THE LAW OF LIFE
Old Koskoosh listened greedily. Though his sight had long since faded,
his hearing was still acute, and the slightest sound penetrated to the
glimmering intelligence which yet abode behind the withered forehead,
but which no longer gazed forth upon the things of the world. Ah! that
was Sit-cum-to-ha, shrilly anathematizing the dogs as she cuffed
and beat them into the harnesses. Sit-cum-to-ha was his daughter's
daughter, but she was too busy to waste a thought upon her broken
grandfather, sitting alone there in the snow, forlorn and helpless.
Camp must be broken. The long trail waited while the short day refused
to linger. Life called her, and the duties of life, not death. And he
was very close to death now.
The thought made the old man panicky for the moment, and he stretched
forth a palsied hand which wandered tremblingly over the small heap
of dry wood beside him. Reassured that it was indeed there, his hand
returned to the shelter of his mangy furs, and he again fell to
listening. The sulky crackling of half-frozen hides told him that the
chief's moose-skin lodge had been struck, and even then was being
rammed and jammed into portable compass. The chief was his son,
stalwart and strong, head man of the tribesmen, and a mighty hunter.
As the women toiled with the camp luggage, his voice rose, chiding
them for their slowness. Old Koskoosh strained his ears. It was the
last time he would hear that voice. There went Geehow's lodge! And
Tusken's! Seven, eight, nine; only the shaman's could be still
standing. There! They were at work upon it now. He could hear the
shaman grunt as he piled it on the sled. A child whimpered, and a
woman soothed it with soft, crooning gutturals. Little Koo-tee, the
old man thought, a fretful child, and not overstrong. It would die
soon, perhaps, and they would burn a hole through the frozen tundra
and pile rocks above to keep the wolverines away. Well, what did it
matter? A few years at best, and as many an empty belly as a full one.
And in the end, Death waited, ever-hungry and hungriest of them all.
What was that? Oh, the men lashing the sleds and drawing tight the
thongs. He listened, who would listen no more. The whip-lashes snarled
and bit among the dogs. Hear them whine! How they hated the work and
the trail! They were off! Sled after sled churned slowly away into the
silence. They were gone. They had passed out of his life, and he faced
the last bitter hour alone. No. The snow crunched beneath a moccasin;
a man stood beside him; upon his head a hand rested gently. His son
was good to do this thing. He remembered other old men whose sons had
not waited after the tribe. But his son had. He wandered away into the
past, till the young man's voice brought him back.
"Is it well with you?" he asked.
And the old man answered, "It is well."
"There be wood beside you," the younger man continued, "and the fire
burns bright. The morning is gray, and the cold has broken. It will
snow presently. Even now is it snowing."
"Ay, even now is it snowing."
"The tribesmen hurry. Their bales are heavy, and their bellies flat
with lack of feasting. The trail is long and they travel fast. I go
now. It is well?"
"It is well. I am as a last year's leaf, clinging lightly to the stem.
The first breath that blows, and I fall. My voice is become like an
old woman's. My eyes no longer show me the way of my feet, and my feet
are heavy, and I am tired. It is well."
He bowed his head in content till the last noise of the complaining
snow had died away, and he knew his son was beyond recall. Then his
hand crept out in haste to the wood. It alone stood between him and
the eternity that yawned in upon him. At last the measure of his life
was a handful of fagots. One by one they would go to feed the fire,
and just so, step by step, death would creep upon him. When the last
stick had surrendered up its heat, the frost would begin to gather
strength. First his feet would yield, then his hands; and the numbness
would travel, slowly, from the extremities to the body. His head would
fall forward upon his knees, and he would rest. It was easy. All men
must die.
He did not complain. It was the way of life, and it was just. He had
been born close to the earth, close to the earth had he lived, and the
law thereof was not new to him. It was the law of all flesh. Nature
was not kindly to the flesh. She had no concern for that concrete
thing called the individual. Her interest lay in the species, the
race. This was the deepest abstraction old Koskoosh's barbaric mind
was capable of, but he grasped it firmly. He saw it exemplified in all
life. The rise of the sap, the bursting greenness of the willow bud,
the fall of the yellow leaf--in this alone was told the whole history.
But one task did Nature set the individual. Did he not perform it, he
died. Did he perform it, it was all the same, he died. Nature did
not care; there were plenty who were obedient, and it was only the
obedience in this matter, not the obedient, which lived and lived
always. The tribe of Koskoosh was very old. The old men he had known
when a boy, had known old men before them. Therefore it was true that
the tribe lived, that it stood for the obedience of all its members,
way down into the forgotten past, whose very resting-places were
unremembered. They did not count; they were episodes. They had passed
away like clouds from a summer sky. He also was an episode, and would
pass away. Nature did not care. To life she set one task, gave one
law. To perpetuate was the task of life, its law was death. A maiden
was a good creature to look upon, full-breasted and strong, with
spring to her step and light in her eyes. But her task was yet before
her. The light in her eyes brightened, her step quickened, she was
now bold with the young men, now timid, and she gave them of her own
unrest. And ever she grew fairer and yet fairer to look upon, till
some hunter, able no longer to withhold himself, took her to his lodge
to cook and toil for him and to become the mother of his children. And
with the coming of her offspring her looks left her. Her limbs dragged
and shuffled, her eyes dimmed and bleared, and only the little
children found joy against the withered cheek of the old squaw by the
fire. Her task was done. But a little while, on the first pinch of
famine or the first long trail, and she would be left, even as he had
been left, in the snow, with a little pile of wood. Such was the law.
He placed a stick carefully upon the fire and resumed his meditations.
It was the same everywhere, with all things. The mosquitoes vanished
with the first frost. The little tree-squirrel crawled away to die.
When age settled upon the rabbit it became slow and heavy, and could
no longer outfoot its enemies. Even the big bald-face grew clumsy and
blind and quarrelsome, in the end to be dragged down by a handful of
yelping huskies. He remembered how he had abandoned his own father
on an upper reach of the Klondike one winter, the winter before the
missionary came with his talk-books and his box of medicines. Many a
time had Koskoosh smacked his lips over the recollection of that box,
though now his mouth refused to moisten. The "painkiller" had been
especially good. But the missionary was a bother after all, for he
brought no meat into the camp, and he ate heartily, and the hunters
grumbled. But he chilled his lungs on the divide by the Mayo, and the
dogs afterwards nosed the stones away and fought over his bones.
Koskoosh placed another stick on the fire and harked back deeper into
the past. There was the time of the Great Famine, when the old men
crouched empty-bellied to the fire, and let fall from their lips dim
traditions of the ancient day when the Yukon ran wide open for three
winters, and then lay frozen for three summers. He had lost his mother
in that famine. In the summer the salmon run had failed, and the tribe
looked forward to the winter and the coming of the caribou. Then the
winter came, but with it there were no caribou. Never had the like
been known, not even in the lives of the old men. But the caribou
did not come, and it was the seventh year, and the rabbits had not
replenished, and the dogs were naught but bundles of bones. And
through the long darkness the children wailed and died, and the women,
and the old men; and not one in ten of the tribe lived to meet the sun
when it came back in the spring. That _was_ a famine!
But he had seen times of plenty, too, when the meat spoiled on their
hands, and the dogs were fat and worthless with overeating--times when
they let the game go unkilled, and the women were fertile, and the
lodges were cluttered with sprawling men-children and women-children.
Then it was the men became high-stomached, and revived ancient
quarrels, and crossed the divides to the south to kill the Pellys, and
to the west that they might sit by the dead fires of the Tananas. He
remembered, when a boy, during a time of plenty, when he saw a moose
pulled down by the wolves. Zing-ha lay with him in the snow and
watched--Zing-ha, who later became the craftiest of hunters, and who,
in the end, fell through an air-hole on the Yukon. They found him, a
month afterward, just as he had crawled halfway out and frozen stiff
to the ice.
But the moose. Zing-ha and he had gone out that day to play at hunting
after the manner of their fathers. On the bed of the creek they struck
the fresh track of a moose, and with it the tracks of many wolves. "An
old one," Zing-ha, who was quicker at reading the sign, said--"an old
one who cannot keep up with the herd. The wolves have cut him out from
his brothers, and they will never leave him." And it was so. It was
their way. By day and by night, never resting, snarling on his heels,
snapping at his nose, they would stay by him to the end. How Zing-ha
and he felt the blood-lust quicken! The finish would be a sight to
see!
Eager-footed, they took the trail, and even he, Koskoosh, slow of
sight and an unversed tracker, could have followed it blind, it was
so wide. Hot were they on the heels of the chase, reading the grim
tragedy, fresh-written, at every step. Now they came to where the
moose had made a stand. Thrice the length of a grown man's body, in
every direction, had the snow been stamped about and uptossed. In the
midst were the deep impressions of the splay-hoofed game, and all
about, everywhere, were the lighter footmarks of the wolves. Some,
while their brothers harried the kill, had lain to one side and
rested. The full-stretched impress of their bodies in the snow was as
perfect as though made the moment before. One wolf had been caught
in a wild lunge of the maddened victim and trampled to death. A few
bones, well picked, bore witness.
Again, they ceased the uplift of their snowshoes at a second stand.
Here the great animal had fought desperately. Twice had he been
dragged down, as the snow attested, and twice had he shaken his
assailants clear and gained footing once more. He had done his task
long since, but none the less was life dear to him. Zing-ha said it
was a strange thing, a moose once down to get free again; but this one
certainly had. The shaman would see signs and wonders in this when
they told him.
And yet again, they come to where the moose had made to mount the bank
and gain the timber. But his foes had laid on from behind, till he
reared and fell back upon them, crushing two deep into the snow. It
was plain the kill was at hand, for their brothers had left them
untouched. Two more stands were hurried past, brief in time-length and
very close together. The trail was red now, and the clean stride of
the great beast had grown short and slovenly. Then they heard the
first sounds of the battle--not the full-throated chorus of the chase,
but the short, snappy bark which spoke of close quarters and teeth to
flesh. Crawling up the wind, Zing-ha bellied it through the snow, and
with him crept he, Koskoosh, who was to be chief of the tribesmen in
the years to come. Together they shoved aside the under branches of a
young spruce and peered forth. It was the end they saw.
The picture, like all of youth's impressions, was still strong with
him, and his dim eyes watched the end played out as vividly as in
that far-off time. Koskoosh marvelled at this, for in the days which
followed, when he was a leader of men and a head of councillors, he
had done great deeds and made his name a curse in the mouths of the
Pellys, to say naught of the strange white man he had killed, knife to
knife, in open fight.
For long he pondered on the days of his youth, till the fire died down
and the frost bit deeper. He replenished it with two sticks this time,
and gauged his grip on life by what remained. If Sit-cum-to-ha had
only remembered her grandfather, and gathered a larger armful, his
hours would have been longer. It would have been easy. But she was
ever a careless child, and honored not her ancestors from the time the
Beaver, son of the son of Zing-ha, first cast eyes upon her. Well,
what mattered it? Had he not done likewise in his own quick youth? For
a while he listened to the silence. Perhaps the heart of his son might
soften, and he would come back with the dogs to take his old father on
with the tribe to where the caribou ran thick and the fat hung heavy
upon them.
He strained his ears, his restless brain for the moment stilled. Not a
stir, nothing. He alone took breath in the midst of the great silence.
It was very lonely. Hark! What was that? A chill passed over his body.
The familiar, long-drawn howl broke the void, and it was close at
hand. Then on his darkened eyes was projected the vision of the
moose--the old bull moose--the torn flanks and bloody sides, the
riddled mane, and the great branching horns, down low and tossing to
the last. He saw the flashing forms of gray, the gleaming eyes, the
lolling tongues, the slavered fangs. And he saw the inexorable circle
close in till it became a dark point in the midst of the stamped snow.
A cold muzzle thrust against his cheek, and at its touch his soul
leaped back to the present. His hand shot into the fire and dragged
out a burning faggot. Overcome for the nonce by his hereditary fear of
man, the brute retreated, raising a prolonged call to his brothers;
and greedily they answered, till a ring of crouching, jaw-slobbered
gray was stretched round about. The old man listened to the drawing
in of this circle. He waved his brand wildly, and sniffs turned to
snarls; but the panting brutes refused to scatter. Now one wormed his
chest forward, dragging his haunches after, now a second, now a third;
but never a one drew back. Why should he cling to life? he asked, and
dropped the blazing stick into the snow. It sizzled and went out. The
circle grunted uneasily, but held its own. Again he saw the last stand
of the old bull moose, and Koskoosh dropped his head wearily upon his
knees. What did it matter after all? Was it not the law of life?
