Baree, Son of Kazan Part 1

Baree, Son of Kazan.

by James Oliver Curwood.

Preface

Since the publication of my two animal books, "Kazan, the Wolf Dog" and "The Grizzly King," I have received so many hundreds of letters from friends of wild animal life, all of which were more or less of an inquiring nature, that I have been encouraged to incorporate in this preface of the third of my series--"Baree, Son of Kazan"--something more of my desire and hope in writing of wild life, and something of the foundation of fact whereupon this and its companion books have been written.

I have always disliked the preaching of sermons in the pages of romance. It is like placing a halter about an unsuspecting reader's neck and dragging him into paths for which he may have no liking. But if fact and truth produce in the reader's mind a message for himself, then a work has been done. That is what I hope for in my nature books.

The American people are not and never have been lovers of wild life. As a nation we have gone after Nature with a gun.

And what right, you may ask, has a confessed slaughterer of wild life such as I have been to complain? None at all, I a.s.sure you. I have twenty-seven guns--and I have used them all. I stand condemned as having done more than my share toward extermination. But that does not lessen the fact that I have learned; and in learning I have come to believe that if boys and girls and men and women could be brought into the homes and lives of wild birds and animals as their homes are made and their lives are lived we would all understand at last that wherever a heart beats it is very much like our own in the final a.n.a.lysis of things. To see a bird singing on a twig means but little; but to live a season with that bird, to be with it in courting days, in matehood and motherhood, to understand its griefs as well as its gladness means a great deal. And in my books it is my desire to tell of the lives of the wild things which I know as they are actually lived. It is not my desire to humanize them. If we are to love wild animals so much that we do not want to kill them we MUST KNOW THEM AS THEY ACTUALLY LIVE. And in their lives, in the facts of their lives, there is so much of real and honest romance and tragedy, so much that makes them akin to ourselves that the animal biographer need not step aside from the paths of actuality to hold one's interest.

Perhaps rather tediously I have come to the few words I want to say about Baree, the hero of this book. Baree, after all, is only another Kazan. For it was Kazan I found in the way I have described--a bad dog, a killer about to be shot to death by his master when chance, and my own faith in him, gave him to me.

We traveled together for many thousands of miles through the northland--on trails to the Barren Lands, to Hudson's Bay and to the Arctic. Kazan--the bad dog, the half-wolf, the killer--was the best four-legged friend I ever had. He died near Fort MacPherson, on the Peel River, and is buried there. And Kazan was the father of Baree; Gray Wolf, the full-blooded wolf, was his mother. Nepeese, the Willow, still lives near G.o.d's Lake; and it was in the country of Nepeese and her father that for three lazy months I watched the doings at Beaver Town, and went on fishing trips with Wakayoo, the bear. Sometimes I have wondered if old Beaver Tooth himself did not in some way understand that I had made his colony safe for his people. It was Pierrot's trapping ground; and to Pierrot--father of Nepeese--I gave my best rifle on his word that he would not harm my beaver friends for two years. And the people of Pierrot's breed keep their word. Wakayoo, Baree's big bear friend, is dead. He was killed as I have described, in that "pocket" among the ridges, while I was on a jaunt to Beaver Town.

We were becoming good friends and I missed him a great deal. The story of Pierrot and of his princess wife, Wyola, is true; they are buried side by side under the tall spruce that stood near their cabin.

Pierrot's murderer, instead of dying as I have told it, was killed in his attempt to escape the Royal Mounted farther west. When I last saw Baree he was at Lac Seul House, where I was the guest of Mr. William Patterson, the factor; and the last word I heard from him was through my good friend Frank Aldous, factor at White Dog Post, who wrote me only a few weeks ago that he had recently seen Nepeese and Baree and the husband of Nepeese, and that the happiness he found in their far wilderness home made him regret that he was a bachelor. I feel sorry for Aldous. He is a splendid young Englishman, unattached, and some day I am going to try and marry him off. I have in mind someone at the present moment--a fox-trapper's daughter up near the Barren, very pretty, and educated at a missioner's school; and as Aldous is going with me on my next trip I may have something to say about them in the book that is to follow "Baree, Son of Kazan."

James Oliver Curwood

Owosso, Michigan

CHAPTER 1

To Baree, for many days after he was born, the world was a vast gloomy cavern.

During these first days of his life his home was in the heart of a great windfall where Gray Wolf, his blind mother, had found a safe nest for his babyhood, and to which Kazan, her mate, came only now and then, his eyes gleaming like strange b.a.l.l.s of greenish fire in the darkness.

It was Kazan's eyes that gave to Baree his first impression of something existing away from his mother's side, and they brought to him also his discovery of vision. He could feel, he could smell, he could hear--but in that black pit under the fallen timber he had never seen until the eyes came. At first they frightened him; then they puzzled him, and his fear changed to an immense curiosity. He would be looking straight at them, when all at once they would disappear. This was when Kazan turned his head. And then they would flash back at him again out of the darkness with such startling suddenness that Baree would involuntarily shrink closer to his mother, who always trembled and shivered in a strange sort of way when Kazan came in.

Baree, of course, would never know their story. He would never know that Gray Wolf, his mother, was a full-blooded wolf, and that Kazan, his father, was a dog. In him nature was already beginning its wonderful work, but it would never go beyond certain limitations. It would tell him, in time, that his beautiful wolf mother was blind, but he would never know of that terrible battle between Gray Wolf and the lynx in which his mother's sight had been destroyed. Nature could tell him nothing of Kazan's merciless vengeance, of the wonderful years of their matehood, of their loyalty, their strange adventures in the great Canadian wilderness--it could make him only a son of Kazan.

But at first, and for many days, it was all mother. Even after his eyes had opened wide and he had found his legs so that he could stumble about a little in the darkness, nothing existed for Baree but his mother. When he was old enough to be playing with sticks and moss out in the sunlight, he still did not know what she looked like. But to him she was big and soft and warm, and she licked his face with her tongue, and talked to him in a gentle, whimpering way that at last made him find his own voice in a faint, squeaky yap.

And then came that wonderful day when the greenish b.a.l.l.s of fire that were Kazan's eyes came nearer and nearer, a little at a time, and very cautiously. Heretofore Gray Wolf had warned him back. To be alone was the first law of her wild breed during mothering time. A low snarl from her throat, and Kazan had always stopped. But on this day the snarl did not come. In Gray Wolf's throat it died away in a low, whimpering sound. A note of loneliness, of gladness, of a great yearning. "It is all right now," she was saying to Kazan; and Kazan--pausing for a moment to make sure--replied with an answering note deep in his throat.

Still slowly, as if not quite sure of what he would find, Kazan came to them, and Baree snuggled closer to his mother. He heard Kazan as he dropped down heavily on his belly close to Gray Wolf. He was unafraid--and mightily curious. And Kazan, too, was curious. He sniffed. In the gloom his ears were alert. After a little Baree began to move. An inch at a time he dragged himself away from Gray Wolf's side. Every muscle in her lithe body tensed. Again her wolf blood was warning her. There was danger for Baree. Her lips drew back, baring her fangs. Her throat trembled, but the note in it never came. Out of the darkness two yards away came a soft, puppyish whine, and the caressing sound of Kazan's tongue.

Baree had felt the thrill of his first great adventure. He had discovered his father.

This all happened in the third week of Baree's life. He was just eighteen days old when Gray Wolf allowed Kazan to make the acquaintance of his son. If it had not been for Gray Wolf's blindness and the memory of that day on the Sun Rock when the lynx had destroyed her eyes, she would have given birth to Baree in the open, and his legs would have been quite strong. He would have known the sun and the moon and the stars; he would have realized what the thunder meant, and would have seen the lightning flashing in the sky. But as it was, there had been nothing for him to do in that black cavern under the windfall but stumble about a little in the darkness, and lick with his tiny red tongue the raw bones that were strewn about them. Many times he had been left alone. He had heard his mother come and go, and nearly always it had been in response to a yelp from Kazan that came to them like a distant echo. He had never felt a very strong desire to follow until this day when Kazan's big, cool tongue caressed his face. In those wonderful seconds nature was at work. His instinct was not quite born until then. And when Kazan went away, leaving them alone in darkness, Baree whimpered for him to come back, just as he had cried for his mother when now and then she had left him in response to her mate's call.

The sun was straight above the forest when, an hour or two after Kazan's visit, Gray Wolf slipped away. Between Baree's nest and the top of the windfall were forty feet of jammed and broken timber through which not a ray of light could break. This blackness did not frighten him, for he had yet to learn the meaning of light. Day, and not night, was to fill him with his first great terror. So quite fearlessly, with a yelp for his mother to wait for him, he began to follow. If Gray Wolf heard him, she paid no attention to his call, and the sound of the sc.r.a.ping of her claws on the dead timber died swiftly away.

This time Baree did not stop at the eight-inch log which had always shut in his world in that particular direction. He clambered to the top of it and rolled over on the other side. Beyond this was vast adventure, and he plunged into it courageously.

It took him a long time to make the first twenty yards. Then he came to a log worn smooth by the feet of Gray Wolf and Kazan, and stopping every few feet to send out a whimpering call for his mother, he made his way farther and farther along it. As he went, there grew slowly a curious change in this world of his. He had known nothing but blackness. And now this blackness seemed breaking itself up into strange shapes and shadows. Once he caught the flash of a fiery streak above him--a gleam of sunshine--and it startled him so that he flattened himself down upon the log and did not move for half a minute.

Then he went on. An ermine squeaked under him. He heard the swift rustling of a squirrel's feet, and a curious whut-whut-whut that was not at all like any sound his mother had ever made. He was off the trail.

The log was no longer smooth, and it was leading him upward higher and higher into the tangle of the windfall, and was growing narrower every foot he progressed. He whined. His soft little nose sought vainly for the warm scent of his mother. The end came suddenly when he lost his balance and fell. He let out a piercing cry of terror as he felt himself slipping, and then plunged downward. He must have been high up in the windfall, for to Baree it seemed a tremendous fall. His soft little body thumped from log to log as he shot this way and that, and when at last he stopped, there was scarcely a breath left in him. But he stood up quickly on his four trembling legs--and blinked.

A new terror held Baree rooted there. In an instant the whole world had changed. It was a flood of sunlight. Everywhere he looked he could see strange things. But it was the sun that frightened him most. It was his first impression of fire, and it made his eyes smart. He would have slunk back into the friendly gloom of the windfall, but at this moment Gray Wolf came around the end of a great log, followed by Kazan. She muzzled Baree joyously, and Kazan in a most doglike fashion wagged his tail. This mark of the dog was to be a part of Baree. Half wolf, he would always wag his tail. He tried to wag it now. Perhaps Kazan saw the effort, for he emitted a m.u.f.fled yelp of approbation as he sat back on his haunches.

Or he might have been saying to Gray Wolf:

"Well, we've got the little rascal out of that windfall at last, haven't we?"

For Baree it had been a great day. He had discovered his father--and the world.

CHAPTER 2

And it was a wonderful world--a world of vast silence, empty of everything but the creatures of the wild. The nearest Hudson's Bay post was a hundred miles away, and the first town of civilization was a straight three hundred to the south. Two years before, Tusoo, the Cree trapper, had called this his domain. It had come down to him, as was the law of the forests, through generations of forefathers. But Tusoo had been the last of his worn-out family; he had died of smallpox, and his wife and his children had died with him. Since then no human foot had taken up his trails. The lynx had multiplied. The moose and caribou had gone unhunted by man. The beaver had built their homes--undisturbed. The tracks of the black bear were as thick as the tracks of the deer farther south. And where once the deadfalls and poison baits of Tusoo had kept the wolves thinned down, there was no longer a menace for these mohekuns of the wilderness.

Following the sun of this first wonderful day came the moon and the stars of Baree's first real night. It was a splendid night, and with it a full red moon sailed up over the forests, flooding the earth with a new kind of light, softer and more beautiful to Baree. The wolf was strong in him, and he was restless. He had slept that day in the warmth of the sun, but he could not sleep in this glow of the moon. He nosed uneasily about Gray Wolf, who lay flat on her belly, her beautiful head alert, listening yearningly to the night sounds, and for the tonguing of Kazan, who had slunk away like a shadow to hunt.

Half a dozen times, as Baree wandered about near the windfall, he heard a soft whir over his head, and once or twice he saw gray shadows floating swiftly through the air. They were the big northern owls swooping down to investigate him, and if he had been a rabbit instead of a wolf dog whelp, his first night under the moon and stars would have been his last; for unlike Wapoos, the rabbit, he was not cautious.

Gray Wolf did not watch him closely. Instinct told her that in these forests there was no great danger for Baree except at the hands of man.

In his veins ran the blood of the wolf. He was a hunter of all other wild creatures, but no other creature, either winged or fanged, hunted him.

In a way Baree sensed this. He was not afraid of the owls. He was not afraid of the strange bloodcurdling cries they made in the black spruce tops. But once fear entered into him, and he scurried back to his mother. It was when one of the winged hunters of the air swooped down on a snowshoe rabbit, and the squealing agony of the doomed creature set his heart thumping like a little hammer. He felt in those cries the nearness of that one ever-present tragedy of the wild--death. He felt it again that night when, snuggled close to Gray Wolf, he listened to the fierce outcry of a wolf pack that was close on the heels of a young caribou bull. And the meaning of it all, and the wild thrill of it all, came home to him early in the gray dawn when Kazan returned, holding between his jaws a huge rabbit that was still kicking and squirming with life.

This rabbit was the climax in the first chapter of Baree's education.

It was as if Gray Wolf and Kazan had planned it all out, so that he might receive his first instruction in the art of killing. When Kazan had dropped it, Baree approached the big hare cautiously. The back of Wapoos, the rabbit, was broken. His round eyes were glazed, and he had ceased to feel pain. But to Baree, as he dug his tiny teeth into the heavy fur under Wapoos's throat, the hare was very much alive. The teeth did not go through into the flesh. With puppyish fierceness Baree hung on. He thought that he was killing. He could feel the dying convulsions of Wapoos. He could hear the last gasping breaths leaving the warm body, and he snarled and tugged until finally he fell back with a mouthful of fur. When he returned to the attack, Wapoos was quite dead, and Baree continued to bite and snarl until Gray Wolf came with her sharp fangs and tore the rabbit to pieces. After that followed the feast.

So Baree came to understand that to eat meant to kill, and as other days and nights pa.s.sed, there grew in him swiftly the hunger for flesh.

In this he was the true wolf. From Kazan he had taken other and stronger inheritances of the dog. He was magnificently black, which in later days gave him the name of Kusketa Mohekun--the black wolf. On his breast was a white star. His right ear was tipped with white. His tail, at six weeks, was bushy and hung low. It was a wolf's tail. His ears were Gray Wolf's ears--sharp, short, pointed, always alert. His foreshoulders gave promise of being splendidly like Kazan's, and when he stood up he was like the trace dog, except that he always stood sidewise to the point or object he was watching. This, again, was the wolf, for a dog faces the direction in which he is looking intently.

One brilliant night, when Baree was two months old, and when the sky was filled with stars and a June moon so bright that it seemed scarcely higher than the tall spruce tops, Baree settled back on his haunches and howled. It was a first effort. But there was no mistake in the note of it. It was the wolf howl. But a moment later when Baree slunk up to Kazan, as if deeply ashamed of his effort, he was wagging his tail in an unmistakably apologetic manner. And this again was the dog. If Tusoo, the dead Indian trapper, could have seen him then, he would have judged him by that wagging of his tail. It revealed the fact that deep in his heart--and in his soul, if we can concede that he had one--Baree was a dog.

In another way Tusoo would have found judgment of him. At two months the wolf whelp has forgotten how to play. He is a slinking part of the wilderness, already at work preying on creatures smaller and more helpless than himself. Baree still played. In his excursions away from the windfall he had never gone farther than the creek, a hundred yards from where his mother lay. He had helped to tear many dead and dying rabbits into pieces. He believed, if he thought upon the matter at all, that he was exceedingly fierce and courageous. But it was his ninth week before he felt his spurs and fought his terrible battle with the young owl in the edge of the thick forest.

The fact that Oohoomisew, the big snow owl, had made her nest in a broken stub not far from the windfall was destined to change the whole course of Baree's life, just as the blinding of Gray Wolf had changed hers, and a man's club had changed Kazan's. The creek ran close past the stub, which had been shriven by lightning; and this stub stood in a still, dark place in the forest, surrounded by tall, black spruce and enveloped in gloom even in broad day. Many times Baree had gone to the edge of this mysterious part of the forest and had peered in curiously, and with a growing desire.

On this day of his great battle its lure was overpowering. Little by little he entered into it, his eyes shining brightly and his ears alert for the slightest sounds that might come out of it. His heart beat faster. The gloom enveloped him more. He forgot the windfall and Kazan and Gray Wolf. Here before him lay the thrill of adventure. He heard strange sounds, but very soft sounds, as if made by padded feet and downy wings, and they filled him with a thrilling expectancy. Under his feet there were no gra.s.s or weeds or flowers, but a wonderful brown carpet of soft evergreen needles. They felt good to his feet, and were so velvety that he could not hear his own movement.

He was fully three hundred yards from the windfall when he pa.s.sed Oohoomisew's stub and into a thick growth of young balsams. And there--directly in his path--crouched the monster!

Papayuchisew [Young Owl] was not more than a third as large as Baree.

But he was a terrifying-looking object. To Baree he seemed all head and eyes. He could see no body at all. Kazan had never brought in anything like this, and for a full half-minute he remained very quiet, eying it speculatively. Papayuchisew did not move a feather. But as Baree advanced, a cautious step at a time, the bird's eyes grew bigger and the feathers about his head ruffled up as if stirred by a puff of wind.

He came of a fighting family, this little Papayuchisew--a savage, fearless, and killing family--and even Kazan would have taken note of those ruffling feathers.

With a s.p.a.ce of two feet between them, the pup and the owlet eyed each other. In that moment, if Gray Wolf could have been there, she might have said to Baree: "Use your legs--and run!" And Oohoomisew, the old owl, might have said to Papayuchisew: "You little fool--use your wings and fly!"

They did neither--and the fight began.