The Country Beyond: A Romance of the Wilderness

by James Oliver Curwood

And this, after all, was the one remaining bit of happiness in Jolly Roger's heart, the knowledge that he had made the evidence utterly complete, and that Nada would never know, and the world would never know—the truth. His love for the blue-eyed girl-woman who had given her heart and her soul into his keeping, even when she knew he was an outlaw, was an undying thing, like his love for the mother of years ago. "It will be easy to die for her," he told Peter, and this, in the end, was what he knew he was going to do. Thought of the inevitable did not make him afraid. He was determined to keep his freedom and his life as long as he could, but he was fatalistic enough, and sufficiently acquainted with the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, to know what the ultimate of the thing would be. And yet, with tragedy behind him, and a still grimmer tragedy ahead, the soul of Jolly Roger was not dead or in utter darkness. In it, waking and sleeping, he enshrined the girl who had been willing to give up all other things in the world for him, who had pleaded with him in the last hour of storm down on the edge of civilization that she be given the privilege of accompanying him wherever his fate might lead. That he was an outlaw had not destroyed her faith in him. That he had killed a man—a man unfit to live—had only drawn her arms more closely about him, and had made her more completely a part of him. And a thousand times the maddening thought possessed Jolly Roger—was he wrong, and not right, in refusing to accept the love and companionship which she had begged him to accept, in spite of all that had happened and all that might happen?

Day by day he slowly won for himself, and at last, as they traveled in the direction of Yellow Bird's country, he crushed the final doubt that oppressed him, and knew that he was right. In his selfishness he had not shackled her to an outlaw. He had left her free. Life and hope and other happiness were ahead of her. He had not destroyed her, and this thought would strengthen him and leave something of gladness in his heart, even in that gray dawn when the law would compel him to make his final sacrifice.

It is a strange peace which follows grief, a secret happiness no other soul but one can understand. Out of it excitement and passion have been burned, and it is then the Great God of things comes more closely into the possession of his own. And now, as they went westward and north toward the Wollaston Lake country, this peace possessed Jolly Roger. It mellowed his world. It was half an ache, half a steady and undying pain, but it drew Life nearer to him than he had ever known it before. His love for the sun and the sky, for the trees and flowers and all growing things of the earth was more worship of the divine than a love for physical things, and each day he felt it drawing more closely about him in its comradeship, whispering to him of its might, and of its power to care for him in the darkest hours of stress that might come.

He did not travel fast after he had reached the decision to go to Yellow Bird's people. And he tried to imagine, a great deal of the time, that Nada was with him. He succeeded in a way that bewildered Peter, for quite frequently the man talked to someone who was not there.

The slowness and caution with which they traveled developed Peter's mental faculties with marvelous swiftness. His master, free of egoism and prejudice, had placed him on a plane of intimate equality, and Peter struggled each day to live up a little more to the responsibility of this intimacy and confidence. Instinct, together with human training, taught him woodcraft until in many ways he was more clever than his master. And along with this Jolly Roger slowly but surely impressed upon him the difference between wanton slaughter and necessary killing.

"Everything that's got a breath of life must kill—up to a certain point," Jolly Roger explained to him, repeating the lesson over and over. "And that isn't wrong, Peter. The sin is in killing when you don't have to. See that tree over there, with a vine as big as my wrist winding around it, like a snake? Well, that vine is choking the life out of the tree, and in time the tree will die. But the vine is doing just what God A'mighty meant it to do. It needs a tree to live on. But I'm going to cut the vine, because I think more of the tree than I do the vine. That's my privilege—following my conscience. And we're eating young partridges tonight, because we had to have something to keep us alive. It's the necessity of the thing that counts, Peter. Think you can understand that?"

It was pretty hard for Peter at first, but he was observant, and his mind worked quickly. The crime of destroying birdlings in their nest, or on the ground, was impressed upon him. He began to understand there was a certain humiliating shame attached to an attack upon a creature weaker than himself, unless there was a reason for it. He looked chiefly to his master for decisions in the matter. Snowshoe rabbits, young and half grown, were very tame in this month of August, and ordinarily he would have destroyed many of them in a day's travel. But unless Jolly Roger gave him a signal, or he was hungry, he would pass a snowshoe unconcernedly. This phase of Peter's development interested Jolly Roger greatly. The outlaw's philosophy had not been punctured by the egotistical "I am the only reasoning being" arguments of narrow-gauged nature scientists. He believed that Peter possessed not only a brain and super-instinct, but also a very positive reasoning power which he was helping to develop. And the process was one that fascinated him. When he was not sleeping, or traveling, or teaching Peter he was usually reading the wonderful little red volumes of history which he had purloined from the mail sledge up near the Barren Lands. He knew their contents nearly by heart. His favorites were the life-stories of Napoleon, Margaret of Anjou, and Peter the Great, and always when he compared his own troubles with the difficulties and tragedies over which these people had triumphed he felt a new courage and inspiration, and faced the world with better cheer. If Nature was his God and Bible, and Nada his Angel, these finger-worn little books written by a man half a century dead were voices out of the past urging him on to his best. Their pages were filled with the vivid lessons of sacrifice, of courage and achievement, of loyalty, honor and dishonor—and of the crashing tragedy which comes always with the last supreme egoism and arrogance of man. He marked the dividing lines, and applied them to himself. And he told Peter of his conclusions. He felt a consuming tenderness for the glorious Margaret of Anjou, and his heart thrilled one day when a voice seemed to whisper to him out of the printed page that Nada was another Margaret—only more wonderful because she was not a princess and a queen.

"The only difference," he explained to Peter, "is that Margaret sacrificed and fought and died for a king, and our Nada is willing to do all that for a poor beggar of an outlaw. Which makes Margaret a second-rater compared with Nada," he added. "For Margaret wanted a kingdom along with her husband, and Nada would take—just you and me. And that's where we're pulling some Peter the Great stuff," he tried to laugh. "We won't let her do it!"

And so they went on, day after day, toward the Wollaston waterways—the country of Yellow Bird and her people.

It was early September when they crossed the Geikie and struck up the western shore of Wollaston Lake. The first golden tints were ripening in the canoe-birch leaves, and the tremulous whisper of autumn was in the rustle of the aspen trees. The poplars were yellowing, the ash were blood red with fruit, and in cool, dank thickets wild currants were glossy black and lusciously ripe. It was the season which Jolly Roger loved most of all, and it was the beginning of Peter's first September. The days were still hot, but at night there was a bracing something in the air that stirred the blood, and Peter found a sharp, new note in the voices of the wild. The wolf howled again in the middle of the night. The loon forgot his love-sickness, and screamed raucous defiance at the moon. The big snowshoes were no longer tame, but wary and alert, and the owls seemed to slink deeper into darkness and watch with more cunning. And Jolly Roger knew the human masters of the wilderness were returning from the Posts to their cabins and trap-lines, and he advanced with still greater caution. And as he went, watching for smoke and listening for sound, he began to reflect upon the many changes which five years might have produced among Yellow Bird's people. Possibly other misfortunes had come, other winters of hunger and pestilence, scattering and destroying the tribe. It might even be that Yellow Bird was dead.