The Shaman/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
Up a slight bank we stumbled and out upon the long, gently ascending slope where the village was built. My astonishment increased when I observed that the cabins were so situated that they formed an orderly whole and bordered a straight and well-defined street. At its upper and higher end, as if posted where it might overlook all, stood a log structure larger than any of the others in the village which it appeared to dominate. A dozen glazed windows stared at us. A porch with hewn pine pillars, the first of its kind I had ever seen in Alaska, was centered by a storm door. It seemed a long way off, and yet my relentless guide prevented us from rushing into the first cabin for succor and forced us forward until we came to a halt in front of the great house.
“The Lady Malitka!” he said, as if in apologetic explanation. “Malitka must see—and speak.”
Doubtless the excitement created by our arrival had warned her of our coming. She may even have observed us through some one of the windows. But we were compelled to wait there in front of the house, like those seeking royal audience, for perhaps ten full minutes. Eventually the door opened and through it stalked a figure which, much to my surprise, was not clad in the customary native garb or the garb of the trader or that of the few white denizens of the North lands.
Her clothing was akin to the garments of civilization, being made of heavy wool that must have come from some English or perhaps American loom, fashioned into a short skirt and a straight-hanging, loose coat not unlike that of a woman's sporting costume. Her feet were incased in exquisitely made boots of soft leather that reached above her knees. She stopped and from the vantage of the raised porch looked down upon us. Instantly the natives made gestures of grave respect and all their garrulous clamor died to silence.
She called to my conductor and I think must have asked him to explain what he knew of our presence, for the shaman spoke at length in his own tongue, pointing now and then at the back trail, at our wearied dogs that had fallen upon the snow too nearly spent to resist the chance for rest. Then, leaving my side, he stepped to the sled and abruptly pulled back the blankets, exposing my partner, who lay as if unconscious.
Malitka moved quickly forward, and looked down at Braith for a moment before turning her scrutiny upon me. It may have been due to the weakness of my condition or the unexpected situation in which we stood, but I somehow felt that she was coldly considering our fate as an aloof judge might in a case involving life and death; I felt that if I did not find some favor in her sight I, with my helpless companion and starving dogs, might be whipped out into the wastes to inevitable death.
Her face was turned fully to mine and on a level—for, although I am five feet seven inches in stature, she was as tall as I. Hers was a clean-cut face with an aquiline nose, firm chin, and with nothing in it to suggest Indian blood. Her mouth was not Indian. It was too well formed, too small, too thin-lipped, and now it suggested inflexibility, perhaps mercilessness, that was disturbing to one in my position. Her head was bare and great masses of hair, nearly blue-black, were plainly but well done up, which was also a most unusual thing for a native woman.
But it was her eyes that held me, that probed, asking unvoiced questions, that disconcerted me with their still stare. I think that had I been confronted by any less austere being, any woman betraying more humanity, I should have cried to her in exasperation to make an end to this wait inflicted upon one helpless, unconscious man, and another who was giddy from fatigue and starvation.
“Who are you?” she suddenly asked. “And how did you find your way here?”
“We found our way here only because we came upon a sled trail and are—as you see—and we followed it,” I answered.
“But you have not answered my first question? I suppose therefore that you are either prospectors or traders, and”
“We are neither,” I interrupted, eager to be done with this inquisition, and for the first time I saw an actual break of something human in that stern face of hers, for she started as if curious to learn what other motives might bring men from that thousands-of-miles-distant civilization to such an unknown land as this.
“You are then—what?” she demanded, still staring at me with those extraordinarily cold eyes.
“If you must know,” I exclaimed, exasperated and resolved to put an end to this delay that meant more, I feared, to my partner than to myself, “my friend and I took on the task of coming into this country to find a man named Harris Barnes, or to get proof of his death. We were employed by a firm of lawyers and”
I stopped as abruptly as I had spoken. I was momentarily consternated when the woman lifted both hands upward with a jerk, held them there arrested after that involuntary movement, and her lips opened as if to speak, while her head bent suddenly forward and her eyes opened widely and fired with a different light. She was alive, at that moment, vivid, intense, startled.
“You came to—you came here—thus far—to—to” she began, then stopped as if catching herself and as if become impatient of further dalliance after reaching swift decision.
Quickly she turned from me, slapping her hands together as if to emphasize the decisiveness of commands, and spoke in their tongue to the waiting shaman, and to the villagers, who sprang to obedience. Some of them leaped forward, unharnessed our poor dogs, picked them up in their arms and carried them away. Others under the shaman's direction gently lifted my partner from the sled and solicitously carried him into the great house in front of which we stood. Bewildered, feverish with starvation, relieved as I was, I could not but note the astonishment of these natives whose demeanor indicated that this was a most unprecedented event. They even hesitated as if questioning whether they had heard her order aright, until she sharply repeated it. They glanced at me with a new and strange look of respect. Their previous attitude of expectant, obedient waiting was dissipated. In my wonderment I stood stolidly alone, until the woman returned from the foot of the steps whither she had walked while giving directions, I think, and herself put a hand on my arm.
“Come,” she said in that same peculiar English that, while flawless in expression and construction, had yet in it a faint foreign accent. “They are taking your companion to a room in my house, where I will give him attention. You, too, are my guest. I am sorry for the delay. But—it was important. Your friend is smitten by the snows and starvation. You are in but little better state. Can I assist you?”
She had changed remarkably, and was now but a woman, sympathetic, succoring, pitying. Her shapely hand, strong and firm, caught itself beneath my arm and helped me, weak, staggering, surrendering at last in a great let-down from resolution and distress, until we also stood within the warmth of her home. She conducted me into a huge room and indicated a chair.
“Sit there, for the time being,” she said, “until I have cared for your friend.”
Again she made that sharp clapping sound with her hands, and as I sank into the depths of a comfortable chair I was but half aware that in response to her summons a neatly clad native woman appeared, was given some quick orders, and disappeared, followed immediately by this strange hostess. I think that, overcome, I must have propped back and closed my eyes, for I have no recollection of any emotion—not even of curiosity—until I was aroused by softly spoken words:
“Drink! Must now drink this. Hope not too hot. Drink. Open eyes and drink.”
I opened my eyes obediently and my nostrils caught an odor that made of me for the moment little other than a famishing beast, the sharp pungent scent of beef tea. I clutched the cup with the wolfish hands of a starving man. I tore it from the brown hands of the servitor, as a famished wolf snatches ravenously at food. Heedless of its temperature, I drained the cup with great gulps, nor could I have restrained my desire had its heat scalded my throat.
“More!” I cried. “For the love of God! Bring more!”
Half frightened by my shout, the native woman took the cup from my hand and backed away. It seems odd to me, now, that even then I paid no attention or regard to my surroundings; that I sat there watching the door through which the woman had disappeared; and that I twitched restlessly in my seat, angry with delay because another cup, other pints, whole gallons of that warming and life-restoring fluid were not immediately put at my disposal. I heard muttered conversation in that unknown tongue outside the door—unmistakably conveying to me that the servant woman had addressed herself to her mistress, as if seeking directions, and unmistakably the quiet, steady instructions in reply.
I waited through an agony of famine, an interval that may have lasted for five minutes. And then again a cup—too small!—a mere tantalizing thing of torture, it seemed to me—was tendered for my grasp. Again I drained it to its dregs, holding it bottom upward in the air that its last faint trickle of contents might minister to my need.
“Enough now! Bimeby more. Lady Malitka say so. Not good too much too soon, or bimeby be sick!” said the native woman, in her hesitant use of my language. “No! No!” she expostulated, when I insisted. “Too much no good. Pretty soon have more. Must wait. Lady say so.”
Sometimes, thinking of it all, I see myself as I must have appeared there in that room, after she again left me alone. A gaunt skeleton of a man, gray-haired and bearded, booted with mukluks in which were many holes of camp fire and wear, and with sprawling, tired feet, a torn cap of skins on his head, skinny, twitching hands, unwashed, chapped and cracked, thrown listlessly on the arms of a denim-covered chair, with feverish eyes fixed vacantly upward, and cursing perhaps because more food was not immediately forthcoming. All of that time is still hazy. But, so quick is the marvelous recovery of one's brain and body by replenishment of supply, that I think in perhaps no more than half an hour I straightened in my chair and for the first time appreciated my surroundings.
The room was the largest I had ever seen in a structure of logs. At one end a great fireplace of rough country rock was filled with live coals and a glowing section of log, and on the mantlepiece were collected, haphazard, crude curios of Indian origin. Above it were other rare things of native craft or significance. Story knives of bone, precious possessions of long-dead hands; fish and game spears; great bows with thongs of caribou sinew; miniature canoes, bidarkas, oumilaks of birch or skin; caribou belts with their tale of teeth attesting the prowess of the hunter; ancient war clubs of knotted root and natural shape; buttons and medallions of carven bone; a great tusk of a mammoth dug from some glacial belt and intricately depicting the chase of ancient times; tanned skins upon whose brown surfaces had been burned or pigmented the crude conceptions of some struggling creative artist of his tribe who may have been, to it, a master.
I then observed a lounge fashioned after the comfortable shapes that we of the civilized world have evolved, chairs of various shapes, skins of precious worth, from that of the monstrous white polar bear to the red fox and the caribou, covering a time-polished floor, and in one corner was a Russian stove of porcelain whose white tiles seemed out of place and incongruous in such a setting. Its glow, through tiny grates, seemed watching and malevolently triumphant over the broader but less utilitarian blaze of the open fire.
In the ceiling the stained beams that served as rafters were alternately carved in grotesque patterns as if the concept of them had been stolen from ancient totem poles in villages far away, villages washed by the tides of the open sea. At one side of the room were crude cases containing books, whose bindings, in orderly array, protested that they at least were not of barbaric origin. A huge Russian lamp was suspended above a generous center table on which were carelessly thrown many things, indicating the amenities of civilization grotesquely placed here in the heart of the unknown, thousands of miles from the place of their origin.
My impatience for food gave way to curiosity, and it was well that it did, for I was compelled to wait another half hour before I was served with something more substantial. I was hungrily finishing the last crumbs when Malitka entered and, standing in the doorway, said, “Your friend has recovered quite well. You may see him if you wish.”
I arose and followed her into a comfortable bedroom in which were two substantial beds evidently made by an amateur cabinet-maker, a washstand with a square mirror in its center and, best of all, a portable bath-tub filled to the brim with steaming water. Jack was sitting in a comfortable chair wrapped in a blanket and with a bandage around his head to shield his eyes. The door closed behind Malitka as she disappeared.
“What on earth do you make of all this?” he asked. “Where are we? I've had food and a woman who talks English put some wonderfully cooling lotion on my eyes, provided me with a bath that was about the most enjoyable one I've ever had—after all these weeks on the trail and in dirty barrabaras—and, from the sound, I judge they have emptied the tub and filled it again for your benefit. Also it seems that somewhere here in the room are two suits of clothes and some clean underwear of some sort that are put out for use. Where the deuce are we, anyhow? I can't understand it at all!”
“No more can I,” I replied. “It beats me.”
I found the two changes and saw that the underwear was of the coarse type provided at trading posts. It was not new and, furthermore, must have been packed away for some time in a moth-proof preparation. The two suits of clothing, Mackinaw trousers and coats, also betrayed wear and storage, although clean. But I did not pause long to consider these matters, for the bath was an enticement.