Nomads of the North, James Oliver Curwood [best big ereader .TXT] 📗

came. Once more he was facing the thrill of a great fight. Once more the blood ran suddenly hot in his veins, and fear was driven from him as the wind drives smoke from a fire. If Neewa were only there now, to fend at his back while he fought in front! He stood up on his feet. He met the up-rushing pack- brute head to head. Their jaws clashed, and the wild wolf found jaws at last that crunched through his own as if they had been whelp's bone, and he rolled and twisted back to the plain in a dying agony. But not until another gray form had come to fill his place. Into the throat of this second Miki drove his fangs as the wolf came over the crest. It was the slashing, sabre-like stroke of the north-dog, and the throat of the wolf was torn open and the blood poured out as if emptied by the blade of a knife. Down he plunged to join the first, and in that instant the pack swept up and over Miki, and he was smothered under the mass of their bodies. Had two or three attacked him at once he would have died as quickly as the first two of his enemies had come to their end. Numbers saved him in the first rush. On the level of the plain he would have been torn into pieces like a bit of cloth, but on the space at the top of the KOPJE, no larger than the top of a table, he was lost for a few seconds under the snarling and rending horde of his enemies. Fangs intended for him sank into other wolf-flesh; the madness of the pack became a blind rage, and the assault upon Miki turned into a slaughter of the wolves themselves. On his back, held down by the weight of bodies, Miki drove his fangs again and again into flesh. A pair of jaws seized him in the groin, and a shock of agony swept through him. It was a death- grip, sinking steadily into his vitals. Just in time another pair of jaws seized the wolf who held him, and the hold in his groin gave way. In that moment Miki felt himself plunging down the steep side of the knoll, and after him came a half of what was left alive of the pack.
The fighting devils in Miki's brain gave way all at once to that cunning of the fox which had served him even more than claw and fang in times of great danger. Scarcely had he reached the plain before he was on his feet, and no sooner had he touched his feet than he was off like the wind in direction of the river. He had gained a fifty-yard start before the first of the wolves discovered his flight. There were only eight that followed him now. Of the thirteen mad beasts five were dead or dying at the foot of the hillock. Of these Miki had slain two. The others had fallen at the fangs of their own brethren.
Half a mile away were the steep cliffs of the river, and at the edge of these cliffs was a great cairn of rocks in which for one night Miki had sought shelter. He had not forgotten the tunnel into the tumbled mass of rock debris, nor how easily it could be defended from within. Once in that tunnel he would turn in the door of it and slaughter his enemies one by one, for only one by one could they attack him. But he had not reckoned with that huge gray form behind him that might have been named Lightning, the fiercest and swiftest of all the mad wolves of the pack. He sped ahead of his slower-footed companions like a streak of light, and Miki had made but half the distance to the cairn when he heard the panting breath of Lightning behind him. Even Hela, his father, could not have run more swiftly than Miki, but great as was Miki's speed, Lightning ran more swiftly. Two thirds of the distance to the cliff and the huge wolf's muzzle was at Miki's flank. With a burst of speed Miki gained a little. Then steadily Lightning drew abreast of him, a grim and merciless shadow of doom.
A hundred yards farther on and a little to the right was the cairn. But Miki could not run to the right without turning into Lightning's jaws, and he realized now that if he reached the cairn his enemy would be upon him before he could dive into the tunnel and face about. To stop and fight would be death, for behind he could hear the other wolves. Ten seconds more and the chasm of the river yawned ahead of them.
At its very brink Miki swung and struck at Lightning. He sensed death now, and in the face of death all his hatred turned upon the one beast that had run at his side. In an instant they were down. Two yards from the edge of the cliff, and Miki's jaws were at Lightning's throat when the pack rushed upon them. They were swept onward. The earth flew out from under their feet, and they were in space. Grimly Miki held to the throat of his foe. Over and over they twisted in mid-air, and then came a terrific shock. Lightning was under. Yet so great was the shock, that, even though the wolf's huge body was under him like a cushion, Miki was stunned and dazed. A minute passed before he staggered to his feet. Lightning lay still, the life smashed out of him. A little beyond him lay the bodies of two other wolves that in their wild rush had swept over the cliff.
Miki looked up. Between him and the stars he could see the top of the cliff, a vast distance above him. One after the other he smelled at the bodies of the three dead wolves. Then he limped slowly along the base of the cliff until he came to a fissure between two huge rocks. Into this he crept and lay down, licking his wounds. After all there were worse things in the world than Le Beau's trapline. Perhaps there were even worse things than men.
After a time he stretched his great head out between his fore- paws, and slowly the starlight grew dimmer, and the snow less white, and he slept.


CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In a twist of Three Jackpine River, buried in the deep of the forest between the Shamattawa country and Hudson Bay, was the cabin in which lived Jacques Le Beau, the trapper. There was not another man in all that wilderness who was the equal of Le Beau in wickedness--unless it was Durant, who hunted foxes a hundred miles north, and who was Jacques's rival in several things. A giant in size, with a heavy, sullen face and eyes which seemed but half- hidden greenish loopholes for the pitiless soul within him--if he had a soul at all--Le Beau was a "throw-back" of the worst sort. In their shacks and teepees the Indians whispered softly that all the devils of his forebears had gathered in him.
It was a grim kind of fate that had given to Le Beau a wife. Had she been a witch, an evil-doer and an evil-thinker like himself, the thing would not have been such an abortion of what should have been. But she was not that. Sweet-faced, with something of unusual beauty still in her pale cheeks and starving eyes--trembling at his approach and a slave in his presence--she was, like his dogs, the PROPERTY of The Brute. And the woman had a baby. One had already died; and it was the thought that this one might die, as the other had died, that brought at times the new flash of fire into her dark eyes.
"Le bon Dieu--I pray to the Blessed Angels--I swear you SHALL live!" she would cry to it at times, hugging it close to her breast. And it was at these times that the fire came into her eyes, and her pale cheeks flushed with a smouldering bit of the flame that had once been her beauty. "Some day--SOME DAY--"
But she never finished, even to the child, what was in her mind. Sometimes her dreams were filled with visions. The world was still young, and SHE was not old. She was thinking of that as she stood before the cracked bit of mirror in the cabin, brushing out her hair, that was black and shining and so long that it fell to her hips. Of her beauty her hair had remained. It was defiant of The Brute. And deep back in her eyes, and in her face, there were still the living, hidden traces of her girlhood heritage ready to bloom again if Fate, mending its error at last, would only take away forever the crushing presence of the Master. She stood a little longer before the bit of glass when she heard the crunching of footsteps in the snow outside.
Swiftly what had been in her face was gone. Le Beau had been away on his trapline since yesterday, and his return filled her with the old dread. Twice he had caught her before the mirror and had called her vile names for wasting her time in admiring herself when she might have been scraping the fat from his pelts. The second time he had sent her reeling back against the wall, and had broken the mirror until the bit she treasured now was not much larger than her two slim hands. She would not be caught again. She ran with the glass to the place where she kept it in hiding, and then quickly she wove the heavy strands of her hair into a braid. The strange, dead look of fear and foreboding closed like a veil over the secrets her eyes had disclosed to herself. She turned, as she always turned in her woman's hope and yearning, to greet him when he entered.
The Brute entered, a dark and surly monster. He was in a wicked humour. His freshly caught furs he flung to the floor. He pointed to them, and his eyes were narrowed to menacing slits as they fell upon her.
"He was there again--that devil!" he growled. "See, he has spoiled the fisher, and he has cleaned out my baits and knocked down the trap-houses. Par les mille cornes du diable, but I will kill him! I have sworn to cut him into bits with a knife when I catch him-- and catch him I will, to-morrow. See to it there--the skins--when you have got me something to eat. Mend the fisher where he is torn in two, and cover the seam well with fat so that the agent over at the post will not discover it is bad. Tonnerre de Dieu!--that brat! Why do you always keep his squalling until I come in? Answer me, Bete!"
Such was his greeting. He flung his snowshoes into a corner, stamped the snow off his feet, and got himself a fresh plug of black tobacco from a shelf over the stove. Then he went out again, leaving the woman with a cold tremble in her heart and the wan desolation of hopelessness in her face as she set about getting him food.
From the cabin Le Beau went to his dog-pit, a corral of saplings with a shelter-shack in the centre of it. It was The Brute's boast that he had the fiercest pack of sledge-dogs between Hudson Bay and the Athabasca. It was his chief quarrel with Durant, his rival farther north; and his ambition was to breed a pup that would kill the fighting husky which Durant brought down to the Post with him each winter at New