Pilgrims of the Wild. Grey Evil Owl
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also in the cabin. The trail was my religion, and like any other fanatic I tried to force my views on even the one I loved. Altogether there were the makings of a first-class domestic tragedy.
But the exigencies of constant travel and the demands made by our manner of living, left little time for temperamental readjustments, and the hurry and drive of the fall and early winter trapping occupied the full of our days, until one evening just before Christmas, I returned from a short trip to find my proud and gallant Anahareo in a dishevelled and disconsolate heap upon the bunk, with a tear-stained face and her eyes swollen and red from weeping. And then the whole thing came out, everything, piece by piece. At first I could not understand; everything had seemed to be going first-class. I had been a most appreciative husband, not at all indifferent or unattentive as the real Indians often were. This woman had won my lasting respect and admiration with her courage in the face of unaccustomed hardships, and I had let her know it. But that, it was now revealed, was not at all what she wanted. Respect! The dead got that. Admiration! What was that! — You admired scenery. We lived, it appeared, with all the sociability of sleigh dogs: we ate our meals with the same relish we enjoyed throwing wood through a stove door.
And I listened amazedly to this strange contradictory creature that could sleep out in the rain with a smile, and cry over a lack of ceremony at meal times.
There was more, much more. Traplines, plans! plans! — plans to inflict torture and death and then to go out and boast of it! I was startled at this latter accusation, and a little indignant. I was trying my best to earn us a living; a man had to kill whatever way he could, and all he could; fur was getting low. But the truth peered out in a most unwelcome fashion from between the lines of this recital, and when it was done I marched out of the house to visit my pet ridge, hurt, bewildered, and not a little angry. I made a fire up there and sat and smoked and thought the matter over while I skinned a marten, and fought my battle out alone as Anahareo had done this many days. And all at once I saw myself as I was, saw clearly the selfishness that had been bred in me during a life of solitary wandering, and realized how narrow was the rut that I had got into. Even my niggardly attentions had been only the scraps, the leavings, the tag ends left over from the spent emotions of the day, that I was offering to this woman who had given her happiness into my hands. And I went down that mountain trail at a run, my dignity, my accursed self-assurance thrown to the winds, and arrived home with my snowshoes nearly smoking, hoping I was not too late. You guessed it; I was not. And from that day, on which I recognized to some extent my woeful shortcomings and what they might have led to, and made some effort to overcome them, could be counted the first steps in a regeneration that worked a revolution in our whole scheme of existence.
Don’t imagine that there was any sudden and complete renunciation such as overcomes the luckless and often temporarily aberrated victim of a highly emotionalized revival meeting; this would have been, at best, but temporary. It was a slow, hard process fraught with many mental upheavals and self-examinations, and numerous backslidings and reversals to type, and it involved a self-discipline as severe as any that the trail, with all its stern severities, had ever imposed upon me. But I emerged from each conflict, I hoped, the better for it, and was not without assistance.
And so the threatening clouds of disaster that were darker and more real than I at the time suspected, rolled clean away. We worked as hard as ever, but I left the job outside the home where it belonged and we took a pride in our little cabin and made ornaments for it, and talked of many things that we had never before had time to even mention. We found our necessary partings longer now, and in our travels, where our trails forked, the one who arrived at the crossing first, spelt out a foolish message for the other in the snow; and we were very happy, at last. And Anahareo became her old self once again. But I never did. And the lesson never was lost, and from it sprang results such as we had never dreamed of, and it had a bearing on all the strange events that followed after.
Anahareo from now on followed the trap trails regularly and we were boon companions. Although it was her first winter at this rather strenuous occupation, she soon became so adept that she was able to take her turn at breaking trail, took care of side lines herself, and was altogether a good deal more of an assistance than some men partners I have had. She was strong and hardy, but this did not prevent her from realizing more and more keenly the cruelties of her new profession. The sight of frozen twisted forms contorted in shapes of agony, and the spectacle of submissive despairful beasts being knocked senseless with an axe handle, and hung up in a noose to choke out any remaining spark of life while the set was being made ready for a fresh victim, moved her to deep compassion. And worse, to her mind, were the great numbers of harmless birds and squirrels caught accidentally and to no good purpose, and often still alive, some screaming, others wailing feebly in their torment. And strangely, it was to be noticed that some of these animals seemed to sense her feeling, and on more than one occasion a doomed animal would look not towards me, to the death that was so near, but at her, staring as though in dumb hopeless appeal to her for the mercy it must have known that I would never give. I remember particularly a lynx that after the stroke screamed out like a woman, and not yet dead, tried to crawl to her in the anguish of its last extremity.
These things made her very unhappy, which was a mild surprise to me, as I had supposed that, being of full Indian blood, she would have at least as much apathy for the sufferings of these animals that were providing us with the means to live, as had I myself.
I had long ago invested the creatures of the forest with a personality.This was the inevitable result of a life spent wandering over the vast reaches of a still, silent land in which they were the only form of animate life, and sprang from early training and folklore. Yet this concession gained them no respite, and although I never killed needlessly and was as merciful as was possible under the circumstances, the urge of debts to be paid, money to spend, and prestige to be maintained, lent power to the axe handle and cunning to the hands that otherwise might have faltered on occasion. Always I had pitied, but had closed my mind to all thoughts of compassion save in retrospect.
But my point of view was slowly changing. Forced at last to stop and look around and take stock, obliged now to think of someone else besides myself, I stepped out of my case hardened shell and rubbed my eyes to get a clearer vision, and saw many things that had hitherto escaped me in my remorseless striving for achievement. My surroundings began to have a different aspect. Up till now the fate of those creatures amongst whom my life had been spent had mattered only in so far as they contributed to my prowess as a hunter. Now my newly awakened consideration for something else besides myself, was branching out most disastrously it seemed. I began to have a faint distaste for my bloody occupation. This was resolutely quenched, though the eventual outcome was inescapable.
Even in those less enlightened days, at a time when I actually believed that radio was spoiling the hunt by affecting the climate, I was perhaps not without a certain sense of justice which, though not recognized as such at the time, evinced itself in strange ways. A primitive and imaginative ancestry had not been without its influence. There were certain precepts, amounting to superstitions, that were strictly adhered to at no matter what cost in time and trouble. You may not take them very seriously, but to me they amounted to a good deal, and were often performed with quite a solemn ritual. No bear was killed without some portion of the carcass, generally the skull or shoulder bones, being hung up in a prominent place somewhere in his former range. The bodies of beaver were laid in supposedly comfortable positions and the hands, feet, and tail, severed for convenience in skinning, were laid beside or on the body. Whenever possible the body, with these appendages securely tied to it, was committed to the water through a hole laboriously cut in the ice. Those eaten had the kneecaps, unusual adjuncts for an animal, removed and most religiously burnt. All these ceremonies are practised by semi-civilized, and even more advanced Indians over a wide area; and should anyone be tactless enough to enquire the reason why they do these things, the answer if any, will be:
“Ozaam tapskoche anicianabé, mahween — because they are so much like Indians.”
I had however other customs of my own invention, and kept rigidly two self-imposed rules. I would allow no sportsman I guided to photograph a wounded animal until it was dead, and any animal that should chance to be brought to camp alive, must be resuscitated and let go. So when I one spring captured a month-old wolf cub I took him home to the cabin and