The Collected Works of James Oliver Curwood (Illustrated Edition). James Oliver Curwood
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Red Death came, life was quite complete for him. It was then—two years ago—that the smallpox killed his princess wife. He still lived in the little cabin on the Gray Loon, but he was a different Pierrot. The heart was sick in him. It would have died, had it not been for Nepeese, his daughter. His wife had named her Nepeese, which means the Willow.
Nepeese had grown up like the willow, slender as a reed, with all her mother's wild beauty, and with a little of the French thrown in. She was sixteen, with great, dark, wonderful eyes, and hair so beautiful that an agent from Montreal passing that way had once tried to buy it. It fell in two shining braids, each as big as a man's wrist, almost to her knees. "Non, M'sieu," Pierrot had said, a cold glitter in his eyes as he saw what was in the agent's face. "It is not for barter."
Two days after Baree had entered his trapping ground, Pierrot came in from the forests with a troubled look in his face.
"Something is killing off the young beavers," he explained to Nepeese, speaking to her in French. "It is a lynx or a wolf. Tomorrow—" He shrugged his thin shoulders, and smiled at her.
"We will go on the hunt," laughed Nepeese happily, in her soft Cree.
When Pierrot smiled at her like that, and began with "Tomorrow," it always meant that she might go with him on the adventure he was contemplating.
Still another day later, at the end of the afternoon, Baree crossed the Gray Loon on a bridge of driftwood that had wedged between two trees. This was to the north. Just beyond the driftwood bridge there was a small clearing, and on the edge of it Baree paused to enjoy the last of the setting sun. As he stood motionless and listening, his tail drooping low, his ears alert, his sharp-pointed nose sniffing the new country to the north, there was not a pair of eyes in the forest that would not have taken him for a young wolf.
From behind a clump of young balsams, a hundred yards away, Pierrot and Nepeese had watched him come over the driftwood bridge. Now was the time, and Pierrot leveled his rifle. It was not until then that Nepeese touched his arm softly. Her breath came a little excitedly as she whispered:
"Nootawe, let me shoot. I can kill him!"
With a low chuckle Pierrot gave the gun to her. He counted the whelp as already dead. For Nepeese, at that distance, could send a bullet into an inch square nine times out of ten. And Nepeese, aiming carefully at Baree, pressed steadily with her brown forefinger upon the trigger.
CHAPTER V
As the Willow pulled the trigger of her rifle, Baree sprang into the air. He felt the force of the bullet before he heard the report of the gun. It lifted him off his feet, and then sent him rolling over and over as if he had been struck a hideous blow with a club. For a flash he did not feel pain. Then it ran through him like a knife of fire, and with that pain the dog in him rose above the wolf, and he let out a wild outcry of puppyish yapping as he rolled and twisted on the ground.
Pierrot and Nepeese had stepped from behind the balsams, the Willow's beautiful eyes shining with pride at the accuracy of her shot. Instantly she caught her breath. Her brown fingers clutched at the barrel of her rifle. The chuckle of satisfaction died on Pierrot's lips as Baree's cries of pain filled the forest.
"Uchi moosis!" gasped Nepeese, in her Cree.
Pierrot caught the rifle from her.
"Diable! A dog—a puppy!" he cried.
He started on a run for Baree. But in their amazement they had lost a few seconds and Baree's dazed senses were returning. He saw them clearly as they came across the open—a new kind of monster of the forests! With a final wail he darted back into the deep shadows of the trees. It was almost sunset, and he ran for the thick gloom of the heavy spruce near the creek. He had shivered at sight of the bear and the moose, but for the first time he now sensed the real meaning of danger. And it was close after him. He could hear the crashing of the two-legged beasts in pursuit; strange cries were almost at his heels—and then suddenly he plunged without warning into a hole.
It was a shock to have the earth go out from under his feet like that, but Baree did not yelp. The wolf was dominant in him again. It urged him to remain where he was, making no move, no sound—scarcely breathing. The voices were over him; the strange feet almost stumbled in the hole where he lay. Looking out of his dark hiding place, he could see one of his enemies. It was Nepeese, the Willow. She was standing so that a last glow of the day fell upon her face. Baree did not take his eyes from her.
Above his pain there rose in him a strange and thrilling fascination. The girl put her two hands to her mouth and in a voice that was soft and plaintive and amazingly comforting to his terrified little heart, cried:
"Uchimoo—Uchimoo—Uchimoo!"
And then he heard another voice; and this voice, too, was far less terrible than many sounds he had listened to in the forests.
"We cannot find him, Nepeese," the voice was saying. "He has crawled off to die. It is too bad. Come."
Where Baree had stood in the edge of the open Pierrot paused and pointed to a birch sapling that had been cut clean off by the Willow's bullet. Nepeese understood. The sapling, no larger than her thumb, had turned her shot a trifle and had saved Baree from instant death. She turned again, and called:
"Uchimoo—Uchimoo—Uchimoo!"
Her eyes were no longer filled with the thrill of slaughter.
"He would not understand that," said Pierrot, leading the way across the open. "He is wild—born of the wolves. Perhaps he was of Koomo's lead bitch, who ran away to hunt with the packs last winter."
"And he will die—"
"Ayetun—yes, he will die."
But Baree had no idea of dying. He was too tough a youngster to be shocked to death by a bullet passing through the soft flesh of his foreleg. That was what had happened. His leg was torn to the bone, but the bone itself was untouched. He waited until the moon had risen before he crawled out of his hole.
His leg had grown stiff, but it had stopped bleeding, though his whole body was racked by a terrible pain. A dozen Papayuchisews, all holding right to his ears and nose, could not have hurt him more. Every time he moved, a sharp twinge shot through him; and yet he persisted in moving. Instinctively he felt that by traveling away from the hole he would get away from danger. This was the best thing that could have happened to him, for a little later a porcupine came wandering along, chattering to itself in its foolish, good-humored way, and fell with a fat thud into the hole. Had Baree remained, he would have been so full of quills that he must surely have died.
In another way the exercise of travel was good for Baree. It gave his wound no opportunity to "set," as Pierrot would have said, for in reality his hurt was more painful than serious. For the first hundred yards he hobbled along on three legs, and after that he found that he could use his fourth by humoring it a great deal. He followed the creek for a half mile. Whenever a bit of brush touched his wound, he would snap at it viciously, and instead of whimpering when he felt one of the sharp twinges shooting through him, an angry little growl gathered in his throat, and his teeth clicked. Now that he was out of the hole, the effect of the Willow's shot was stirring every drop of wolf blood in his body. In him there was a growing animosity—a feeling of rage not against any one thing in particular, but against all things. It was not the feeling with which he had fought Papayuchisew, the young owl. On this night the dog in him had disappeared. An accumulation of misfortunes had descended upon him, and out of these misfortunes—and his present hurt—the wolf had risen savage and vengeful.
This was the first time Baree had traveled at night. He was, for the time, unafraid of anything that might creep up on him out of the darkness. The blackest shadows had lost their terror. It was the first big fight between the two natures that were born in him—the wolf and the dog—and the dog was vanquished. Now and then he stopped to lick his wound, and as he licked it he growled, as though for the hurt itself he held a personal antagonism. If Pierrot could have