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The Golden Snare

J >> James Oliver Curwood >> The Golden Snare



Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

THE GOLDEN SNARE

BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

AUTHOR OF KAZAN, THE DANGER TRAIL, THE COURAGE OF MARGE O'DOONE,
THE GRIZZLY KING, ETC.





THE GOLDEN SNARE





CHAPTER I




Bram Johnson was an unusual man, even for the northland. He was,
above all other things, a creature of environment--and necessity,
and of that something else which made of him at times a man with a
soul, and at others a brute with the heart of a devil. In this
story of Bram, and the girl, and the other man, Bram himself
should not be blamed too much. He was pathetic, and yet he was
terrible. It is doubtful if he really had what is generally
regarded as a soul. If he did, it was hidden--hidden to the
forests and the wild things that had made him.

Bram's story started long before he was born, at least three
generations before. That was before the Johnsons had gone north of
Sixty. But they were wandering, and steadily upward. If one puts a
canoe in the Lower Athabasca and travels northward to the Great
Slave and thence up the Mackenzie to the Arctic he will note a
number of remarkable ethnological changes. The racial
characteristics of the world he is entering change swiftly. The
thin-faced Chippewa with his alert movements and high-bowed canoe
turns into the slower moving Cree, with his broader cheeks, his
more slanting eyes, and his racier birchbark. And even the Cree
changes as he lives farther north; each new tribe is a little
different from its southernmost neighbor, until at last the Cree
looks like a Jap, and the Chippewyan takes his place. And the
Chippewyan takes up the story of life where the Cree left off.
Nearer the Arctic his canoe becomes a skin kaiak, his face is
still broader, Ms eyes like a Chinaman's, and writers of human
history call him Eskimo.

The Johnsons, once they started, did not stop at any particular
point. There was probably only one Johnson in the beginning of
that hundred year story which was to have its finality in Bram.
But there were more in time. The Johnson blood mixed itself first
with the Chippewa, and then with the Cree--and the Cree-Chippewa
Johnson blood, when at last it reached the Eskimo, had in it also
a strain of Chippewyan. It is curious how the name itself lived.
Johnson! One entered a tepee or a cabin expecting to find there a
white man, and was startled when he discovered the truth.

Bram, after nearly a century of this intermixing of bloods, was a
throwback--a white man, so far as his skin and his hair and his
eyes went. In other physical ways he held to the type of his half-
strain Eskimo mother, except in size. He was six feet, and a giant
in strength. His face was broad, his cheek-bones high, his lips
thick, his nose flat. And he was WHITE. That was the shocking
thing about it all. Even his hair was a reddish blonde, wild and
coarse and ragged like a lion's mane, and his eyes were sometimes
of a curious blue, and at others--when he was angered--green like
a cat's at night-time.

No man knew Bram for a friend. He was a mystery. He never remained
at a post longer than was necessary to exchange his furs for
supplies, and it might be months or even years before he returned
to that particular post again. He was ceaselessly wandering. More
or less the Royal Northwest Mounted Police kept track of him, and
in many reports of faraway patrols filed at Headquarters there are
the laconic words, "We saw Bram and his wolves traveling
northward" or "Bram and his wolves passed us"--always Bram AND HIS
WOLVES. For two years the Police lost track of him. That was when
Bram was buried in the heart of the Sulphur Country east of the
Great Bear. After that the Police kept an even closer watch on
him, waiting, and expecting something to happen. And then--the
something came. Bram killed a man. He did it so neatly and so
easily, breaking him as he might have broken a stick, that he was
well off in flight before it was discovered that his victim was
dead. The next tragedy followed quickly--a fortnight later, when
Corporal Lee and a private from the Fort Churchill barracks closed
in on him out on the edge of the Barren. Bram didn't fire a shot.
They could hear his great, strange laugh when they were still a
quarter of a mile away from him. Bram merely set loose his wolves.
By a miracle Corporal Lee lived to drag himself to a half-breed's
cabin, where he died a little later, and the half-breed brought
the story to Fort Churchill.

After this, Bram disappeared from the eyes of the world. What he
lived in those four or five years that followed would well be
worth his pardon if his experiences could be made to appear
between the covers of a book. Bram--AND HIS WOLVES! Think of it.
Alone. In all that time without a voice to talk to him. Not once
appearing at a post for food. A loup-garou. An animal-man. A
companion of wolves. By the end of the third year there was not a
drop of dog-blood in his pack. It was wolf, all wolf. From whelps
he brought the wolves up, until he had twenty in his pack. They
were monsters, for the under-grown ones he killed. Perhaps he
would have given them freedom in place of death, but these wolf-
beasts of Bram's would not accept freedom. In him they recognized
instinctively the super-beast, and they were his slaves. And Bram,
monstrous and half animal himself, loved them. To him they were
brother, sister, wife--all creation. He slept with them, and ate
with them, and starved with them when food was scarce. They were
comradeship and protection. When Bram wanted meat, and there was
meat in the country, he would set his wolf-horde on the trail of a
caribou or a moose, and if they drove half a dozen miles ahead of
Bram himself there would always be plenty of meat left on the
bones when he arrived. Four years of that! The Police would not
believe it. They laughed at the occasional rumors that drifted in
from the far places; rumors that Bram had been seen, and that his
great voice had been heard rising above the howl of his pack on
still winter nights, and that half-breeds and Indians had come
upon his trails, here and there--at widely divergent places. It
was the French half-breed superstition of the chasse-galere that
chiefly made them disbelieve, and the chasse-galere is a thing not
to be laughed at in the northland. It is composed of creatures who
have sold their souls to the devil for the power of navigating the
air, and there were those who swore with their hands on the
crucifix of the Virgin that they had with their own eyes seen Bram
and his wolves pursuing the shadowy forms of great beasts through
the skies.

So the Police believed that Bram was dead; and Bram, meanwhile,
keeping himself from all human eyes, was becoming more and more
each day like the wolves who were his brothers. But the white
blood in a man dies hard, and always there flickered in the heart
of Bram's huge chest a great yearning. It must at times have been
worse than death--that yearning to hear a human voice, to have a
human creature to speak to, though never had he loved man or
woman. Which brings us at last to the final tremendous climax in
Bram's life--to the girl, and the other man.





CHAPTER II




The other man was Raine--Philip Raine.

To-night he sat in Pierre Breault's cabin, with Pierre at the
opposite side of the table between them, and the cabin's sheet
iron stove blazing red just beyond. It was a terrible night
outside. Pierre, the fox hunter, had built his shack at the end of
a long slim forefinger of scrub spruce that reached out into the
Barren, and to-night the wind was wailing and moaning over the
open spaces in a way that made Raine shiver. Close to the east was
Hudson's Bay--so close that a few moments before when Raine had
opened the cabin door there came to him the low, never-ceasing
thunder of the under-currents fighting their way down through the
Roes Welcome from the Arctic Ocean, broken now and then by a
growling roar as the giant forces sent a crack, like a great
knife, through one of the frozen mountains. Westward from Pierre's
cabin there stretched the lifeless Barren, illimitable and void,
without rock or bush, and overhung at day by a sky that always
made Raine think of a terrible picture he had once seen of Dore's
"Inferno"--a low, thick sky, like purple and blue granite, always
threatening to pitch itself down in terrific avalanches. And at
night, when the white foxes yapped, and the wind moaned--

"As I have hope of paradise I swear that I saw him--alive,
M'sieu," Pierre was saying again over the table.

Raine, of the Fort Churchill patrol of the Royal Northwest Mounted
Police, no longer smiled in disbelief. He knew that Pierre Breault
was a brave man, or he would not have perched himself alone out in
the heart of the Barren to catch the white foxes; and he was not
superstitious, like most of his kind, or the sobbing cries and
strife of the everlasting night-winds would have driven him away.

"I swear it!" repeated Pierre.

Something that was almost eagerness was burning now in Philip's
face. He leaned over the table, his hands gripping tightly. He was
thirty-five; almost slim as Pierre himself, with eyes as steely
blue as Pierre's were black. There was a time, away back, when he
wore a dress suit as no other man in the big western city where he
lived; now the sleeves of his caribou skin coat were frayed and
torn, his hands were knotted, in his face were the lines of storm
and wind.

"It is impossible," he said. "Bram Johnson is dead!"

"He is alive, M'sieu."

In Pierre's voice there was a strange tremble.

"If I had only HEARD, if I had not SEEN, you might disbelieve,
M'sieu," he cried, his eyes glowing with a dark fire. "Yes, I
heard the cry of the pack first, and I went to the door, and
opened it, and stood there listening and looking out into the
night. UGH! they went near. I could hear the hoofs of the caribou.
And then I heard a great cry, a voice that rose above the howl of
the wolves like the voice of ten men, and I knew that Bram Johnson
was on the trail of meat. MON DIEU--yes--he is alive. And that is
not all. No. No. That is not all--"

His fingers were twitching. For the third or fourth time in the
last three-quarters of an hour Raine saw him fighting back a
strange excitement. His own incredulity was gone. He was beginning
to believe Pierre.

"And after that--you saw him?"

"Yes. I would not do again what I did then for all the foxes
between the Athabasca and the Bay, M'sieu. It must have been--I
don't know what. It dragged me out into the night. I followed. I
found the trail of the wolves, and I found the snowshoe tracks of
a man. Oui. I still followed. I came close to the kill, with the
wind in my face, and I could hear the snapping of jaws and the
rending of flesh--yes--yes--AND A MAN'S TERRIBLE LAUGH! If the
wind had shifted--if that pack of devils' souls had caught the
smell of me--tonnerre de dieu!" He shuddered, and the knuckles of
his fingers snapped as he clenched and unclenched his hands. "But
I stayed there, M'sieu, half buried in a snow dune. They went on
after a long time. It was so dark I could not see them. I went to
the kill then, and--yes, he had carried away the two hind quarters
of the caribou. It was a bull, too, and heavy. I followed--clean
across that strip of Barren down to the timber, and it was there
that Bram built himself the fire. I could see him then, and I
swear by the Blessed Virgin that it was Bram! Long ago, before he
killed the man, he came twice to my cabin--and he had not
changed. And around him, in the fire-glow, the wolves huddled. It
was then that I came to my reason. I could see him fondling them.
I could see their gleaming fangs. Yes, I could HEAR their bodies,
and he was talking to them and laughing with them through his
great beard--and I turned and fled back to the cabin, running so
swiftly that even the wolves would have had trouble in catching
me. And that--that--WAS NOT ALL!"

Again his fingers were clenching and unclenching as he stared at
Raine.

"You believe me, M'sieu?"

Philip nodded.

"It seems impossible. And yet--you could not have been dreaming,
Pierre."

Breault drew a deep breath of satisfaction, and half rose to his
feet.

"And you will believe me if I tell you the rest?"

"Yes."

Swiftly Pierre went to his bunk and returned with the caribou skin
pouch in which he carried his flint and steel and fire material
for the trail.

"The next day I went back, M'sieu," he said, seating himself again
opposite Philip. "Bram and his wolves were gone. He had slept in a
shelter of spruce boughs. And--and--par les mille cornes du diable
if he had even brushed the snow out! His great moccasin tracks
were all about among the tracks of the wolves, and they were big
as the spoor of a monster bear. I searched everywhere for
something that he might have left, and I found--at last--a rabbit
snare."

Pierre Breault's eyes, and not his words--and the curious twisting
and interlocking of his long slim fingers about the caribou-skin
bag in his hand stirred Philip with the thrill of a tense and
mysterious anticipation, and as he waited, uttering no word,
Pierre's fingers opened the sack, and he said:

"A rabbit snare, M'sieu, which had dropped from his pocket into
the snow--"

In another moment he had given it into Philip's hands. The oil
lamp was hung straight above them. Its light flooded the table
between them, and from Philip's lips, as he stared at the snare,
there broke a gasp of amazement. Pierre had expected that cry. He
had at first been disbelieved; now his face burned with triumph.
It seemed, for a space, as if Philip had ceased breathing. He
stared--stared--while the light from above him scintillated on the
thing he held. It was a snare. There could be no doubt of that. It
was almost a yard in length, with the curious Chippewyan loop at
one end and the double-knot at the other.

The amazing thing about it was that it was made of a woman's
golden hair.





CHAPTER III




The process of mental induction occasionally does not pause to
reason its way, but leaps to an immediate and startling finality,
which, by reason of its very suddenness, is for a space like the
shock of a sudden blow. After that one gasp of amazement Philip
made no sound. He spoke no word to Pierre. In a sudden lull of the
wind sweeping over the cabin the ticking of his watch was like the
beating of a tiny drum. Then, slowly, his eyes rose from the
silken thread in his fingers and met Pierre's. Each knew what the
other was thinking. If the hair had been black. If it had been
brown. Even had it been of the coarse red of the blond Eskimo of
the upper Mackenzie! But it was gold--shimmering gold.

Still without speaking, Philip drew a knife from his pocket and
cut the shining thread above the second knot, and worked at the
finely wrought weaving of the silken filaments until a tress of
hair, crinkled and waving, lay on the table before them. If he had
possessed a doubt, it was gone now. He could not remember where he
had ever seen just that colored gold in a woman's hair. Probably
he had, at one time or another. It was not red gold. It possessed
no coppery shades and lights as it rippled there in the lamp glow.
It was flaxen, and like spun silk--so fine that, as he looked at
it, he marveled at the patience that had woven it into a snare.
Again he looked at Pierre. The same question was in their eyes.

"It must be--that Bram has a woman with him," said Pierre.

"It must be," said Philip. "Or--"

That final word, its voiceless significance, the inflection which
Philip gave to it as he gazed at Pierre, stood for the one
tremendous question which, for a space, possessed the mind of
each. Pierre shrugged his shoulders. He could not answer it. And
as he shrugged his shoulders he shivered, and at a sudden blast of
the wind against the cabin door he turned quickly, as though he
thought the blow might have been struck by a human hand.

"Diable!" he cried, recovering himself, his white teeth flashing a
smile at Philip. "It has made me nervous--what I saw there in the
light of the campfire, M'sieu. Bram, and his wolves, and THAT!"

He nodded at the shimmering strands.

"You have never seen hair the color of this, Pierre?"

"Non. In all my life--not once."

"And yet you have seen white women at Fort Churchill, at York
Factory, at Lac la Biche, at Cumberland House, and Norway House,
and at Fort Albany?"

"Ah-h-h, and at many other places, M'sieu. At God's Lake, at Lac
Seul, and over on the Mackenzie--and never have I seen hair on a
woman like that."

"And Bram has never been out of the northland, never farther south
than Fort Chippewyan that we know of," said Philip. "It makes one
shiver, eh, Pierre? It makes one think of--WHAT? Can't you answer?
Isn't it in your mind?"

French and Cree were mixed half and half in Pierre's blood. The
pupils of his eyes dilated as he met Philip's steady gaze.

"It makes one think," he replied uneasily, "of the chasse-galere
and the loup-garou, and--and--almost makes one believe. I am not
superstitious, M'sieu--non--non--I am not superstitious," he cried
still more uneasily. "But many strange things are told about Bram
and his wolves;--that he has sold his soul to the devil, and can
travel through the air, and that he can change himself into the
form of a wolf at will. There are those who have heard him singing
the Chanson de Voyageur to the howling of his wolves away up in
the sky. I have seen them, and talked with them, and over on the
McLeod I saw a whole tribe making incantation because they had
seen Bram and his wolves building themselves a conjuror's house in
the heart of a thunder-cloud. So--is it strange that he should
snare rabbits with, a woman's hair?"

"And change black into the color of the sun?" added Philip,
falling purposely into the other's humor.

"If the rest is true--"

Pierre did not finish. He caught himself, swallowing hard, as
though a lump had risen in his throat, and for a moment or two
Philip saw him fighting with himself, struggling with the age-old
superstitions which had flared up for an instant like a powder-
flash. His jaws tightened, and he threw back his head.

"But those stories are NOT true, M'sieu," he added in a repressed
voice. "That is why I showed you the snare. Bram Johnson is not
dead. He is alive. And there is a woman with him, or--"

"Or--"

The same thought was in their eyes again. And again neither gave
voice to it. Carefully Philip was gathering up the strands of
hair, winding them about his forefinger, and placing them
afterward in a leather wallet which he took from his pocket. Then,
quite casually, he loaded his pipe and lighted it. He went to the
door, opened it, and for a few moments stood listening to the
screech of the wind over the Barren. Pierre, still seated at the
table, watched him attentively. Philip's mind was made up when he
closed the door and faced the half-breed again.

"It is three hundred miles from here to Fort Churchill," he said.
"Half way, at the lower end of Jesuche Lake, MacVeigh and his
patrol have made their headquarters. If I go after Bram, Pierre, I
must first make certain of getting a message to MacVeigh, and he
will see that it gets to Fort Churchill. Can you leave your foxes
and poison-baits and your deadfalls long enough for that?"

A moment Pierre hesitated.

Then he said:

"I will take the message."

Until late that night Philip sat up writing his report. He had
started out to run down a band of Indian thieves. More important
business had crossed his trail, and he explained the whole matter
to Superintendent Fitzgerald, commanding "M" Division at Fort
Churchill. He told Pierre Breault's story as he had heard it. He
gave his reasons for believing it, and that Bram Johnson, three
times a murderer, was alive. He asked that another man be sent
after the Indians, and explained, as nearly as he could, the
direction he would take in his pursuit of Bram.

When the report was finished and sealed he had omitted just one
thing.

Not a word had he written about the rabbit snare woven from a
woman's hair.





CHAPTER IV




The next morning the tail of the storm was still sweeping bitterly
over the edge of the Barren, but Philip set out, with Pierre
Breault as his guide, for the place where the half-breed had seen
Bram Johnson and his wolves in camp. Three days had passed since
that exciting night, and when they arrived at the spot where Bram
had slept the spruce shelter was half buried in a windrow of the
hard, shot like snow that the blizzard had rolled in off the open
spaces.

From this point Pierre marked off accurately the direction Bram
had taken the morning after the hunt, and Philip drew the point of
his compass to the now invisible trail. Almost instantly he drew
his conclusion.

"Bram is keeping to the scrub timber along the edge of the
Barren," he said to Pierre. "That is where I shall follow. You
might add that much to what I have written to MacVeigh. But about
the snare, Pierre Breault, say not a word. Do you understand? If
he is a loup-garou man, and weaves golden hairs out of the winds--"

"I will say nothing, M'sieu," shuddered Pierre.

They shook hands, and parted in silence. Philip set his face to
the west, and a few moments later, looking back, he could no
longer see Pierre. For an hour after that he was oppressed by the
feeling that he was voluntarily taking a desperate chance. For
reasons which he had arrived at during the night he had left his
dogs and sledge with Pierre, and was traveling light. In his
forty-pound pack, fitted snugly to his shoulders, were a three
pound silk service-tent that was impervious to the fiercest wind,
and an equal weight of cooking utensils. The rest of his burden,
outside of his rifle, his Colt's revolver and his ammunition, was
made up of rations, so much of which was scientifically compressed
into dehydrated and powder form that he carried on his back, in a
matter of thirty pounds, food sufficient for a month if he
provided his meat on the trail. The chief article in this
provision was fifteen pounds of flour; four dozen eggs he carried
in one pound of egg powder; twenty-eight pounds of potatoes in
four pounds of the dehydrated article; four pounds of onions in a
quarter of a pound of the concentration, and so on through the
list.

He laughed a little grimly as he thought of this concentrated
efficiency in the pack on his shoulders. In a curious sort of way
it reminded him of other days, and he wondered what some of his
old-time friends would say if he could, by some magic endowment,
assemble them here for a feast on the trail. He wondered
especially what Mignon Davenport would say--and do. P-f-f-f! He
could see the blue-blooded horror in her aristocratic face! That
wind from over the Barren would curdle the life in her veins. She
would shrivel up and die. He considered himself a fairly good
judge in the matter, for once upon a time he thought that he was
going to marry her. Strange why he should think of her now, he
told himself; but for all that he could not get rid of her for a
time. And thinking of her, his mind traveled back into the old
days, even as he followed over the hidden trail of Bram.
Undoubtedly a great many of his old friends had forgotten him.
Five years was a long time, and friendship in the set to which he
belonged was not famous for its longevity. Nor love, for that
matter. Mignon had convinced him of that. He grimaced, and in the
teeth of the wind he chuckled. Fate was a playful old chap. It was
a good joke he had played on him--first a bit of pneumonia, then a
set of bad lungs afflicted with that "galloping" something-or-other
that hollows one's cheeks and takes the blood out of one's
veins. It was then that the horror had grown larger and larger
each day in Mignon's big baby-blue eyes, until she came out with
childish frankness and said that it was terribly embarrassing to
have one's friends know that one was engaged to a consumptive.

Philip laughed as he thought of that. The laugh came so suddenly
and so explosively that Bram could have heard it a hundred yards
away, even with the wind blowing as it was. A consumptive! Philip
doubled up his arm until the hard muscles in it snapped. He drew
in a deep lungful of air, and forced it out again with a sound
like steam escaping from a valve. The NORTH had done that for him;
the north with its wonderful forests, its vast skies, its rivers,
and its lakes, and its deep snows--the north that makes a man out
of the husk of a man if given half a chance. He loved it. And
because he loved it, and the adventure of it, he had joined the
Police two years ago. Some day he would go back, just for the fun
of it; meet his old friends in his old clubs, and shock baby-eyed
Mignon to death with his good health.

He dropped these meditations as he thought of the mysterious man
he was following. During the course of his two years in the
Service he had picked up a great many odds and ends in the history
of Bram's life, and in the lives of the Johnsons who had preceded
him. He had never told any one how deeply interested he was. He
had, at times, made efforts to discuss the quality of Bram's
intelligence, but always he had failed to make others see and
understand his point of view. By the Indians and half-breeds of
the country in which he had lived, Bram was regarded as a monster
of the first order possessed of the conjuring powers of the devil
himself. By the police he was earnestly desired as the most
dangerous murderer at large in all the north, and the lucky man
who captured him, dead or alive, was sure of a sergeantcy.
Ambition and hope had run high in many valiant hearts until it was
generally conceded that Bram was dead.

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