The Wisdom of the Trail
Sitka Charley had achieved the impossible. Other Indians might
have known as much of the wisdom of the trail as he did; but he
alone knew the white man's wisdom, the honor of the trail, and
the law. But these things had not come to him in a day. The
aboriginal mind is slow to generalize, and many facts, repeated
often, are required to compass an understanding. Sitka Charley,
from boyhood, had been thrown continually with white men, and as
a man he had elected to cast his fortunes with them, expatriating
himself, once and for all, from his own people. Even then,
respecting, almost venerating their power, and pondering over it,
he had yet to divine its secret essence--the honor and the law.
And it was only by the cumulative evidence of years that he had
finally come to understand. Being an alien, when he did know, he
knew it better than the white man himself; being an Indian, he
had achieved the impossible.
And of these things had been bred a certain contempt for his own
people--a contempt which he had made it a custom to conceal, but
which now burst forth in a polyglot whirlwind of curses upon the
heads of Kah-Chucte and Gowhee. They cringed before him like a
brace of snarling wolf dogs, too cowardly to spring, too wolfish
to cover their fangs. They were not handsome creatures. Neither
was Sitka Charley. All three were frightful-looking. There was no
flesh to their faces; their cheekbones were massed with hideous
scabs which had cracked and frozen alternately under the intense
frost; while their eyes burned luridly with the light which is
born of desperation and hunger. Men so situated, beyond the pale
of the honor and the law, are not to be trusted. Sitka Charley
knew this; and this was why he had forced them to abandon their
rifles with the rest of the camp outfit ten days before. His
rifle and Captain Eppingwell's were the only ones that remained.
'Come, get a fire started,' he commanded, drawing out the
precious matchbox with its attendant strips of dry birchbark.
The two Indians fell sullenly to the task of gathering dead
branches and underwood. They were weak and paused often, catching
themselves, in the act of stooping, with giddy motions, or
staggering to the center of operations with their knees shaking
like castanets.
After each trip they rested for a moment, as though sick and
deadly weary. At times their eyes took on the patient stoicism of
dumb suffering; and again the ego seemed almost burst forth with
its wild cry, 'I, I, I want to exist!'--the dominant note of the
whole living universe.
A light breath of air blew from the south, nipping the exposed
portions of their bodies and driving the frost, in needles of
fire, through fur and flesh to the bones. So, when the fire had
grown lusty and thawed a damp circle in the snow about it, Sitka
Charley forced his reluctant comrades to lend a hand in pitching
a fly. It was a primitive affair, merely a blanket stretched
parallel with the fire and to windward of it, at an angle of
perhaps forty-five degrees. This shut out the chill wind and
threw the heat backward and down upon those who were to huddle in
its shelter. Then a layer of green spruce boughs were spread,
that their bodies might not come in contact with the snow. When
this task was completed, Kah-Chucte and Gowhee proceeded to take
care of their feet. Their icebound moccasins were sadly worn by
much travel, and the sharp ice of the river jams had cut them to
rags.
Their Siwash socks were similarly conditioned, and when these had
been thawed and removed, the dead-white tips of the toes, in the
various stages of mortification, told their simple tale of the
trail.
Leaving the two to the drying of their footgear, Sitka Charley
turned back over the course he had come. He, too, had a mighty
longing to sit by the fire and tend his complaining flesh, but
the honor and the law forbade. He toiled painfully over the
frozen field, each step a protest, every muscle in revolt.
Several times, where the open water between the jams had recently
crusted, he was forced to miserably accelerate his movements as
the fragile footing swayed and threatened beneath him. In such
places death was quick and easy; but it was not his desire to
endure no more.
His deepening anxiety vanished as two Indians dragged into view
round a bend in the river. They staggered and panted like men
under heavy burdens; yet the packs on their backs were a matter
of but a few pounds. He questioned them eagerly, and their
replies seemed to relieve him. He hurried on. Next came two white
men, supporting between them a woman. They also behaved as though
drunken, and their limbs shook with weakness. But the woman
leaned lightly upon them, choosing to carry herself forward with
her own strength. At the sight of her a flash of joy cast its
fleeting light across Sitka Charley's face. He cherished a very
great regard for Mrs. Eppingwell. He had seen many white women,
but this was the first to travel the trail with him. When Captain
Eppingwell proposed the hazardous undertaking and made him an
offer for his services, he had shaken his head gravely; for it
was an unknown journey through the dismal vastnesses of the
Northland, and he knew it to be of the kind that try to the
uttermost the souls of men.
But when he learned that the captain's wife was to accompany
them, he had refused flatly to have anything further to do with
it. Had it been a woman of his own race he would have harbored no
objections; but these women of the Southland--no, no, they were
too soft, too tender, for such enterprises.
Sitka Charley did not know this kind of woman. Five minutes
before, he did not even dream of taking charge of the expedition;
but when she came to him with her wonderful smile and her
straight clean English, and talked to the point, without pleading
or persuading, he had incontinently yielded. Had there been a
softness and appeal to mercy in the eyes, a tremble to the voice,
a taking advantage of sex, he would have stiffened to steel;
instead her clear-searching eyes and clear-ringing voice, her
utter frankness and tacit assumption of equality, had robbed him
of his reason. He felt, then, that this was a new breed of woman;
and ere they had been trail mates for many days he knew why the
sons of such women mastered the land and the sea, and why the
sons of his own womankind could not prevail against them. Tender
and soft! Day after day he watched her, muscle-weary, exhausted,
indomitable, and the words beat in upon him in a perennial
refrain. Tender and soft! He knew her feet had been born to easy
paths and sunny lands, strangers to the moccasined pain of the
North, unkissed by the chill lips of the frost, and he watched
and marveled at them twinkling ever through the weary day.
She had always a smile and a word of cheer, from which not even
the meanest packer was excluded. As the way grew darker she
seemed to stiffen and gather greater strength, and when
Kah-Chucte and Gowhee, who had bragged that they knew every
landmark of the way as a child did the skin bails of the tepee,
acknowledged that they knew not where they were, it was she who
raised a forgiving voice amid the curses of the men. She had sung
to them that night till they felt the weariness fall from them
and were ready to face the future with fresh hope. And when the
food failed and each scant stint was measured jealously, she it
was who rebelled against the machinations of her husband and
Sitka Charley, and demanded and received a share neither greater
nor less than that of the others.
Sitka Charley was proud to know this woman. A new richness, a
greater breadth, had come into his life with her presence.
Hitherto he had been his own mentor, had turned to right or left
at no man's beck; he had moulded himself according to his own
dictates, nourished his manhood regardless of all save his own
opinion. For the first time he had felt a call from without for
the best that was in him, just a glance of appreciation from the
clear-searching eyes, a word of thanks from the clear-ringing
voice, just a slight wreathing of the lips in the wonderful
smile, and he walked with the gods for hours to come. It was a
new stimulant to his manhood; for the first time he thrilled with
a conscious pride in his wisdom of the trail; and between the
twain they ever lifted the sinking hearts of their comrades. The
faces of the two men and the woman brightened as they saw him,
for after all he was the staff they leaned upon. But Sitka
Charley, rigid as was his wont, concealing pain and pleasure
impartially beneath an iron exterior, asked them the welfare of
the rest, told the distance to the fire, and continued on the
back-trip.
Next he met a single Indian, unburdened, limping, lips
compressed, and eyes set with the pain of a foot in which the
quick fought a losing battle with the dead. All possible care had
been taken of him, but in the last extremity the weak and
unfortunate must perish, and Sitka Charley deemed his days to be
few. The man could not keep up for long, so he gave him rough
cheering words. After that came two more Indians, to whom he had
allotted the task of helping along Joe, the third white man of
the party. They had deserted him. Sitka Charley saw at a glance
the lurking spring in their bodies, and knew they had at last
cast off his mastery. So he was not taken unawares when he
ordered them back in quest of their abandoned charge, and saw the
gleam of the hunting knives that they drew from the sheaths. A
pitiful spectacle, three weak men lifting their puny strength in
the face of the mighty vastness; but the two recoiled under the
fierce rifle blows of the one and returned like beaten dogs to
the leash. Two hours later, with Joe reeling between them and
Sitka Charley bringing up the rear, they came to the fire, where
the remainder of the expedition crouched in the shelter of the
fly.
'A few words, my comrades, before we sleep,' Sitka Charley said
after they had devoured their slim rations of unleavened bread.
He was speaking to the Indians in their own tongue, having
already given the import to the whites. 'A few words, my
comrades, for your own good, that ye may yet perchance live. I
shall give you the law; on his own head by the death of him that
breaks it. We have passed the Hills of Silence, and we now travel
the head reaches of the Stuart. It may be one sleep, it may be
several, it may be many sleeps, but in time we shall come among
the men of the Yukon, who have much grub. It were well that we
look to the law. Today Kah-Chucte and Gowhee, whom I commanded to
break trail, forgot they were men, and like frightened children
ran away.
'True, they forgot; so let us forget. But hereafter, let them
remember. If it should happen they do not...' He touched his
rifle carelessly, grimly. 'Tomorrow they shall carry the flour
and see that the white man Joe lies not down by the trail. The
cups of flour are counted; should so much as an ounce be wanting
at nightfall... Do ye understand? Today there were others that
forgot. Moose Head and Three Salmon left the white man Joe to lie
in the snow. Let them forget no more. With the light of day shall
they go forth and break trail. Ye have heard the law. Look well,
lest ye break it.' Sitka Charley found it beyond him to keep the
line close up. From Moose Head and Three Salmon, who broke trail
in advance, to Kah-Chucte, Gowhee, and Joe, it straggled out over
a mile. Each staggered, fell or rested as he saw fit.
The line of march was a progression through a chain of irregular
halts. Each drew upon the last remnant of his strength and
stumbled onward till it was expended, but in some miraculous way
there was always another last remnant. Each time a man fell it
was with the firm belief that he would rise no more; yet he did
rise, and again and again. The flesh yielded, the will conquered;
but each triumph was a tragedy. The Indian with the frozen foot,
no longer erect, crawled forward on hand and knee. He rarely
rested, for he knew the penalty exacted by the frost.
Even Mrs. Eppingwell's lips were at last set in a stony smile,
and her eyes, seeing, saw not. Often she stopped, pressing a
mittened hand to her heart, gasping and dizzy.
Joe, the white man, had passed beyond the stage of suffering. He
no longer begged to be let alone, prayed to die; but was soothed
and content under the anodyne of delirium. Kah-Chucte and Gowhee
dragged him on roughly, venting upon him many a savage glance or
blow. To them it was the acme of injustice.
Their hearts were bitter with hate, heavy with fear. Why should
they cumber their strength with his weakness? To do so meant
death; not to do so--and they remembered the law of Sitka
Charley, and the rifle.
Joe fell with greater frequency as the daylight waned, and so
hard was he to raise that they dropped farther and farther
behind. Sometimes all three pitched into the snow, so weak had
the Indians become. Yet on their backs was life, and strength,
and warmth.
Within the flour sacks were all the potentialities of existence.
They could not but think of this, and it was not strange, that
which came to pass. They had fallen by the side of a great timber
jam where a thousand cords of firewood waited the match. Near by
was an air hole through the ice. Kah-Chucte looked on the wood
and the water, as did Gowhee; then they looked at each other.
Never a word was spoken. Gowhee struck a fire; Kah-Chucte filled
a tin cup with water and heated it; Joe babbled of things in
another land, in a tongue they did not understand.
They mixed flour with the warm water till it was a thin paste,
and of this they drank many cups. They did not offer any to Joe;
but he did not mind. He did not mind anything, not even his
moccasins, which scorched and smoked among the coals.
A crystal mist of snow fell about them, softly, caressingly,
wrapping them in clinging robes of white. And their feet would
have yet trod many trails had not destiny brushed the clouds
aside and cleared the air. Nay, ten minutes' delay would have
been salvation.
Sitka Charley, looking back, saw the pillared smoke of their
fire, and guessed. And he looked ahead at those who were
faithful, and at Mrs. Eppingwell. 'So, my good comrades, ye have
again forgotten that you were men? Good! Very good. There will be
fewer bellies to feed.' Sitka Charley retied the flour as he
spoke, strapping the pack to the one on his own back. He kicked
Joe till the pain broke through the poor devil's bliss and
brought him doddering to his feet. Then he shoved him out upon
the trail and started him on his way. The two Indians attempted
to slip off.
'Hold, Gowhee! And thou, too, Kah-Chucte! Hath the flour given
such strength to thy legs that they may outrun the swift-winged
lead? Think not to cheat the law. Be men for the last time, and
be content that ye die full-stomached.
Come, step up, back to the timber, shoulder to shoulder. Come!'
The two men obeyed, quietly, without fear; for it is the future
which pressed upon the man, not the present.
'Thou, Gowhee, hast a wife and children and a deerskin lodge in
the Chipewyan. What is thy will in the matter?' 'Give thou her of
the goods which are mine by the word of the captain--the
blankets, the beads, the tobacco, the box which makes strange
sounds after the manner of the white men. Say that I did die on
the trail, but say not how.' 'And thou, Kah-Chucte, who hast nor
wife nor child?' 'Mine is a sister, the wife of the factor at
Koshim. He beats her, and she is not happy. Give thou her the
goods which are mine by the contract, and tell her it were well
she go back to her own people. Shouldst thou meet the man, and be
so minded, it were a good deed that he should die. He beats her,
and she is afraid.' 'Are ye content to die by the law?' 'We are.'
'Then good-bye, my good comrades. May ye sit by the well-filled
pot, in warm lodges, ere the day is done.' As he spoke he raised
his rifle, and many echoes broke the silence. Hardly had they
died away when other rifles spoke in the distance. Sitka Charley
started.
There had been more than one shot, yet there was but one other
rifle in the party.
He gave a fleeting glance at the men who lay so quietly, smiled
viciously at the wisdom of the trail, and hurried on to meet the
men of the Yukon.
