Nomads of the North: A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars

by James Oliver Curwood

That night, after supper, he saw Challoner unbraid Nanette's glorious hair, and brush it. They laughed like two happy children. Miki tried still harder to understand.

When Challoner went to go to his tent in the edge of the forest he took Nanette in his arms, and kissed her, and stroked her shining hair; and Nanette took his face between her hands and smiled and almost cried in her joy.

After that Miki DID understand. He knew that happiness had come to all who were in that cabin.

Now that his world was settled, Miki took once more to hunting. The thrill of the trail came back to him, and wider and wider grew his range from the cabin. Again he followed Le Beau's old trapline. But the traps were sprung now. He had lost a great deal of his old caution. He had grown fatter. He no longer scented danger in every whiff of the wind. It was in the third week of Challoner's stay at the cabin, the day which marked the end of the cold spell and the beginning of warm weather, that Miki came upon an old dead-fall in a swamp a full ten miles from the clearing. Le Beau had set it for lynx, but nothing had touched the bait, which was a chunk of caribou flesh, frozen solid as a rock. Curiously Miki began smelling of it. He no longer feared danger. Menace had gone out of his world. He nibbled. He pulled—and the log crashed down to break his back. Only by a little did it fail. For twenty-four hours it held him helpless and crippled. Then, fighting through all those hours, he dragged himself out from under it. With the rising temperature a soft snow had fallen, covering all tracks and trails. Through this snow Miki dragged himself, leaving a path like that of an otter in the mud, for his hind quarters were helpless. His back was not broken; it was temporarily paralyzed by the blow and the weight of the log.

He made in the direction of the cabin, but every foot that he dragged himself was filled with agony, and his progress was so slow that at the end of an hour he had not gone more than a quarter of a mile. Another night found him less than two miles from the deadfall. He pulled himself under a shelter of brush and lay there until dawn. All through that day he did not move. The next, which was the fourth since he had left the cabin to hunt, the pain in his back was not so great. But he could pull himself through the snow only a few yards at a time. Again the good spirit of the forests favoured him for in the afternoon he came upon the partly eaten carcass of a buck killed by the wolves. The flesh was frozen but he gnawed at it ravenously. Then he found himself a shelter under a mass of fallen tree-tops, and for ten days thereafter he lay between life and death. He would have died had it not been for the buck. To the carcass he managed to drag himself, sometimes each day and sometimes every other day, and kept himself from starving. It was the end of the second week before he could stand well on his feet. The fifteenth day he returned to the cabin.

In the edge of the clearing there fell upon him slowly a foreboding of great change. The cabin was there. It was no different than it had been fifteen days ago. But out of the chimney there came no smoke, and the windows were white with frost. About it the snow lay clean and white, like an unspotted sheet. He made his way hesitatingly across the clearing to the door. There were no tracks. Drifted snow was piled high over the sill. He whined, and scratched at the door. There was no answer. And he heard no sound.

He went back into the edge of the timber, and waited. He waited all through that day, going occasionally to the cabin, and smelling about it, to convince himself that he had not made a mistake. When darkness came he hollowed himself out a bed in the fresh snow close to the door and lay there all through the night. Day came again, gray and empty and still there was no smoke from the chimney or sound from within the log walls, and at last he knew that Challoner and Nanette and the baby were gone. But he was hopeful. He no longer listened for sound from within the cabin, but watched and listened for them to come from out of the forest. He made short quests, hunting now on this side and now on that of the cabin, sniffing futilely at the fresh and trackless snow and pointing the wind for minutes at a time. In the afternoon, with a forlorn slouch to his body, he went deeper into the forest to hunt for a rabbit. When he had killed and eaten his supper he returned again and slept a second night in the burrow beside the door. A third day and a third night he remained, and the third night he heard the wolves howling under a clear and star-filled sky, and from him there came his first cry—a yearning, grief-filled cry that rose wailingly out of the clearing; the entreaty for his master, for Nanette, and the baby. It was not an answer to the wolves. In its note there was a trembling fear, the voicing of a thing that had grown into hopelessness.

And now there settled upon him a loneliness greater than any loneliness he had ever known. Something seemed to whisper to his canine brain that all he had seen and felt had been but a dream, and that he was face to face with his old world again, its dangers, its vast and soul-breaking emptiness, its friendlessness, its ceaseless strife for existence. His instincts, dulled by the worship of what the cabin had held, became keenly alive. He sensed again the sharp thrill of danger, which comes of ALONENESS, and his old caution fell upon him, so that the fourth day he slunk around the edge of the clearing like a wolf.

The fifth night he did not sleep in the clearing but found himself a windfall a mile back in the forest. That night he had strange and troubled dreams. They were not of Challoner, or of Nanette and the baby, nor were they of the fight and the unforgettable things he had seen at the Post. His dreams were of a high and barren ridge smothered in deep snow, and of a cavern that was dark and deep. Again he was with his brother and comrade of days that were gone—Neewa the bear. He was trying to waken him, and he could feel the warmth of his body and hear his sleepy, protesting grunts. And then, later, he was fighting again in the paradise of black currants, and with Neewa was running for his life from the enraged she-bear who had invaded their coulee. When he awoke suddenly from out of these dreams he was trembling and his muscles were tense. He growled in the darkness. His eyes were round balls of searching fire. He whined softly and yearningly in that pit of gloom under the windfall, and for a moment or two he listened, for he thought that Neewa might answer.

For a month after that night he remained near the cabin. At least once each day, and sometimes at night, he would return to the clearing. And more and more frequently he was thinking of Neewa. Early in March came the Tiki-Swao—(the Big Thaw). For a week the sun shone without a cloud in the sky. The air was warm. The snow turned soft underfoot and on the sunny sides of slopes and ridges it melted away into trickling streams or rolled down in "slides" that were miniature avalanches. The world was vibrant with a new thrill. It pulsed with the growing heart-beat of spring, and in Miki's soul there arose slowly a new hope, a new impression a new inspiration that was the thrilling urge of a wonderful instinct. NEEWA WOULD BE WAKING NOW!