_ CHAPTER VII
Father Roland slipped the little plush box into his pocket as he and David went out to join Thoreau. They left the cabin together, Marie lifting her eyes from her work in a furtive glance to see if the stranger was wearing her cap.
A wild outcry from the dogs greeted the three men as they appeared outside the door, and for the first time David saw with his eyes what he had only heard last night. Among the balsams and spruce close to the cabin there were fully a score of the wildest and most savage-looking dogs he had ever beheld. As he stood for a moment, gazing about him, three things impressed themselves upon him in a flash: it was a glorious day, it was so cold that he felt a curious sting in the air, and not one of those long-haired, white-fanged beasts straining at their leashes possessed a kennel, or even a brush shelter. It was this last fact that struck him most forcefully. Inherently he was a lover of animals, and he believed these four-footed creatures of Thoreau's must have suffered terribly during the night. He noticed that at the foot of each tree to which a dog was attached there was a round, smooth depression in the snow, where the animal had slept. The next few minutes added to his conviction that the Frenchman and the Missioner were heartless masters, though open-handed hosts. Mukoki and another Indian had come up with two gunny sacks, and from one of these a bushel of fish was emptied out upon the snow. They were frozen stiff, so that Mukoki had to separate them with his belt-axe; David fancied they must be hard as rock. Thoreau proceeded to toss these fish to the dogs, one at a time, and one to each dog. The watchful and apparently famished beasts caught the fish in mid-air, and there followed a snarling and grinding of teeth and smashing of bones and frozen flesh that made David shiver. He was half disgusted. Thoreau might at least have boiled the fish, or thawed them out. A fish weighing from one and a half to two pounds was each dog's allotment, and the work--if this feeding process could be called work--was done. Father Roland watched the dogs, rubbing his hands with satisfaction. Thoreau was showing his big, white teeth, as if proud of something.
"Not a bad tooth among them, _mon Pere_," he said. "Not one!"
"Fine--fine--but a little too fat, Thoreau. You're feeding them too well for dogs out of the traces," replied Father Roland.
David gasped.
"Too _well_!" he exclaimed. "They're half starved, and almost frozen! Look at the poor devils swallow those fish, ice and all! Why don't you cook the fish? Why don't you give them some sort of shelter to sleep in?"
Father Roland and the Frenchman stared at him as if they did not quite catch his meaning. Then a look of comprehension swept over the Missioner's face. He chuckled, the chuckle grew, it shook his body, and he laughed--laughed until the forest flung back the echoes of his merriment, and even the leathery faces of the Indians crinkled in sympathy. David could see no reason for his levity. He looked at Thoreau. His host was grinning broadly.
"God bless my soul!" said the Little Missioner at last. "Starved? Cold? _Boil_ their fish? Give 'em _beds_!" He stopped himself as he saw a flush rising in David's face. "Forgive me, David," he begged, laying a hand on the other's arm. "You can't understand how funny that was--what you said. If you gave those fellows the warmest kennels in New York City, lined with bear skins, they wouldn't sleep in them, but would come outside and burrow those little round holes in the snow. That's their nature. I've felt sorry for them, like you--when the thermometer was down to sixty. But it's no use. As for the fish--they want 'em fresh or frozen. I suppose you might educate them to eat cooked meat, but it would be like making over a lynx or a fox or a wolf. They're mighty comfortable, those dogs, David. That bunch of eight over there is mine. They'll take us north. And I want to warn you, don't put yourself in reach of them until they get acquainted with you. They're not pets, you know; I guess they'd appreciate petting just about as much as they would boiled fish, or poison. There's nothing on earth like a husky or an Eskimo dog when it comes to lookin' you in the eye with a friendly and lovable look and snapping your hand off at the same time. But you'll like 'em, David. You can't help feeling they're pretty good comrades when you see what they do in the traces."
Thoreau had shouldered the second gunny sack and now led the way into the thicker spruce and balsam behind the cabin. David and Father Roland followed, the latter explaining more fully why it was necessary to keep the sledge dogs "hard as rocks," and how the trick was done. He was still talking, with the fingers of one hand closed about the little plush box in his pocket, when they came to the first of the fox pens. He was watching David closely, a little anxiously--thrilled by the touch of that box. He read men as he read books, seeing much that was not in print, and feeling by a wonderful intuitive power emotions not visible in a face, and he believed that in David there were strange and conflicting forces struggling now for mastery. It was not in the surrender of the box that he had felt David's triumph, but in the voluntary sacrifice of what that box contained. He wanted to rid himself of the picture, and quickly. He was filled with apprehension lest David should weaken again, and ask for its return. The locket meant nothing. It was a bauble--cold, emotionless, easily forgotten; but the other--the picture of the woman who had almost destroyed him--was a deadly menace, a poison to David's soul and body as long as it remained in his possession, and the Little Missioner's fingers itched to tear it from the velvet casket and destroy it.
He watched his opportunity. As Thoreau tossed three fish over the high wire netting of the first pen the Frenchman was explaining to David why there were two female foxes and one male in each of his nine pens, and why warm houses partly covered with earth were necessary for their comfort and health, while the sledge dogs required nothing more than a bed of snow. Father Roland seized this opportunity to drop back toward the cabin, calling in Cree to Mukoki. Five seconds after the cabin concealed him from David he had the plush box out of his pocket; another five and he had opened it and the locket itself was in his hand. And then, his breath coming in a sudden, hissing spurt between his teeth, he was looking upon the face of the woman. Again in Cree he spoke to Mukoki, asking him for his knife. The Indian drew it from his sheath and watched in silence while Father Roland accomplished his work of destruction. The Missioner's teeth were set tight. There was a strange gleam of fire in his eyes. An unspoken malediction rose out of his soul. The work was done! He wanted to hurl the yellow trinket, shaped so sacrilegiously in the image of a heart, as far as he could fling it into the forest. It seemed to burn his fingers, and he held for it a personal hatred. But it was for Marie! Marie would prize it, and Marie would purify it. Against her breast, where beat a heart of his beloved Northland, it would cease to be a polluted thing. This was his thought as he replaced it in the casket and retraced his steps to the fox pens.
Thoreau was tossing fish into the last pen when Father Roland came up. David was not with him. In answer to the Missioner's inquiry he nodded toward the thicker growth of the forest where as yet his axe had not scarred the trees.
"He said that he would walk a little distance into the timber."
Father Roland muttered something that Thoreau did not catch, and then, a sudden brightness lighting up his eyes:
"I am going to leave you to-day."
"To-day, _mon Pere_!" Thoreau made a muffled exclamation of astonishment. "To-day? And it is fairly well along toward noon!"
"He cannot travel far." The Missioner nodded in the direction of the unthinned timber. "It will give us four hours, between noon and dark. He is soft. You understand? We will make as far as the old trapping shack you abandoned two winters ago over on Moose Creek. It is only eight miles, but it will be a bit of hardening for him. And, besides...."
He was silent for a moment, as if turning a matter over again in his own mind.
"I want to get him away."
He turned a searching, quietly analytic gaze upon Thoreau to see whether the Frenchman would understand without further explanation.
The fox breeder picked up the empty gunny sack.
"We will begin to pack the sledge, _mon Pere_. There must be a good hundred pounds to the dog."
As they turned back to the cabin Father Roland cast a look over his shoulder to see whether David was returning.
Three or four hundred yards in the forest David stood in a mute and increasing wonder. He was in a tiny open, and about him the spruce and balsam hung still as death under their heavy cloaks of freshly fallen snow. It was as if he had entered unexpectedly into a wonderland of amazing beauty, and that from its dark and hidden bowers, crusted with their glittering mantles of white, snow naiads must be peeping forth at him, holding their breath for fear of betraying themselves to his eyes. There was not the chirp of a bird nor the flutter of a wing--not the breath of a sound to disturb the wonderful silence. He was encompassed in a white, soft world that seemed tremendously unreal--that for some strange reason made him breathe very softly, that made him stand without a movement, and made him listen, as though he had come to the edge of the universe and that there were mysterious things to hear, and possibly to see, if he remained very quiet. It was the first sensation of its kind he had ever experienced; it was disquieting, and yet soothing; it filled him with an indefinable uneasiness, and yet with a strange yearning. He stood, in these moments, at the inscrutable threshold of the great North; he felt the enigmatical, voiceless spirit of it; it passed into his blood; it made his heart beat a little faster; it made him afraid, and yet daring. In his breast the spirit of adventure was waking--had awakened; he felt the call of the Northland, and it alarmed even as it thrilled him. He knew, now, that this was the beginning--the door opening to him--of a world that reached for hundreds of miles up there. Yes, there were thousands of miles of it, many thousands; white, as he saw it here; beautiful, terrible, and deathly still. And into this world Father Roland had asked him to go, and he had as good as pledged himself!
Before he could think, or stop himself, he had laughed. For an instant it struck him like mirth in a tomb, an unpleasant, soulless sort of mirth, for his laugh had in it a jarring incredulity, a mocking lack of faith in himself. What right had _he_ to enter into a world like that? Why, even now, his legs ached because of his exertion in furrowing through a few hundred steps of foot-and-a-half snow!
But the laugh succeeded in bringing him back into the reality of things. He started at right angles, pushed into the maze of white-robed spruce and balsam, and turned back in the direction of the cabin over a new trail. He was not in a good humour. There possessed him an ingrowing and acute feeling of animosity toward himself. Since the day--or night--fate had drawn that great, black curtain over his life, shutting out his sun, he had been drifting; he had been floating along on currents of the least resistance, making no fight, and, in the completeness of his grief and despair, allowing himself to disintegrate physically as well as mentally. He had sorrowed with himself; he had told himself that everything worth having was gone; but now, for the first time, he cursed himself. To-day--these few hundred yards out in the snow--had come as a test. They had proved his weakness. He had degenerated into less than a man! He was....
He clenched his hands inside his thick mittens, and a rage burned within him like a fire. Go with Father Roland? Go up into that world where he knew that the one great law of life was the survival of the fittest? Yes, he _would go_! This body and brain of his needed their punishment--and they should have it! He would go. And his body would fight for it, or die. The thought gave him an atrocious satisfaction. He was filled with a sudden contempt for himself. If Father Roland had known, he would have uttered a paean of joy.
Out of the darkness of the humour into which he had fallen, David was suddenly flung by a low and ferocious growl. He had stepped around a young balsam that stood like a seven-foot ghost in his path, and found himself face to face with a beast that was cringing at the butt of a thick spruce. It was a dog. The animal was not more than four or five short paces from him, and was chained to the tree. David surveyed him with sudden interest, wondering first of all why he was larger than the other dogs. As he lay crouched there against his tree, his ivory fangs gleaming between half-uplifted lips, he looked like a great wolf. In the other dogs David had witnessed an avaricious excitement at the approach of men, a hungry demand for food, a straining at leash ends, a whining and snarling comradeship. Here he saw none of those things. The big, wolf-like beast made no sound after that first growl, and made no movement. And yet every muscle in his body seemed gathered in a tense readiness to spring, and his gleaming fangs threatened. He was ferocious, and yet shrinking; ready to leap, and yet afraid. He was like a thing at bay--a hunted creature that had been prisoned. And then David noticed that he had but one good eye. It was bloodshot, balefully alert, and fixed on him like a round ball of fire. The lids had closed over his other eye; they were swollen; there was a big lump just over where the eye should have been. Then he saw that the beast's lips were cut and bleeding. There was blood on the snow; and suddenly the big brute covered his fangs to give a racking cough, as though he had swallowed a sharp fish-bone, and fresh blood dripped out of his mouth on the snow between his forepaws. One of these forepaws was twisted; it had been broken.
"You poor devil!" said David aloud.
He sat down on a birch log within six feet of the end of the chain, and looked steadily into the big husky's one bloodshot eye as he said again:
"You poor devil!"
Baree, the dog, did not understand. It puzzled him that this man did not carry a club. He was used to clubs. So far back as he could remember the club had been the one dominant thing in his life. It was a club that had closed his eye. It was a club that had broken one of his teeth and cut his lips, and it was a club that had beat against his ribs until--now--the blood came up into his throat and choked him, and dripped out of his mouth. But this man had no club, and he looked friendly.
"You poor devil!" said David for the third time.
Then he added, dark indignation in his voice:
"What, in God's name, has Thoreau been doing to you?"
There was something sickening in the spectacle--that battered, bleeding, broken creature huddling there against the tree, coughing up the red stuff that discoloured the snow. Loving dogs, he was not afraid of them, and forgetting Father Roland's warning he rose from the log and went nearer. From where he stood, looking down, Baree could have reached his throat. But he made no movement, unless it was that his thickly haired body was trembling a little. His one red eye looked steadily up at David.
For the fourth time David spoke;
"You poor, God-forsaken brute!"
There was friendliness, compassion, wonderment in his voice, and he held down a hand that he had drawn from one of the thick mittens. Another moment and he would have bent over, but a cry stopped him so sharply and suddenly that he jumped back.
Thoreau stood within ten feet of him, horrified. He clutched a rifle in one hand.
"Back--back, m'sieu!" he cried sharply. "For the love of God, jump back."
He swung his rifle into the crook of his arm. David did not move, and from Thoreau he looked down coolly at the dog. Baree was a changed beast. His one eye was fastened upon the fox breeder. His bared, bleeding lips revealed inch-long fangs between which there came now a low and menacing snarl. The tawny crest along his spine was like a brush; from a puzzled toleration of David his posture and look had changed into deadly hatred for Thoreau, and fear of him. For a moment after his first warning the Frenchman's voice seemed to stick in his throat as he saw what he believed to be David's fatal disregard of his peril. He did not speak to him again. His eyes were on the dog. Slowly he raised his rifle; David heard the click of the hammer--and Baree heard it. There was something in the sharp, metallic thrill of it that stirred his brute instinct. His lips fell over his fangs, he whined, and then, on his belly, he dragged himself slowly toward David!
It was a miracle that Thoreau the Frenchman looked upon then. He would have staked his very soul--wagered his hopes of paradise against a _babiche_ thread--that what he saw could never have happened between Baree and man. In utter amazement he lowered his gun. David, looking down, was smiling into that one, wide-open, bloodshot eye of Baree's, his hand reaching out. Foot by foot Baree slunk to him on his belly, and when at last he was at David's feet he faced Thoreau again, his terrible teeth snarling, a low, rumbling growl in his throat. David reached down and touched him, even as he heard the fox breeder make an incoherent sound in his beard. At the caress of his hand a great shudder passed through Baree's body, as if he had been stung. That touch was the connecting link through which passed the electrifying thrill of a man's soul reaching out to a brute instinct.
Baree had found a man friend!
When David stepped away from him to Thoreau's side as much of the Frenchman's face as was not hidden under his beard was of a curious ashen pallor. He seemed to make a struggle before he could get his voice.
And then: "M'sieu, I tell you it is incredible! I cannot believe what I have seen. It was a miracle!"
He shuddered. David was looking at him, a bit puzzled. He could not quite comprehend the fear that had possessed him. Thoreau saw this, and pointing to Baree--a gesture that brought a snarl from the beast--he said:
"He is bad, m'sieu, _bad_! He is the worst dog in all this country. He was born an outcast--among the wolves--and his heart is filled with murder. He is a quarter wolf, and you can't club it out of him. Half a dozen masters have owned him, and none of them has been able to club it out of him. I, myself, have beaten him until he lay as if dead, but it did no good. He has killed two of my dogs. He has leaped at my throat. I am afraid of him. I chained him to that tree a month ago to keep him away from the other dogs, and since then I have not been able to unleash him. He would tear me into pieces. Yesterday I beat him until he was almost dead, and still he was ready to go at my throat. So I am determined to kill him. He is no good. Step a little aside, m'sieu, while I put a bullet through his head!"
He raised his rifle again. David put a hand on it.
"I can unleash him," he said.
Before the other could speak, he had walked boldly to the tree. Baree did not turn his head--did not for an instant take his eye from Thoreau. There came the click of the snap that fastened the chain around the body of the spruce, and David stood with the loose end of the chain in his hand.
"There!"
He laughed a little proudly.
"And I didn't use a club," he added.
Thoreau gasped "_Mon Dieu_!" and sat down on the birch log as though the strength had gone from his legs.
David rattled the chain and then re-fastened it about the spruce. Baree was still watching Thoreau, who sat staring at him as if the beast had suddenly changed his shape and species.
In David's breast there was the thrill of a new triumph. He had done it unconsciously, without fear, and without feeling that there had been any great danger. In those few minutes something of his old self had returned into him; he felt a new excitement pumping the blood through his heart, and he felt the warm glow of it in his body. Baree had awakened something within him--Baree and the _club_. He went to Thoreau, who had risen from the log. He laughed again, a bit exultantly.
"I am going north with Father Roland," he said. "Will you let me have the dog, Thoreau? It will save you the trouble of killing him."
Thoreau stared at him blankly for a moment before he answered.
"That dog? You? Into the North?" He shot a look full of hatred and disgust at Baree. "Would you risk it, m'sieu?"
"Yes. It is an adventure I would very much like to try. You may think it strange, Thoreau, but that dog--ugly and fierce as he is--has found a place with me. I like him. And I fancy he has begun to like me."
"But look at his eye, m'sieu----"
"Which eye?" demanded David. "The one you have shut with a club?"
"He deserved it," muttered Thoreau. "He snapped at my hand. But I mean the other eye, m'sieu--the one that is glaring at us now like a red bloodstone with the heart of a devil in it! I tell you he is a quarter wolf...."
"And the broken paw. I suppose that was done by a club, too?" interrupted David.
"It was broken like that when I traded for him a year ago, m'sieu. I have not maimed him. And ... yes, you may have the beast! May the saints preserve you!"
"And his name?"
"The Indian who owned him as a puppy five years ago called him Baree, which among the Dog Ribs means Wild Blood. He should have been called The Devil."
Thoreau shrugged his shoulders, as though the matter and its consequences were now off his hands, and turned in the direction of the cabin. As he followed the Frenchman, David looked back at Baree. The big husky had risen from the snow. He was standing at the full length of his chain, and as David disappeared among the spruce a low whine that was filled with a strange yearning followed him. He did not hear the whine, but there came to him distinctly a moment later the dog's racking cough, and he shivered, and his eyes burned into Thoreau's broad back as he thought of the fresh blood-clots that were staining the white snow. _