The Greatest Adventures Boxed Set: Jack London Edition. Jack London

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The Greatest Adventures Boxed Set: Jack London Edition - Jack London


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or smell…. Any tobacco?… Ah, thanks, and a pipe? Good. Now for a fire-stick and we’ll see if the weed has lost its cunning.”

      He scratched the match with the painstaking care of the woodsman, cherished its young flame as though there were never another in all the world, and drew in the first mouthful of smoke. This he retained meditatively for a time, and blew out through his pursed lips slowly and caressingly. Then his face seemed to soften as he leaned back, and a soft blur to film his eyes. He sighed heavily, happily, with immeasurable content, and then said suddenly:

      “God! But that tastes good!”

      Van Brunt nodded sympathetically. “Five years, you say?”

      “Five years.” The man sighed again. “And you, I presume, wish to know about it, being naturally curious, and this a sufficiently strange situation, and all that. But it’s not much. I came in from Edmonton after musk-ox, and like Pike and the rest of them, had my mischances, only I lost my party and outfit. Starvation, hardship, the regular tale, you know, sole survivor and all that, till I crawled into Tantlatch’s, here, on hand and knee.”

      “Five years,” Van Brunt murmured retrospectively, as though turning things over in his mind.

      “Five years on February last. I crossed the Great Slave early in May—”

      “And you are … Fairfax?” Van Brunt interjected.

      The man nodded.

      “Let me see … John, I think it is, John Fairfax.”

      “How did you know?” Fairfax queried lazily, half-absorbed in curling smoke-spirals upward in the quiet air.

      “The papers were full of it at the time. Prevanche—”

      “Prevanche!” Fairfax sat up, suddenly alert. “He was lost in the Smoke Mountains.”

      “Yes, but he pulled through and came out.”

      Fairfax settled back again and resumed his smoke-spirals. “I am glad to hear it,” he remarked reflectively. “Prevanche was a bully fellow if he did have ideas about head-straps, the beggar. And he pulled through? Well, I’m glad.”

      Five years … the phrase drifted recurrently through Van Brunt’s thought, and somehow the face of Emily Southwaithe seemed to rise up and take form before him. Five years … A wedge of wildfowl honked low overhead and at sight of the encampment veered swiftly to the north into the smouldering sun. Van Brunt could not follow them. He pulled out his watch. It was an hour past midnight. The northward clouds flushed bloodily, and rays of sombrered shot southward, firing the gloomy woods with a lurid radiance. The air was in breathless calm, not a needle quivered, and the least sounds of the camp were distinct and clear as trumpet calls. The Crees and voyageurs felt the spirit of it and mumbled in dreamy undertones, and the cook unconsciously subdued the clatter of pot and pan. Somewhere a child was crying, and from the depths of the forest, like a silver thread, rose a woman’s voice in mournful chant: “O-o-o-o-o-o-a-haa-ha-a-ha-aa-a-a, O-o-o-o-o-o-a-ha-a-ha-a.”

      Van Brunt shivered and rubbed the backs of his hands briskly.

      “And they gave me up for dead?” his companion asked slowly.

      “Well, you never came back, so your friends—”

      “Promptly forgot.” Fairfax laughed harshly, defiantly.

      “Why didn’t you come out?”

      “Partly disinclination, I suppose, and partly because of circumstances over which I had no control. You see, Tantlatch, here, was down with a broken leg when I made his acquaintance,—a nasty fracture,—and I set it for him and got him into shape. I stayed some time, getting my strength back. I was the first white man he had seen, and of course I seemed very wise and showed his people no end of things. Coached them up in military tactics, among other things, so that they conquered the four other tribal villages, (which you have not yet seen), and came to rule the land. And they naturally grew to think a good deal of me, so much so that when I was ready to go they wouldn’t hear of it. Were most hospitable, in fact. Put a couple of guards over me and watched me day and night. And then Tantlatch offered me inducements,—in a sense, inducements,—so to say, and as it didn’t matter much one way or the other, I reconciled myself to remaining.”

      “I knew your brother at Freiburg. I am Van Brunt.”

      Fairfax reached forward impulsively and shook his hand. “You were Billy’s friend, eh? Poor Billy! He spoke of you often.”

      “Rum meeting place, though,” he added, casting an embracing glance over the primordial landscape and listening for a moment to the woman’s mournful notes. “Her man was clawed by a bear, and she’s taking it hard.”

      “Beastly life!” Van Brunt grimaced his disgust. “I suppose, after five years of it, civilization will be sweet? What do you say?”

      Fairfax’s face took on a stolid expression. “Oh, I don’t know. At least they’re honest folk and live according to their lights. And then they are amazingly simple. No complexity about them, no thousand and one subtle ramifications to every single emotion they experience. They love, fear, hate, are angered, or made happy, in common, ordinary, and unmistakable terms. It may be a beastly life, but at least it is easy to live. No philandering, no dallying. If a woman likes you, she’ll not be backward in telling you so. If she hates you, she’ll tell you so, and then, if you feel inclined, you can beat her, but the thing is, she knows precisely what you mean, and you know precisely what she means. No mistakes, no misunderstandings. It has its charm, after civilization’s fitful fever. Comprehend?”

      “No, it’s a pretty good life,” he continued, after a pause; “good enough for me, and I intend to stay with it.”

      Van Brunt lowered his head in a musing manner, and an imperceptible smile played on his mouth. No philandering, no dallying, no misunderstanding. Fairfax also was taking it hard, he thought, just because Emily Southwaithe had been mistakenly clawed by a bear. And not a bad sort of a bear, either, was Carlton Southwaithe.

      “But you are coming along with me,” Van Brunt said deliberately.

      “No, I’m not.”

      “Yes, you are.”

      “Life’s too easy here, I tell you.” Fairfax spoke with decision. “I understand everything, and I am understood. Summer and winter alternate like the sun flashing through the palings of a fence, the seasons are a blur of light and shade, and time slips by, and life slips by, and then … a wailing in the forest, and the dark. Listen!”

      He held up his hand, and the silver thread of the woman’s sorrow rose through the silence and the calm. Fairfax joined in softly.

      “O-o-o-o-o-o-a-haa-ha-a-ha-aa-a-a, O-o-o-o-o-o-a-ha-a-ha-a,” he sang. “Can’t you hear it? Can’t you see it? The women mourning? the funeral chant? my hair white-locked and patriarchal? my skins wrapped in rude splendor about me? my hunting-spear by my side? And who shall say it is not well?”

      Van Brunt looked at him coolly. “Fairfax, you are a damned fool. Five years of this is enough to knock any man, and you are in an unhealthy, morbid condition. Further, Carlton Southwaithe is dead.”

      Van Brunt filled his pipe and lighted it, the while watching slyly and with almost professional interest. Fairfax’s eyes flashed on the instant, his fists clenched, he half rose up, then his muscles relaxed and he seemed to brood. Michael, the cook, signalled that the meal was ready, but Van Brunt motioned back to delay. The silence hung heavy, and he fell to analyzing the forest scents, the odors of mould and rotting vegetation, the resiny smells of pine cones and needles, the aromatic savors of many camp-smokes. Twice Fairfax looked up, but said nothing, and then:

      “And … Emily …?”

      “Three years a widow; still a widow.”

      Another long silence settled down, to be broken by Fairfax finally with a naïve smile. “I guess you’re right, Van Brunt. I’ll go along.”


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