The Son of the Wolf
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Jack London >> The Son of the Wolf
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11 The Son of the Wolf
Jack London
1900
Contains
The White Silence
The Son of the Wolf
The Men of Forty Mile
In a Far Country
To the Man on the Trail
The Priestly Prerogative
The Wisdom of the Trail
The Wife of a King
An Odyssey of the North
The White Silence
'Carmen won't last more than a couple of days.' Mason spat out a
chunk of ice and surveyed the poor animal ruefully, then put her
foot in his mouth and proceeded to bite out the ice which
clustered cruelly between the toes.
'I never saw a dog with a highfalutin' name that ever was worth a
rap,' he said, as he concluded his task and shoved her aside.
'They just fade away and die under the responsibility. Did ye
ever see one go wrong with a sensible name like Cassiar, Siwash,
or Husky? No, sir! Take a look at Shookum here, he's--' Snap! The
lean brute flashed up, the white teeth just missing Mason's
throat.
'Ye will, will ye?' A shrewd clout behind the ear with the butt
of the dog whip stretched the animal in the snow, quivering
softly, a yellow slaver dripping from its fangs.
'As I was saying, just look at Shookum here--he's got the spirit.
Bet ye he eats Carmen before the week's out.' 'I'll bank another
proposition against that,' replied Malemute Kid, reversing the
frozen bread placed before the fire to thaw. 'We'll eat Shookum
before the trip is over. What d'ye say, Ruth?' The Indian woman
settled the coffee with a piece of ice, glanced from Malemute Kid
to her husband, then at the dogs, but vouchsafed no reply. It was
such a palpable truism that none was necessary. Two hundred miles
of unbroken trail in prospect, with a scant six days' grub for
themselves and none for the dogs, could admit no other alternative.
The two men and the woman grouped about the fire and began their
meager meal. The dogs lay in their harnesses for it was a midday
halt, and watched each mouthful enviously.
'No more lunches after today,' said Malemute Kid. 'And we've got
to keep a close eye on the dogs--they're getting vicious. They'd
just as soon pull a fellow down as not, if they get a chance.'
'And I was president of an Epworth once, and taught in the Sunday
school.' Having irrelevantly delivered himself of this, Mason
fell into a dreamy contemplation of his steaming moccasins, but
was aroused by Ruth filling his cup.
'Thank God, we've got slathers of tea! I've seen it growing, down
in Tennessee. What wouldn't I give for a hot corn pone just now!
Never mind, Ruth; you won't starve much longer, nor wear
moccasins either.' The woman threw off her gloom at this, and in
her eyes welled up a great love for her white lord--the first
white man she had ever seen--the first man whom she had known to
treat a woman as something better than a mere animal or beast of
burden.
'Yes, Ruth,' continued her husband, having recourse to the
macaronic jargon in which it was alone possible for them to
understand each other; 'wait till we clean up and pull for the
Outside. We'll take the White Man's canoe and go to the Salt
Water. Yes, bad water, rough water--great mountains dance up and
down all the time. And so big, so far, so far away--you travel
ten sleep, twenty sleep, forty sleep'--he graphically enumerated
the days on his fingers--'all the time water, bad water. Then you
come to great village, plenty people, just the same mosquitoes
next summer. Wigwams oh, so high--ten, twenty pines.
'Hi-yu skookum!' He paused impotently, cast an appealing glance
at Malemute Kid, then laboriously placed the twenty pines, end on
end, by sign language. Malemute Kid smiled with cheery cynicism;
but Ruth's eyes were wide with wonder, and with pleasure; for she
half believed he was joking, and such condescension pleased her
poor woman's heart.
'And then you step into a--a box, and pouf! up you go.' He tossed
his empty cup in the air by way of illustration and, as he deftly
caught it, cried: 'And biff! down you come. Oh, great medicine
men! You go Fort Yukon. I go Arctic City--twenty-five sleep--big
string, all the time--I catch him string--I say, "Hello, Ruth!
How are ye?"--and you say, "Is that my good husband?"--and I say,
"Yes"--and you say, "No can bake good bread, no more soda"--then
I say, "Look in cache, under flour; good-by." You look and catch
plenty soda. All the time you Fort Yukon, me Arctic City. Hi-yu
medicine man!' Ruth smiled so ingenuously at the fairy story that
both men burst into laughter. A row among the dogs cut short the
wonders of the Outside, and by the time the snarling combatants
were separated, she had lashed the sleds and all was ready for
the trail.--'Mush! Baldy! Hi! Mush on!' Mason worked his whip
smartly and, as the dogs whined low in the traces, broke out the
sled with the gee pole. Ruth followed with the second team,
leaving Malemute Kid, who had helped her start, to bring up the
rear. Strong man, brute that he was, capable of felling an ox at
a blow, he could not bear to beat the poor animals, but humored
them as a dog driver rarely does--nay, almost wept with them in
their misery.
'Come, mush on there, you poor sore-footed brutes!' he murmured,
after several ineffectual attempts to start the load. But his
patience was at last rewarded, and though whimpering with pain,
they hastened to join their fellows.
No more conversation; the toil of the trail will not permit such
extravagance.
And of all deadening labors, that of the Northland trail is the
worst. Happy is the man who can weather a day's travel at the
price of silence, and that on a beaten track. And of all
heartbreaking labors, that of breaking trail is the worst. At
every step the great webbed shoe sinks till the snow is level
with the knee. Then up, straight up, the deviation of a fraction
of an inch being a certain precursor of disaster, the snowshoe
must be lifted till the surface is cleared; then forward, down,
and the other foot is raised perpendicularly for the matter of
half a yard. He who tries this for the first time, if haply he
avoids bringing his shoes in dangerous propinquity and measures
not his length on the treacherous footing, will give up exhausted
at the end of a hundred yards; he who can keep out of the way of
the dogs for a whole day may well crawl into his sleeping bag
with a clear conscience and a pride which passeth all
understanding; and he who travels twenty sleeps on the Long Trail
is a man whom the gods may envy.
The afternoon wore on, and with the awe, born of the White
Silence, the voiceless travelers bent to their work. Nature has
many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity--the
ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of
the earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery--but the most
tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of
the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the
heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and
man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole
speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead
world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a
maggot's life, nothing more.
Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things
strives for utterance.
And the fear of death, of God, of the universe, comes over
him--the hope of the Resurrection and the Life, the yearning for
immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence--it is
then, if ever, man walks alone with God.
So wore the day away. The river took a great bend, and Mason
headed his team for the cutoff across the narrow neck of land.
But the dogs balked at the high bank. Again and again, though
Ruth and Malemute Kid were shoving on the sled, they slipped
back. Then came the concerted effort. The miserable creatures,
weak from hunger, exerted their last strength. Up--up--the sled
poised on the top of the bank; but the leader swung the string of
dogs behind him to the right, fouling Mason's snowshoes. The
result was grievous.
Mason was whipped off his feet; one of the dogs fell in the
traces; and the sled toppled back, dragging everything to the
bottom again.
Slash! the whip fell among the dogs savagely, especially upon the
one which had fallen.
'Don't,--Mason,' entreated Malemute Kid; 'the poor devil's on its
last legs. Wait and we'll put my team on.' Mason deliberately
withheld the whip till the last word had fallen, then out flashed
the long lash, completely curling about the offending creature's
body.
Carmen--for it was Carmen--cowered in the snow, cried piteously,
then rolled over on her side.
It was a tragic moment, a pitiful incident of the trail--a dying
dog, two comrades in anger.
Ruth glanced solicitously from man to man. But Malemute Kid
restrained himself, though there was a world of reproach in his
eyes, and, bending over the dog, cut the traces. No word was
spoken. The teams were doublespanned and the difficulty overcome;
the sleds were under way again, the dying dog dragging herself
along in the rear. As long as an animal can travel, it is not
shot, and this last chance is accorded it--the crawling into
camp, if it can, in the hope of a moose being killed.
Already penitent for his angry action, but too stubborn to make
amends, Mason toiled on at the head of the cavalcade, little
dreaming that danger hovered in the air. The timber clustered
thick in the sheltered bottom, and through this they threaded
their way. Fifty feet or more from the trail towered a lofty
pine. For generations it had stood there, and for generations
destiny had had this one end in view--perhaps the same had been
decreed of Mason.
He stooped to fasten the loosened thong of his moccasin. The
sleds came to a halt, and the dogs lay down in the snow without a
whimper. The stillness was weird; not a breath rustled the
frost-encrusted forest; the cold and silence of outer space had
chilled the heart and smote the trembling lips of nature. A sigh
pulsed through the air--they did not seem to actually hear it,
but rather felt it, like the premonition of movement in a
motionless void. Then the great tree, burdened with its weight of
years and snow, played its last part in the tragedy of life. He
heard the warning crash and attempted to spring up but, almost
erect, caught the blow squarely on the shoulder.
The sudden danger, the quick death--how often had Malemute Kid
faced it! The pine needles were still quivering as he gave his
commands and sprang into action. Nor did the Indian girl faint or
raise her voice in idle wailing, as might many of her white
sisters. At his order, she threw her weight on the end of a
quickly extemporized handspike, easing the pressure and listening
to her husband's groans, while Malemute Kid attacked the tree
with his ax. The steel rang merrily as it bit into the frozen
trunk, each stroke being accompanied by a forced, audible
respiration, the 'Huh!' 'Huh!' of the woodsman.
At last the Kid laid the pitiable thing that was once a man in
the snow. But worse than his comrade's pain was the dumb anguish
in the woman's face, the blended look of hopeful, hopeless query.
Little was said; those of the Northland are early taught the
futility of words and the inestimable value of deeds. With the
temperature at sixty-five below zero, a man cannot lie many
minutes in the snow and live. So the sled lashings were cut, and
the sufferer, rolled in furs, laid on a couch of boughs. Before
him roared a fire, built of the very wood which wrought the
mishap. Behind and partially over him was stretched the primitive
fly--a piece of canvas, which caught the radiating heat and threw
it back and down upon him--a trick which men may know who study
physics at the fount.
And men who have shared their bed with death know when the call
is sounded. Mason was terribly crushed. The most cursory
examination revealed it.
His right arm, leg, and back were broken; his limbs were
paralyzed from the hips; and the likelihood of internal injuries
was large. An occasional moan was his only sign of life.
No hope; nothing to be done. The pitiless night crept slowly
by--Ruth's portion, the despairing stoicism of her race, and
Malemute Kid adding new lines to his face of bronze.
In fact, Mason suffered least of all, for he spent his time in
eastern Tennessee, in the Great Smoky Mountains, living over the
scenes of his childhood. And most pathetic was the melody of his
long-forgotten Southern vernacular, as he raved of swimming holes
and coon hunts and watermelon raids. It was as Greek to Ruth, but
the Kid understood and felt--felt as only one can feel who has
been shut out for years from all that civilization means.
Morning brought consciousness to the stricken man, and Malemute
Kid bent closer to catch his whispers.
'You remember when we foregathered on the Tanana, four years come
next ice run? I didn't care so much for her then. It was more
like she was pretty, and there was a smack of excitement about
it, I think. But d'ye know, I've come to think a heap of her.
She's been a good wife to me, always at my shoulder in the pinch.
And when it comes to trading, you know there isn't her equal.
D'ye recollect the time she shot the Moosehorn Rapids to pull you
and me off that rock, the bullets whipping the water like
hailstones?--and the time of the famine at Nuklukyeto?--when she
raced the ice run to bring the news?
'Yes, she's been a good wife to me, better'n that other one.
Didn't know I'd been there?
'Never told you, eh? Well, I tried it once, down in the States.
That's why I'm here. Been raised together, too. I came away to
give her a chance for divorce. She got it.
'But that's got nothing to do with Ruth. I had thought of
cleaning up and pulling for the Outside next year--her and I--but
it's too late. Don't send her back to her people, Kid. It's
beastly hard for a woman to go back. Think of it!--nearly four
years on our bacon and beans and flour and dried fruit, and then
to go back to her fish and caribou. It's not good for her to have
tried our ways, to come to know they're better'n her people's,
and then return to them. Take care of her, Kid, why don't you--but
no, you always fought shy of them--and you never told me why you
came to this country. Be kind to her, and send her back to the
States as soon as you can. But fix it so she can come back--liable
to get homesick, you know.
'And the youngster--it's drawn us closer, Kid. I only hope it is
a boy. Think of it!--flesh of my flesh, Kid. He mustn't stop in
this country. And if it's a girl, why, she can't. Sell my furs;
they'll fetch at least five thousand, and I've got as much more
with the company. And handle my interests with yours. I think
that bench claim will show up. See that he gets a good schooling;
and Kid, above all, don't let him come back. This country was not
made for white men.
'I'm a gone man, Kid. Three or four sleeps at the best. You've
got to go on. You must go on! Remember, it's my wife, it's my
boy--O God! I hope it's a boy! You can't stay by me--and I charge
you, a dying man, to pull on.'
'Give me three days,' pleaded Malemute Kid. 'You may change for
the better; something may turn up.'
'No.'
'Just three days.'
'You must pull on.'
'Two days.'
'It's my wife and my boy, Kid. You would not ask it.'
'One day.'
'No, no! I charge--'
'Only one day. We can shave it through on the grub, and I might
knock over a moose.'
'No--all right; one day, but not a minute more. And, Kid,
don't--don't leave me to face it alone. Just a shot, one pull on
the trigger. You understand. Think of it! Think of it! Flesh of
my flesh, and I'll never live to see him!
'Send Ruth here. I want to say good-by and tell her that she must
think of the boy and not wait till I'm dead. She might refuse to
go with you if I didn't. Goodby, old man; good-by.
'Kid! I say--a--sink a hole above the pup, next to the slide. I
panned out forty cents on my shovel there.
'And, Kid!' He stooped lower to catch the last faint words, the
dying man's surrender of his pride. 'I'm sorry--for--you
know--Carmen.' Leaving the girl crying softly over her man,
Malemute Kid slipped into his parka and snowshoes, tucked his
rifle under his arm, and crept away into the forest. He was no
tyro in the stern sorrows of the Northland, but never had he
faced so stiff a problem as this. In the abstract, it was a
plain, mathematical proposition--three possible lives as against
one doomed one. But now he hesitated. For five years, shoulder to
shoulder, on the rivers and trails, in the camps and mines,
facing death by field and flood and famine, had they knitted the
bonds of their comradeship. So close was the tie that he had
often been conscious of a vague jealousy of Ruth, from the first
time she had come between. And now it must be severed by his own
hand.
Though he prayed for a moose, just one moose, all game seemed to
have deserted the land, and nightfall found the exhausted man
crawling into camp, lighthanded, heavyhearted. An uproar from the
dogs and shrill cries from Ruth hastened him.
Bursting into the camp, he saw the girl in the midst of the
snarling pack, laying about her with an ax. The dogs had broken
the iron rule of their masters and were rushing the grub.
He joined the issue with his rifle reversed, and the hoary game
of natural selection was played out with all the ruthlessness of
its primeval environment. Rifle and ax went up and down, hit or
missed with monotonous regularity; lithe bodies flashed, with
wild eyes and dripping fangs; and man and beast fought for
supremacy to the bitterest conclusion. Then the beaten brutes
crept to the edge of the firelight, licking their wounds, voicing
their misery to the stars.
The whole stock of dried salmon had been devoured, and perhaps
five pounds of flour remained to tide them over two hundred miles
of wilderness. Ruth returned to her husband, while Malemute Kid
cut up the warm body of one of the dogs, the skull of which had
been crushed by the ax. Every portion was carefully put away,
save the hide and offal, which were cast to his fellows of the
moment before.
Morning brought fresh trouble. The animals were turning on each
other. Carmen, who still clung to her slender thread of life, was
downed by the pack. The lash fell among them unheeded. They
cringed and cried under the blows, but refused to scatter till
the last wretched bit had disappeared--bones, hide, hair,
everything.
Malemute Kid went about his work, listening to Mason, who was
back in Tennessee, delivering tangled discourses and wild
exhortations to his brethren of other days.
Taking advantage of neighboring pines, he worked rapidly, and
Ruth watched him make a cache similar to those sometimes used by
hunters to preserve their meat from the wolverines and dogs. One
after the other, he bent the tops of two small pines toward each
other and nearly to the ground, making them fast with thongs of
moosehide. Then he beat the dogs into submission and harnessed
them to two of the sleds, loading the same with everything but
the furs which enveloped Mason. These he wrapped and lashed
tightly about him, fastening either end of the robes to the bent
pines. A single stroke of his hunting knife would release them
and send the body high in the air.
Ruth had received her husband's last wishes and made no struggle.
Poor girl, she had learned the lesson of obedience well. From a
child, she had bowed, and seen all women bow, to the lords of
creation, and it did not seem in the nature of things for woman
to resist. The Kid permitted her one outburst of grief, as she
kissed her husband--her own people had no such custom--then led
her to the foremost sled and helped her into her snowshoes.
Blindly, instinctively, she took the gee pole and whip, and
'mushed' the dogs out on the trail. Then he returned to Mason,
who had fallen into a coma, and long after she was out of sight
crouched by the fire, waiting, hoping, praying for his comrade to
die.
It is not pleasant to be alone with painful thoughts in the White
Silence. The silence of gloom is merciful, shrouding one as with
protection and breathing a thousand intangible sympathies; but
the bright White Silence, clear and cold, under steely skies, is
pitiless.
An hour passed--two hours--but the man would not die. At high
noon the sun, without raising its rim above the southern horizon,
threw a suggestion of fire athwart the heavens, then quickly drew
it back. Malemute Kid roused and dragged himself to his comrade's
side. He cast one glance about him. The White Silence seemed to
sneer, and a great fear came upon him. There was a sharp report;
Mason swung into his aerial sepulcher, and Malemute Kid lashed
the dogs into a wild gallop as he fled across the snow.
The Son of the Wolf
Man rarely places a proper valuation upon his womankind, at least
not until deprived of them. He has no conception of the subtle
atmosphere exhaled by the sex feminine, so long as he bathes in
it; but let it be withdrawn, and an ever-growing void begins to
manifest itself in his existence, and he becomes hungry, in a
vague sort of way, for a something so indefinite that he cannot
characterize it. If his comrades have no more experience than
himself, they will shake their heads dubiously and dose him with
strong physic. But the hunger will continue and become stronger;
he will lose interest in the things of his everyday life and wax
morbid; and one day, when the emptiness has become unbearable, a
revelation will dawn upon him.
In the Yukon country, when this comes to pass, the man usually
provisions a poling boat, if it is summer, and if winter,
harnesses his dogs, and heads for the Southland. A few months
later, supposing him to be possessed of a faith in the country,
he returns with a wife to share with him in that faith, and
incidentally in his hardships. This but serves to show the innate
selfishness of man. It also brings us to the trouble of 'Scruff'
Mackenzie, which occurred in the old days, before the country was
stampeded and staked by a tidal-wave of the che-cha-quas, and
when the Klondike's only claim to notice was its salmon
fisheries.
'Scruff' Mackenzie bore the earmarks of a frontier birth and a
frontier life.
His face was stamped with twenty-five years of incessant struggle
with Nature in her wildest moods,--the last two, the wildest and
hardest of all, having been spent in groping for the gold which
lies in the shadow of the Arctic Circle. When the yearning
sickness came upon him, he was not surprised, for he was a
practical man and had seen other men thus stricken. But he showed
no sign of his malady, save that he worked harder. All summer he
fought mosquitoes and washed the sure-thing bars of the Stuart
River for a double grubstake. Then he floated a raft of houselogs
down the Yukon to Forty Mile, and put together as comfortable a
cabin as any the camp could boast of. In fact, it showed such
cozy promise that many men elected to be his partner and to come
and live with him. But he crushed their aspirations with rough
speech, peculiar for its strength and brevity, and bought a
double supply of grub from the trading-post.
As has been noted, 'Scruff' Mackenzie was a practical man. If he
wanted a thing he usually got it, but in doing so, went no
farther out of his way than was necessary. Though a son of toil
and hardship, he was averse to a journey of six hundred miles on
the ice, a second of two thousand miles on the ocean, and still a
third thousand miles or so to his last stamping-grounds,--all in
the mere quest of a wife. Life was too short. So he rounded up
his dogs, lashed a curious freight to his sled, and faced across
the divide whose westward slopes were drained by the head-reaches
of the Tanana.
He was a sturdy traveler, and his wolf-dogs could work harder and
travel farther on less grub than any other team in the Yukon.
Three weeks later he strode into a hunting-camp of the Upper
Tanana Sticks. They marveled at his temerity; for they had a bad
name and had been known to kill white men for as trifling a thing
as a sharp ax or a broken rifle.
But he went among them single-handed, his bearing being a
delicious composite of humility, familiarity, sang-froid, and
insolence. It required a deft hand and deep knowledge of the
barbaric mind effectually to handle such diverse weapons; but he
was a past-master in the art, knowing when to conciliate and when
to threaten with Jove-like wrath.
He first made obeisance to the Chief Thling-Tinneh, presenting
him with a couple of pounds of black tea and tobacco, and thereby
winning his most cordial regard. Then he mingled with the men and
maidens, and that night gave a potlach.
The snow was beaten down in the form of an oblong, perhaps a
hundred feet in length and quarter as many across. Down the
center a long fire was built, while either side was carpeted with
spruce boughs. The lodges were forsaken, and the fivescore or so
members of the tribe gave tongue to their folk-chants in honor of
their guest.
'Scruff' Mackenzie's two years had taught him the not many
hundred words of their vocabulary, and he had likewise conquered
their deep gutturals, their Japanese idioms, constructions, and
honorific and agglutinative particles. So he made oration after
their manner, satisfying their instinctive poetry-love with crude
flights of eloquence and metaphorical contortions. After
Thling-Tinneh and the Shaman had responded in kind, he made
trifling presents to the menfolk, joined in their singing, and
proved an expert in their fifty-two-stick gambling game.
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