in his imagination.
"What happened?" he asked.
"Nothing happened. But the man could not sleep. He sit before the fire,
his eyes moving here and there, and sometimes he shiver. Well, I watch
him. In the morning we leave him there, and he has been there ever
since--the only man at the Fort. The Indians do not go; they fear him;
but there is no harm in him. He is old now. In an hour we'll be there."
The sun was hanging, with one shoulder up like a great red peering dwarf,
on the far side of a long hillock of stunted pines, when the three
arrived at the Fort. The yard was still as Parfaite had described
it--full of rank grass, through which one path trailed to the open door.
On the stockade walls grass grew, as though where men will not live like
men Nature labours to smother. The shutters of the window were not open;
light only entered through narrow openings in them, made for the needs of
possible attacks by Indians in the far past. One would have sworn that
anyone dwelling there was more like the dead than the living. Yet it had,
too, something of the peace of the lonely graveyard. There was no one in
the Fort; but there were signs of life--skins piled here and there, a few
utensils, a bench, a hammock for food swung from the rafters, a low fire
burning in the chimney, and a rude spear stretched on the wall.
"Sure, the place gives you shivers!" said Shon. "Open go these windows.
Put wood on the fire, Parfaite; cook the meat that we've brought, and no
other, me boy; and whin we're filled wid a meal and the love o' God,
bring in your Lost Man, or Sun Dog, or whativer's he by name or nature."
While Parfaite and Shon busied themselves, Lawless wandered out with his
gun, and, drawn on by the clear joyous air of the evening, walked along a
path made by the same feet that had travelled the yard of the Fort. He
followed it almost unconsciously at first, thinking of the strange
histories that the far north hoards in its fastnesses, wondering what
singular fate had driven the host of this secluded tavern--farthest from
the pleasant south country, nearest to the Pole--to stand, as it were, a
sentinel at the raw outposts of the world. He looked down at the trail
where he was walking with a kind of awe, which even his cheerful common
sense could not dismiss.
He came to the top of a ridge on which were a handful of meagre trees.
Leaning on his gun, he looked straight away into the farthest distance.
On the left was a blurred edge of pines, with tops like ungainly tendrils
feeling for the sky. On the right was a long bare stretch of hills veiled
in the thin smoke of the evening, and between, straight before him, was a
wide lane of unknown country, billowing away to where it froze into the
vast archipelago that closes with the summit of the world. He experienced
now that weird charm which has drawn so many into Arctic wilds and
gathered the eyes of millions longingly. Wife, child, London,
civilisation, were forgotten for the moment. He was under a spell which,
once felt, lingers in your veins always.
At length his look drew away from the glimmering distance, and he
suddenly became conscious of human presence. Here, almost at his feet,
was a man, also looking out along that slumbering waste. He was dressed
in skins, his arms were folded across his breast, his chin bent low, and
he gazed up and out from deep eyes shadowed by strong brows. Lawless saw
the shoulders of the watcher heave and shake once or twice, and then a
voice with a deep aching trouble in it spoke; but at first he could catch
no words. Presently, however, he heard distinctly, for the man raised his
hands high above his head, and the words fell painfully: "Am I my
brother's keeper?"
Then a low harsh laugh came from him, and he was silent again. Lawless
did not move. At last the man turned round, and, seeing him standing
motionless, his gun in his hands, he gave a hoarse cry. Then he stood
still. "If you have come to kill, do not wait," he said; "I am ready."
At the sound of Lawless's reassuring voice he recovered, and began, in
stumbling words, to excuse himself. His face was as Jacques Parfaite had
described it: trouble of some terrible kind was furrowed in it, and,
though his body was stalwart, he looked as if he had lived a century. His
eyes dwelt on Sir Duke Lawless for a moment, and then, coming nearer, he
said, "You are an Englishman?"
Lawless held out his hand in greeting, yet he was not sorry when the
other replied: "The hand of no man in greeting. Are you alone?"
When he had been told, he turned towards the Fort, and silently they made
their way to it. At the door he turned and said to Lawless, "My name--to
you--is Detmold."
The greeting between Jacques and his sombre host was notable for its
extreme brevity; with Shon McGann for its hesitation--Shon's
impressionable Irish nature was awed by the look of the man, though he
had seen some strange things in the north. Darkness was on them by this
time, and the host lighted bowls of fat with wicks of deer's tendons, and
by the light of these and the fire they ate their supper. Parfaite
beguiled the evening with tales of the north, always interesting to
Lawless; to which Shon added many a shrewd word of humour--for he had
recovered quickly from his first timidity in the presence of the
stranger.
As time went on Jacques saw that their host's eyes were frequently fixed
on Sir Duke in a half-eager, musing way, and he got Shon away to bed and
left the two together.
"You are a singular man. Why do you live here?" said Lawless. Then he
went straight to the heart of the thing. "What trouble have you had, of
what crime are you guilty?"
The man rose to his feet, shaking, and walked to and fro in the room for
a time, more than once trying to speak, but failing. He beckoned to
Lawless, and opened the door. Lawless took his hat and followed him along
the trail they had travelled before supper until they came to the ridge
where they had met. The man faced the north, the moon glistening coldly
on his grey hair. He spoke with incredible weight and slowness:
"I tell you--for you are one who understands men, and you come from a
life that I once knew well. I know of your people. I was of good
family--"
"I know the name," said Sir Duke quietly, at the same time fumbling in
his memory for flying bits of gossip and history which he could not
instantly find.
"There were two brothers of us. I was the younger. A ship was going to
the Arctic Sea." He pointed into the north. "We were both young and
ambitious. He was in the army, I the navy. We went with the expedition.
At first it was all beautiful and grand, and it seemed noble to search
for those others who had gone into that land and never come back. But our
ship got locked in the ice, and then came great trouble. A year went by
and we did not get free; then another year began. . . . Four of us set
out for the south. Two died. My brother and I were left--"
Lawless exclaimed. He now remembered how general sympathy went out to a
well-known county family when it was announced that two of its members
were lost in the Arctic regions.
Detmold continued: "I was the stronger. He grew weaker and weaker. It was
awful to live those days: the endless snow and cold, the long nights when
you could only hear the whirring of meteors, the bright sun which did not
warm you, nor even when many suns, the reflections of itself, followed
it--the mocking sun dogs, no more the sun than I am what my mother
brought into the world. . . . We walked like dumb men, for the dreadful
cold fills the heart with bitterness. I think I grew to hate him because
he could not travel faster, that days were lost, and death crept on so
pitilessly. Sometimes I had a mad wish to kill him. May you never know
suffering that begets such things! I laughed as I sat beside him, and saw
him sink to sleep and die. . . . I think I could have saved him. When he
was gone I--what do men do sometimes when starvation is on them, and they
have a hunger of hell to live? I did that shameless thing--and he was my
brother! . . . I lived, and was saved."
Lawless shrank away from the man, but words of horror got no farther than
his throat. And he was glad afterwards that it was so; for when he looked
again at this woful relic of humanity before him he felt a strange pity.
"God's hand is on me to punish," said the man. "It will never be lifted.
Death were easy: I bear the infamy of living."
Lawless reached out and caught him gently by the shoulders. "Poor fellow!
poor Detmold!" he said. For an instant the sorrowful face lighted, the
square chin trembled, and the hands thrust out towards Lawless, but
suddenly dropped.
"Go," he said humbly, "and leave me here. We must not meet again. . . I
have had one moment of respite. . . . Go."
Without a word, Lawless turned and made his way to the Fort. In the
morning the three comrades started on their journey again; but no one
sped them on their way or watched them as they went.
THE PILOT OF BELLE AMOUR
He lived in a hut on a jutting crag of the Cliff of the King. You could
get to it by a hard climb up a precipitous pathway, or by a ladder of
ropes which swung from his cottage door down the cliff-side to the sands.
The bay that washed the sands was called Belle Amour. The cliff was huge,
sombre; it had a terrible granite moroseness. If you travelled back from
its edge until you stood within the very heart of Labrador, you would add
step upon step of barrenness and austerity.
Only at seasons did the bay share the gloom of the cliff. When out of its
shadow it was, in summer, very bright and playful, sometimes boisterous,
often idle, coquetting with the sands. There was a great difference
between the cliff and the bay: the cliff was only as it appeared, but the
bay was a shameless hypocrite. For under one shoulder it hid a range of
reefs, and, at a spot where the shadows of the cliff never reached it,
and the sun played with a grim kind of joy, a long needle of rock ran up
at an angle under the water, waiting to pierce irresistibly the
adventurous ship that, in some mad moment, should creep to its shores.
The man was more like the cliff than the bay: stern, powerful, brooding.
His only companions were the Indians, who in summer-time came and went,
getting stores of him, which he in turn got from a post of the Hudson's
Bay Company, seventy miles up the coast. At one time the Company,
impressed by the number of skins brought to them by the pilot, and the
stores he bought of them, had thought of establishing a post at Belle
Amour; but they saw that his dealings with them were fair and that he had
small gain, and they decided to use him as an unofficial agent, and reap
what profit was to be had as things stood. Kenyon, the Company's agent,
who had the Post, was keen to know why Gaspard the pilot lived at Belle
Amour. No white man sojourned near him, and he saw no one save now and
then a priest who travelled silently among the Indians, or some
fisherman, hunter, or woodsman, who, for pleasure or from pure adventure,
ran into the bay and tasted the hospitality tucked away on a ledge of the
Cliff of the King.
To Kenyon, Gaspard was unresponsive, however adroit the catechism. Father
Corraine also, who sometimes stepped across the dark threshold of
Gaspard's hut, would have, for the man's soul's sake, dug out the heart
of his secret; but Gaspard, open with food, fire, blanket, and tireless
attendance, closed like the doors of a dungeon when the priest would have
read him. At the name of good Ste. Anne he would make the sacred gesture,
and would take a blessing when the priest passed from his hut to go again
into the wilds; but when pressed to disclose his mind and history, he
would always say: "M'sieu', I have nothing to confess." After a number of
years the priest ceased to ask him, and he remained with the secret of
his life, inscrutable and silent.
Being vigilant, one would have seen, however, that he lived in some land
of memory or anticipation, beyond his life of daily toil and usual
dealing. The hut seemed to have been built at a point where east and west
and south the great gulf could be seen and watched. It seemed almost
ludicrous that a man should call himself a pilot on a coast and at a bay
where a pilot was scarce needed once a year. But he was known as Gaspard
the pilot, and on those rare occasions when a vessel did anchor in the
bay, he performed his duties with such a certainty as to leave unguessed
how many deathtraps crouched near that shore. At such times, however,
Gaspard seemed to look twenty years younger. A light would come into his
face, a stalwart kind of pride sit on him, though beneath there lurked a
strange, sardonic look in his deep eyes--such a grim furtiveness as
though he should say: "If I but twist my finger we are all for the
fishes." But he kept his secret and waited. He never seemed to tire of
looking down the gulf, as though expecting some ship. If one appeared and
passed on, he merely nodded his head, hung up his glass, returned to his
work, or, sitting by the door, talked to himself in low, strange tones.
If one came near, making as if it would enter the bay, a hungry joy
possessed him. If a storm was on, the joy was the greater. No pilot ever
ventured to a ship on such rough seas as Gaspard ventured for small
profit or glory.
Behind it all lay his secret. There came one day a man who discovered it.
It was Pierre, the half-breed adventurer. There was no point in all the
wild northland which Pierre had not touched. He loved it as he loved the
game of life. He never said so of it, but he never said so of the game of
life, and he played it with a deep subterranean joy. He had had his way
with the musk-ox in the Arctic Circle; with the white bear at the foot of
Alaskan Hills; with the seal in Baffin's Bay; with the puma on the slope
of the Pacific; and now at last he had come upon the trail of Labrador.
Its sternness, its moodiness pleased him. He smiled at it the
comprehending smile of the man who has fingered the nerves and the heart
of men and things. As a traveller, wandering through a prison, looks upon
its grim cells and dungeons with the eye of unembarrassed freedom,
finding no direful significance in the clank of its iron, so Pierre
travelled down with a handful of Indians through the hard fastnesses of
that country, and, at last, alone, came upon the bay of Belle Amour.