The Gaunt Gray Wolf Part 22

THE SPIRIT OF DEATH GROWS BOLD

When Ungava Bob was gone, Shad Trowbridge returned to the deerskin lodge to think. Now that he was alone with the Indians, he was not at all sure that he did not regret his decision to remain with them and share their uncertain fortunes.

For a moment the thought occurred to him that he might even yet follow Bob's trail and overtake him in his night camp. But he thrust the impulse aside at once as unworthy consideration. He had come to his decision, and he was determined to remain and play the game to a finish.

He craved action and excitement, and the glamour of romance that surrounded the Indians and their nomadic life had attracted him. It was this, together with the human instinct to play at games of chance, and the primordial instinct slumbering in every strong man's breast to throw off restraint and, untrammelled, match his brains and strength against the forces of untamed nature, that had led Shad to adopt the red man's life for a period which he believed would not exceed three or four weeks at most.

In preparation for departure the following day, the Indians erected upon an elevated flat rock, which winds had swept bare of snow, a log shelter some five feet square and five feet high. After lining the bottom and sides of this shelter with spruce boughs, a quant.i.ty of jerked venison and dried fish was deposited in it, the top covered with boughs, and the roof, consisting of logs laid closely side by side and weighted with stones, was placed in position. This precaution was taken to protect the cache from marauding animals.

In the dim light of the cold December morning the deerskin covering of the wigwam was stripped from the poles, folded and packed upon the toboggans, together with the simple housekeeping equipment of the Indians, and a sufficient quant.i.ty of fresh bear's meat and jerked venison to sustain them for a fortnight.

Immediately the march was begun toward the Lake of Willows, Sishetakushin and Mookoomahn in turn taking the lead and breaking the trail, the others following, single file.

Day after day they pushed on and still on through scattered forests, across wide barrens and over frozen lakes, always on the alert for caribou but always disappointed.

Once a small flock of ptarmigans was seen along the willow brush that lined a stream. Shad drew his shotgun from his toboggan, but the Indians would not permit him to use it, and in disgust he returned it to its place while he watched Sishetakushin and Mookoomahn kill the birds with bows and arrows. He marvelled at their skill. Indeed, he did not observe a single arrow go astray of its mark.

Eleven birds were secured in this way--the first game they had seen, and the last they were to see for several days.

A dead, awful cold settled upon the earth. The very atmosphere was frozen. Rime in shimmering, glittering particles hung suspended in s.p.a.ce, and covered bushes, trees, and rocks--scintillating in the sunlight and seeming to intensify the cold.

The few brief hours of sunshine were disregarded. The sun rose only to tantalise. For three or four hours each day it hung close to the horizon, then dropped again below the southwestern hills; and its rays gave out no warmth.

No sign of game was seen near the Lake of Willows, and no halt was made. The life of the Indians depended upon the killing of caribou.

The little cache of jerked venison and fish left near the Great Lake would scarcely have sustained them a month. The few ptarmigans killed now and again were of small a.s.sistance. The food they hauled was nearly exhausted.

Then came a period of storm. For a week snow fell and gales blew with such terrific fury that no living thing could have existed in the open, and during this period a halt was unavoidable.

Once a day a small ration was doled out--pitifully small--enough to tantalise appet.i.te, but not to still hunger. Shad was consumed with a craving for food. He could think of nothing but food. His days on the trails and in the tilts with the trappers were remembered as days of luxury and feasting. He wondered if Bob and the others had thought of him when they ate their Christmas dinner of geese and ptarmigans. "Oh, for one delicious meal of pork and camp bread. Oh, for one night of the luxurious warmth of the river tilt!"

When the storm abated sufficiently to permit them to continue their journey, he moved his legs mechanically, even forgetting at last that the effort was painful. An insidious weakness was taking possession of him. It was an effort to draw his lightly-laden toboggan. It made him dizzy to swing an axe when he a.s.sisted Manikawan to cut wood for the fire. His knees gave way under him when he sat down.

Manikawan's plump cheeks were sunken. Her eyes were growing big and staring. Her mother had lost half her bulk, and Sishetakushin and Mookoomahn were also noticeably affected. They no longer laughed and seldom spoke.

As one performing a duty that must not under any circ.u.mstance or condition be neglected, Manikawan conscientiously looked after Shad's welfare; but still she treated him with the same degree of dignity and reserve, if not aloofness, that she had always maintained toward him.

He realised that what she did for him she did because he was the friend of her beloved White Brother of the Snow, and not for his own sake--as a dog will guard the thing which its master directs it to guard, faithfully and untiringly, for the master's sake, but with no other attachment for the thing itself.

He wondered why they did not return to their cache on the Great Lake after the long storm, and then it occurred to him that probably their destination was the trading post at Ungava, of which Bob had told him.

On the afternoon of the second day after the storm, they came upon a single wigwam. Sishetakushin and Mookoomahn looked into it and pa.s.sed on. Shad raised the flap, and peering in saw the emaciated figure of an old Indian. He was quite stark and dead, his wide-open eyes staring vacantly into s.p.a.ce. He had been abandoned to die.

That evening Shad stumbled over an object in the snow. He stooped to examine it in the starlight, and was horrified to discover the dead body of a woman.

The following morning, as they plodded wearily forward under the faint light of the stars, they came suddenly upon a group of wigwams. Men, women, and children came out to meet them--an emaciated, starved, unkempt horde that had more the appearance of ghouls and skeletons than human beings. Some of them tottered as they walked, some fell in the snow and with difficulty regained their feet.

"Atuk! Atuk! Have you found the atuk?" was the cry from all--a hopeless cry of desperation, as they crowded around the travellers.

"We have not found the atuk," answered Sishetakushin.

Some heard him stoically, others staggered hopelessly away to their wigwams, others wailed:

"The Great Spirit of the Sky is angry. He has sent all the spirits to destroy us. The Spirit of Hunger--the Gaunt Gray Wolf--is at our back.

The raven, the Black Spirit of Death, is ready to attack us. The Spirit of the Tempest torments us. The Spirits of the Forest and of the Barrens mock us. The Great Spirit of the Sky has driven away the atuk, and our people are starving. Many of our people are dead. Four of our hunters now lie dead in their lodges."

Shad Trowbridge could not understand what was said, but he could not fail to understand the situation.

For some inexplicable reason the caribou, upon which the Indians depended for food, had disappeared from the land. All living things save these starving wretches had vanished.

For twenty-four hours not a mouthful of food had pa.s.sed Shad's own lips, and a sickening dread engulfed his soul.

[Footnote: This was the winter of 1890-1891, known as "the year of starvation," when for some unknown reason the caribou failed to appear in their accustomed haunts, and as a result one out of every three of the Indians of northern Labrador perished of starvation.]

XIX

THE CACHE ON THE LAKE

Shad Trowbridge stood dazed, as one in a dream--a horrid, awful dream.

He looked through a haze, and what he saw was distorted, unreal, terrible. The suffering creatures about him were spectral phantoms of the nether world, the shimmering rime, a symbol of death, the endless snow the white robe of the grave quickly to cover them all.

A sudden stillness fell upon the camp, to be presently broken by the agonised scream of a woman, shrill and startling, followed by wailings and melancholy moans. The Spirit of Death had s.n.a.t.c.hed away her favourite son.

A sickening nausea overtook Shad, and he sank upon his toboggan, faint and dizzy with an overpowering weakness. His imagination was getting the better of him.

It is always dangerous and sometimes fatal for one to permit the imagination to a.s.sert itself in seasons of peril. Will power to put away thoughts of to-morrow, to think only of to-day, to do to-day the thing which necessity requires, coupled with a determination never to abandon hope, is a paramount essential for the successful explorer to possess.

In this moment of hopeless surrender Shad felt Manikawan's hand rest lightly upon his shoulder for an instant, and looking up he saw her standing before him, tall, straight, commanding, and as she looked that day on the river bank when she bade him and Bob wait for her return to free them from their island prison.

"The friend of White Brother of the Snow is not a coward. He is not afraid of the Spirit of Hunger. He is not afraid of the Spirit of Death. He is brave. He once outwitted the Matchi Manitu of the River.

He will outwit the Spirit of Hunger. He will outwit the Spirit of Death. The friend of White Brother of the Snow is brave. He is not afraid to die."

The words were unintelligible to him, but their import was unmistakable. She, a young Indian maiden, was offering him encouragement, and recalling him to his manhood.

He arose to his feet, ashamed that she had read his mind, ashamed that she had found it necessary to recall him from a lapse into his foolish weakness which must have seemed to her like cowardice.

But he remembered now that he was a man--a white man--and because he was a white man, the physical equal and mental superior of any savage there. Looking into Manikawan's eyes, he made an unspoken vow that she should never again have cause to chide him.

Dawn was breaking, and in the growing light a half-dozen lodges were to be seen. At one side and alone stood a deerskin tent of peculiar form. It was a high tent of exceedingly small circ.u.mference, and where the smoke opening was provided and the poles protruded at the top of the ordinary wigwam, this was tightly closed. It was the medicine lodge of the shaman.

Sishetakushin and Mookoomahn had entered one of the lodges immediately after the tumult caused by their arrival had subsided, and Manikawan now followed her mother into another lodge. There were no Indians visible. The moans of the grief-stricken mother, rising above the voices of men in the lodge which Sishetakushin and Mookoomahn had entered, were the only sounds.

The air was bitterly cold, but the tragedy enacting around him had for a time rendered Shad quite insensible to it. When he did finally realise that, standing inactive, he was numbed and chilled, he still lingered a little before joining Sishetakushin and Mookoomahn, dreading to enter the famine-stricken lodges.

At last, however, necessity drove him to do so, and within the lodge he discovered that a council was in progress. In the centre a fire burned, and around it the men, solemn and dignified, sat in a circle.

One after another of the Indians spoke in earnest debate. They were considering what action they should take to preserve their lives, and Shad, as deeply interested as any, felt aggrieved that he could not immediately learn the final result of the conference, which came to an end as the sun cast its first feeble rays over the barren ranges that marked the southeastern horizon.

When the council closed the Indians filed out of the lodge, and one, a tall old man, fantastically attired in skins, entered the medicine lodge alone, carefully closing the entrance after him to exclude any ray of light.