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The Floating Press - Oliver Curwood James

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121 pages

English

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At the height of his literary career, Michigan-born author James Oliver Curwood was reported to be the highest-paid writer in the world. The collection Back to God's Country and Other Stories brings together some of Curwood's most memorable shorter pieces, many of which are set in the rugged wilderness of northwest Canada.

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Short story

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Publié par	The Floating Press
Date de parution	01 octobre 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781775561613
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0134€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY
AND OTHER STORIES
* * *
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

*
Back to God's Country And Other Stories First published in 1920 ISBN 978-1-77556-161-3 © 2012 The Floating Press and its licensors. All rights reserved. While every effort has been used to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information contained in The Floating Press edition of this book, The Floating Press does not assume liability or responsibility for any errors or omissions in this book. The Floating Press does not accept responsibility for loss suffered as a result of reliance upon the accuracy or currency of information contained in this book. Do not use while operating a motor vehicle or heavy equipment. Many suitcases look alike. Visit www.thefloatingpress.com
Contents
*
Back to God's Country The Yellow-Back The Fiddling Man L'ange The Case of Beauvais The Other Man's Wife The Strength of Men The Match The Honor of Her People Bucky Severn His First Penitent Peter God The Mouse
Back to God's Country
*
When Shan Tung, the long-cued Chinaman from Vancouver, started up theFrazer River in the old days when the Telegraph Trail and theheadwaters of the Peace were the Meccas of half the gold-huntingpopulation of British Columbia, he did not foresee tragedy ahead ofhim. He was a clever man, was Shan Tung, a cha-sukeed, a very devil inthe collecting of gold, and far-seeing. But he could not look fortyyears into the future, and when Shan Tung set off into the north, thatwinter, he was in reality touching fire to the end of a fuse that wasto burn through four decades before the explosion came.
With Shan Tung went Tao, a Great Dane. The Chinaman had picked him upsomewhere on the coast and had trained him as one trains a horse. Taowas the biggest dog ever seen about the Height of Land, the mostpowerful, and at times the most terrible. Of two things Shan Tung wasenormously proud in his silent and mysterious oriental way—of Tao, thedog, and of his long, shining cue which fell to the crook of his kneeswhen he let it down. It had been the longest cue in Vancouver, andtherefore it was the longest cue in British Columbia. The cue and thedog formed the combination which set the forty-year fuse of romance andtragedy burning. Shan Tung started for the El Dorados early in thewinter, and Tao alone pulled his sledge and outfit. It was no more thanan ordinary task for the monstrous Great Dane, and Shan Tungsubserviently but with hidden triumph passed outfit after outfitexhausted by the way. He had reached Copper Creek Camp, which wasboiling and frothing with the excitement of gold-maddened men, and wascongratulating himself that he would soon be at the camps west of thePeace, when the thing happened. A drunken Irishman, filled with a grimand unfortunate sense of humor, spotted Shan Tung's wonderful cue andcoveted it. Wherefore there followed a bit of excitement in which ShanTung passed into his empyrean home with a bullet through his heart, andthe drunken Irishman was strung up for his misdeed fifteen minuteslater. Tao, the Great Dane, was taken by the leader of the men whopulled on the rope. Tao's new master was a "drifter," and as hedrifted, his face was always set to the north, until at last a newhumor struck him and he turned eastward to the Mackenzie. As theseasons passed, Tao found mates along the way and left a string of hisprogeny behind him, and he had new masters, one after another, until hewas grown old and his muzzle was turning gray. And never did one ofthese masters turn south with him. Always it was north, north with thewhite man first, north with the Cree, and then wit h the Chippewayan,until in the end the dog born in a Vancouver kennel died in an Eskimoigloo on the Great Bear. But the breed of the Great Dane lived on. Hereand there, as the years passed, one would find among the Eskimotrace-dogs, a grizzled-haired, powerful-jawed giant that was alien tothe arctic stock, and in these occasional aliens ran the blood of Tao,the Dane.
Forty years, more or less, after Shan Tung lost his life and his cue atCopper Creek Camp, there was born on a firth of Coronation Gulf a dogwho was named Wapi, which means "the Walrus." Wapi, at full growth, wasa throwback of more than forty dog generations. He was nearly as largeas his forefather, Tao. His fangs were an inch in length, his greatjaws could crack the thigh-bone of a caribou, and from the beginningthe hands of men and the fangs of beasts were against him. Almost fromthe day of his birth until this winter of his fourth year, life forWapi had been an unceasing fight for existence. He was maya-tisew—badwith the badness of a devil. His reputation had gone from master tomaster and from igloo to igloo; women and children were afraid of him,and men always spoke to him with the club or the lash in their hands.He was hated and feared, and yet because he could run down abarren-land caribou and kill it within a mile, and would hold a bigwhite bear at bay until the hunters came, he was not sacrificed to thishate and fear. A hundred whips and clubs and a hundred pairs of handswere against him between Cape Perry and the crown of Franklin Bay—andthe fangs of twice as many dogs.
The dogs were responsible. Quick-tempered, clannish with the savagebrotherhood of the wolves, treacherous, jealous of leadership, and withthe older instincts of the dog dead within them, their merciless feudwith what they regarded as an interloper of another breed put the devilheart in Wapi. In all the gray and desolate sweep of his world he hadno friend. The heritage of Tao, his forefather, had fallen upon him,and he was an alien in a land of strangers. As the dogs and the men andwomen and children hated him, so he hated them. He hated the sight andsmell of the round-faced, blear-eyed creatures who were his master, yethe obeyed them, sullenly, watchfully, with his lips wrinkled warninglyover fangs which had twice torn out the life of white bears. Twentytimes he had killed other dogs. He had fought them singly, and inpairs, and in packs. His giant body bore the scars of a hundred wounds.He had been clubbed until a part of his body was deformed and hetraveled with a limp. He kept to himself even in the mating season. Andall this because Wapi, the Walrus, forty years removed from the GreatDane of Vancouver, was a white man's dog.
Stirring restlessly within him, sometimes coming to him in dreams andsometimes in a great and unfulfilled yearning, Wapi felt vaguely thestrange call of his forefathers. It was impossible for him tounderstand. It was impossible for him to know what it meant. And yet hedid know that somewhere there was something for which he was seekingand which he never found. The desire and the questing came to him mostcompellingly in the long winter filled with its eternal starlight, whenthe maddening yap, yap, yap of the little white foxes, the barking ofthe dogs, and the Eskimo chatter oppressed him like the voices ofhaunting ghosts. In these long months, filled with the horror of thearctic night, the spirit of Tao whispered within him that somewherethere was light and sun, that somewhere there was warmth and flowers,and running streams, and voices he could understand, and things hecould love. And then Wapi would whine, and perhaps the whine wouldbring him the blow of a club, or the lash of a whip, or an Eskimothreat, or the menace of an Eskimo dog's snarl. Of the latter Wapi wasunafraid. With a snap of his jaws, he could break the back of any otherdog on Franklin Bay.
Such was Wapi, the Walrus, when for two sacks of flour, some tobacco,and a bale of cloth he became the property of Blake, theuta-wawe-yinew, the trader in seals, whalebone—and women. On this dayWapi's soul took its flight back through the space of forty years. ForBlake was white, which is to say that at one time or another he hadbeen white. His skin and his appearance did not betray how black he hadturned inside and Wapi's brute soul cried out to him, telling him howhe had waited and watched for this master he knew would come, how hewould fight for him, how he wanted to lie down and put his great headon the white man's feet in token of his fealty. But Wapi's bloodshoteyes and battle-scarred face failed to reveal what was in him, andBlake—following the instructions of those who should know—ruled himfrom the beginning with a club that was more brutal than the club ofthe Eskimo.
For three months Wapi had been the property of Blake, and it was nowthe dead of a long and sunless arctic night. Blake's cabin, built ofship timber and veneered with blocks of ice, was built in the face of adeep pit that sheltered it from wind and storm. To this cabin came theNanatalmutes from the east, and the Kogmollocks from the west,bartering their furs and whalebone and seal-oil for the things Blakegave in exchange, and adding women to their wares whenever Blakeannounced a demand. The demand had been excellent this winter. Over inDarnley Bay, thirty miles across the headland, was the whaler Harpoonfrozen up for the winter with a crew of thirty men, and straight outfrom the face of his igloo cabin, less than a mile away, was the FlyingMoon with a crew of twenty more. It was Blake's business to wait andwatch like a hawk for such opportunities as there, and tonight—hiswatch pointed to the hour of twelve, midnight—he was sitting in thelight of a sputtering seal-oil lamp adding up figures which told himthat his winter, only half gone, had already been an enormouslyprofitable one.
"If the Mounted Police over at Herschel only knew," he chuckled. "Uppy,if they did, they'd have an outfit after us in twenty-four hours."
Oopi, his Eskimo right-hand man, had learned to understand English, andhe nodded, his moon-face split by a wide and enigmatic grin. In hisway, "Uppy" was as clever as Shan Tung had been in his.
And Blake added, "We've sold every fur and every pound of bone and oil,and we've forty Upisk wives to our credit at fifty dollars apiece."
Uppy's grin became large