The Shaman/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
ASIDE from its physical beauty gold is not worth much, after all!
Because its dominion has been for so many ages undisputed; because the hunger for it has betrayed souls; because myriads of men and women have throughout all time gambled blood, lives, and honor for its possession, none of these has made me either detest it or bow head and knee in reverence. I recognized it as a metal. Beautiful? Yes. The most beautiful of all—enduring, unrusting, maintaining its dignified luster though buried beneath the clean, unbroken earth, or recovered after long handling from the muck heaps of human cesspools.
For that undefilable, unconquerable, austere quality I honor it; but for that alone. Yet this I who am now old and gray can boast: that not any of it ever came other than clean to my hands nor left thereafter polluted by my transient touch. I have no gold that I did not earn by the sweat of physical effort or the barter of such mental creations as were my inheritance, save that which came from Peluk, the shaman.
A shaman? To me it seems strange that there are those who do not know the word in its value. For it means many things. It is more than a mere title. It cannot be conferred by potentate, autocrat, or king. It is an endowment of respect rather than election, bestowed upon those who, wise in the lore, history, or accomplishments of a tribe of men are given due and merited deference. The quality of the service depends upon the ideals of the tribe. Gibbon, the historian, was a shaman to those of the English-speaking race. Napoleon, but for his fall, might have become a shaman to the French. Cæsar was shaman to his own. George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were American shamen in their day. And, doubtless, so was Tamerlane and Mohammed and Herodotus, as well as the chief of that South Seas cannibal tribe who decreed that the most certain way of disposing of Captain Cook was not only to kill him, but thereafter to eat and digest him. And so, great or small, down through all human history they pass.
It is of one of the obscure shamen that I would tell. Whether he was a great murderer, an unmitigated villain, a monster, or a benevolent despot, I leave to judgment.
Interwoven with this memory of the shaman is the Lady Malitka, concerning whose reputation and characteristics there was at one time much dispute. Whether, as some of her followers and supporters declared, she was a martyr, or, as her enemies and detractors insisted, a human tigress, is also a matter of opinion. She is still alive and, of all, cares least.
That the genesis of a sinister sequence of trying adventures was toward the day when John Braith and I first heard her name, is certain. That was in the days when the silent North slept, unknown, unsought, the goal or desire of none of this white race of ours. Its vast solitude, majestic and severe, swept from the shores of the Bering on the west, to Hudson Bay on the east, a dormant and hardly accessible land, carpeted with flowers beneath the short summer's suns, blanketed in the long arctic night beneath frozen snows; filled in summer with the songs of breeding and unmolested birds; silent in winter with a stillness so profound, so unreal, so intense, that life in any form seemed unknown, impossible.
And it was through this latter season that, spent, starving, teamed together with skeleton dogs, dying, as were we, and yet desperately and together fighting for life, Jack Braith and I staggered down the white expanse of a river that still is unknown to the maps.
Braith, my partner, was snow-blind. For five days we had traveled thus, he, poor fellow—as white a man as ever lived!—clinging to the handlebars of the sled. Our last sight of human beings had been at a little, squalid native village whose inhabitants were themselves on the verge of starvation. The younger men were all gone, in quest of game, and an old tyune made us understand that they could furnish us with neither food nor a guide; but with a “story knife” he drew on the earthen floor of the kashime a map indicating how the next village might be reached. “Four sleeps,” he said, indicating that ours must be a journey of four days. And then looking at our starved dogs he shook a doubtful head, pointed at the animals, and corrected it to “five sleeps.”
Both my partner and I knew a few words of the native tongue used in that village, but not enough to understand his guttural patter through which at regular intervals came a word, “Malitka.”
“What do you suppose that means?” Braith asked, staring at me. “That word Malitka that he uses so much.”
I took from the tyune's gnarled hand his story knife and drew a crude picture of native huts and then questioned: “Malitka?” He nodded his head in assent; but to our bewilderment now drew a picture of a woman and, tapping it with his knife, said, “Malitka.”
“I can't make out whether that's the name of an Indian village or an Indian woman,” I said to Jack, and we gave it up after making a copy of the route map on the back of an envelope which the headman finally took from my hands and elaborated to indicate mountain passes we must find and other places to be avoided.
The tyune's prediction that it would require “five sleeps” proved wrong; for it was on the second day after our departure from that village and its miseries that the winter terror of the North, snow blindness, smote my partner's sight and put drags upon our progress. He suffered silently throughout the brief hours of daylight; he suffered grimly throughout the long nights, making no complaint, passing no remarks save to deplore the extra burdens imposed upon me. And I, whose eyes must serve for two, whose visual judgment must serve lest we lose our way through the great wastes and piled-up mountains, traveled with fear in my heart.
It was on the sixth night, in the tiny trail tent, after I had trickled warm water into those widely staring, blood-red, tortured eyes, that Braith reached up from where he lay flat on his back on the blankets and caught my hand in his.
“Old man,” he said, and there was neither fear nor wavering in his voice, “I've been thinking it over as we came along to-day and, although I can't see, I know how things are going.”
“Oh, but we're getting along all right,” I insisted.
“No. No use in evading me, partner,” he said, shaking his head. “I can still hear, although I can't see. To-day there were only five dogs left in the team. The sixth was too weak to pull and you left him out. He followed us all day, sometimes falling far behind, then in desperate terror catching up again. Yesterday morning you slipped away from the camp and put one out of its misery with an ax, not using your gun lest I hear the sound. To-night you pretended to eat but didn't. I found it out while you were out of the tent by counting the remaining fish—I counted them last night, too. You didn't”
“Count nothing! You might have found one bundle of the dog fish on which all of us are working on mighty small rations; but the other bundle”
“It won't do,” he interrupted. “There is no other bundle. The time has come when we've got to have a straight talk. We've been together some years now—you and I—Jim, and I don't think I've ever given you reason to think that I couldn't stand the gaft when things came to the worst. Well, they must be about there now.”
I could not at that moment answer. I was weak, hungry, nearly whipped. Outside a famished dog moaned and whimpered to the cold, merciless stars.
“Jim,” he said, sitting up on the blankets and staring at me with those pitifully blinded eyes as if he could see through the red veil, “tell me the truth. Do you think we've got off in the wrong direction and have missed the way to that village or woman, or what ever it is?”
Again I could not answer. He had voiced the fear that tormented my own mind.
“Come,” he said patiently. “Let's have the truth. I could feel that half dozen times to-day you stopped and took from underneath your parka that map we drew—a copy of the old native's route. You took it out to study it because you were uncertain. It's no use trying to keep things from me. And—I must know to-night. Must know now!”
For another moment I hesitated, sitting there with those sightless eyes fixed on me. Then, half-despairing, I told the truth.
“I have been worried,” I admitted. “Either the old fellow's map was not clear, or—or—I was too stupid to read it. All day I have traveled without a landmark that I could identify.”
For a long time he pondered while I, cold, hungry, sat helpless. Our situation indeed seemed hopeless.
“Then,” said Braith at last, very gently, “there is but one thing Left to do. To-morrow you must take the trail alone.”
“Alone? Leave you here—alone?” I stammered, scarcely able to believe my ears.
“Yes,” he said. “There's no use in both of us dying. You must take the dogs that can still travel, and the grub, and—go on, Jim. Go on to the end—whatever it is.”
I refused volubly, with that stark, violent language that one employs in desperation. But he was immovable. I argued; persuaded; begged; but it was all of no avail. He was determined—intent on giving me at least an opportunity for my life, resolutely bent on self-sacrifice that I might have a one-thousandth chance to survive. He attempted to convince me that if I went on alone and found this native village—that infinitesimally small spot in thousands of square miles of a frozen, unknown land, I could then return and succor him.
I suppose that there is a point where human endurance reaches mental rather than physical break, that sanity may go first leaving behind but an animal entity fighting to the last for self-preservation. It doesn't matter. All that is of moment is in what I did. For before I went to sleep that night, beaten by hunger and exhaustion into a nightmare of semiconsciousness, my plan was formed. I was determined that we should survive or die together, somewhere out there in the snows that stretched ahead for thousands of miles.
Jack was still asleep when I quietly threw the blankets off in the terrible cold of the new dawn, the one that promised to prove our last. He was greatly my physical superior—a man of prodigious strength and activity. Blind though he was, my sole hope of conquest and subjugation rested in overpowering him and rendering him helpless. I cannot even yet be certain which of us was the madman. I presume it may have been I who had slipped across that borderland.
I got the pack lashings, the long, slender rope with which we bound our sled for each day's journey, and with infinite pains and gentle movement lest I disturb him, got a loop over one outflung arm as it lay upon his chest, brought it over his back, and slipped it beneath another unheeding wrist. I cut it there and then bent over his feet that rested closely together in the bottom folds. I hobbled him effectually without awakening him. And then, with an abrupt pull, I tightened and bound his hands behind him. Startled, alert, angry, he struggled for a moment, and then, recognizing his helplessness, he lay still.
“Jack,” I said, “it's just as well to take things easy. You can't help yourself. You wouldn't give in last night. You've got to, now. I'll not leave you behind. To-day you'll ride. It's one of just two things; the last ride you'll ever take, or the worst one you'll ever have.”
I could discern that he believed himself in the power of a maniac who loved him, but a maniac nevertheless. I surmise that I was. I cannot entirely remember what I thought then. Yet I can remember this much: that I made no effort to remove either the tent, or its tiny square of sheet metal stove, and considered nothing save the little bundle of moldy dog fish, the sled and the dogs. In a reckless mood I fed the starving dogs the last food we had. I envied them as they tore the scanty, filthy food. To me they were devouring epicurean morsels beyond value. My sole hope was that they might gain strength for this crucial day that must be our last hope. To-night or wherever we paused when spent, one of them must die, be murdered, that we and his team mates might try for one day more. To-morrow, if we survived the day, another dog must die and the sled, which the others would not have sufficient strength to pull, be abandoned.
“Well, will you walk, or must I throw you on the sled and haul you?” I demanded of my partner when all my preparations to start had been made.
“I can't help myself,” he muttered. “You are mad! Clean mad! What do you intend to do with me?”
“If you'll promise to walk, I'll loosen your feet and tether your hands to the handlebars of the sled so you can run behind. If you won't do that, I'll throw you on top of the blankets on the sled, tie you there, and go on.”
“You may loosen my feet and tie my hands,” he said.
It is impossible, for me to remember the start or the stages of our progress; but I can imagine reeling dogs and reeling men, silent, hopeless, staggering down a white valley which in summertime must have been marked in its center by a stream but was now a white, hollow channel between high hills. I can picture one man whose hands were tied to the handles of a birch sled, moving, stumbling in blindness wheresoever he was dragged. I see a swerving, uncertain figure, a scarecrow, a half-dead lunatic in front, cursing through frostbitten lips the dogs, the man behind, and the cold topaz of arctic skies, and striving to lead the way.
But I can vividly recall a time when, with bent head, I saw traces in the snow—human traces—the sign of a sled pulled by dogs, the faint impact of moccasin-clad feet behind. I can still recall the bewilderment, the time it took me to appreciate that human beings had traversed this perilous waste. I can bring back the mental struggle to gather something from this sign, the conclusion that, inasmuch as this trail was fairly fresh and going in a certain direction, our sole hope lay in following it; I vaguely remember when the dog Barth fell and the weight of his body, still lashed to the sled, brought the panting dogs to a halt. I picked him up, laid him on the sled, slashed off a piece of pack rope and thereafter, with it across my shoulder pulled to assist the dogs—nothing more than a dying dog myself, feeling an awful kinship with the brutes.
The trail led upward over what appeared to be the frozen bed of a tiny stream that wound through great high hills and was bordered by cliffs so abrupt that it would have been impossible to scale them. After a time it abruptly passed through mountain gates into a valley. And there, to my bewilderment, I saw an Indian village different from any I had ever seen before.
Here, instead of squalid barrabaras—mere holes in the ground entered by tiny tunnels through which one must creep on hands and knees over refuse and filth to emerge in a cellarlike habitation in whose center was a fire pit—here, I say, instead of such barrabaras, were cabins built of logs. Outside of them were caches such as white men build, elevated in the air on log pillars, accessible only by the aid of ladders, dry, well roofed, secure. I had no time to bestow more than a startled glance before the dogs gave tongue and rushed forward recklessly expending their last reserve of energy. Poor brutes! I appreciated what scent and what they saw told to them! Food and shelter from the cold that was so intense that it burned and branded like living flame.
From the village there swept outward an answering pack, turbulent, resentful, strong. It rushed toward us a living and menacing flood, ready to gnash and tear our feeble bodies. Alarmed, I rushed to the sled and seized a rifle, prepared to fight to the last. Suddenly a shrill whistle shrieked through the still air, and the pack was checked. Doors opened and figures appeared upon the great white snows. As if amazed by such an unprecedented sight as that of travelers, these figures were slow to move. Then, as if recovering from a spell, they rushed toward us, men, women, and children, clad in skins, or voluminous denims, and shouting guttural expostulations to their dogs. They closed down upon us where in a little black group on the snow we waited. They breathed soft, but audible “Ah-h-h-hs!” at the sight of two white men, one of whom lay still and blanketed on the sled, and the other who, still clinging to a rifle, waited to learn whether this reception meant life or death.
Suddenly they parted, muttering “Peluk! Peluk!” and with something akin to deference made way for a man who walked hastily toward us and came to a stop. Tall as he was, for he was at least six feet in stature, he appeared squatty, by reason of his enormous width of shoulders, his gorilla-like chest and arms, and his great pillars of legs that braced apart and became rigid when he halted. His head was bare, as if he defied the cold, and his bristling hair, cropped, coarse, and thick, was blue-black save where an occasional thread of white bespoke age or hardship.
His face was massive, with high cheek bones, and his chin scarcely concealed by a sparse black growth of beard, was formidable. His thin-lipped, firm, almost cruel mouth was unsmiling. Nor was there a gleam of any discernible emotion, anger or mercy, in his black eyes that, sharp as those of a bird of prey, slowly and carefully scrutinized us. They stared from beneath eye brows heavier than I have ever seen in any Indian of the North. The nose might have been that of a great Sioux chieftain; a warrior's nose; the nose of a fierce and relentless conqueror.
And then, to my astonishment, he spoke in English:
“Put down gun. Don't shoot. You starved. Me know. Dogs most dead. You most dead. This man—him already dead? No, think not; for then why haul on sled? Come. We help.”
I dropped my rifle and then in soft and decisive gutturals he addressed his followers. Babbling like children released from authority, some of them drove the village dogs away while others, with hands on the sides of the birch rails, pushed the sled forward at a run. Our dogs ran lightly with unstretched harness. Peluk, after another look into my face, patted me on the back and said, “Not far now. Me understan'. You not strong. Here! I help!”
He thrust a sturdy hand under my armpit and assisted me in that last lap of the race against death in which we—Jack Braith, myself, and the dogs had won.