The Honor of the Big Snows

by James Oliver Curwood

"A moment, m'sieur," begged Jan, as the Frenchman made a movement as if to run in the direction of the tumult. "The factor had a daughter—Mélisse—"

"She left Lac Bain a long time ago, m'sieur," interrupted the trapper, making a tremendous effort to be polite as he edged toward the sound of battle. "M'sieur Cummins told me that he had not seen her in a long time—I believe it was almost a year. Sacre, listen to that! They are tearing one another to bits, and they are MY dogs, m'sieur, for I can tell their voices among a thousand!"

He sprang through the darkness and Jan made a movement to follow. Then he stopped, and turned instead to the company's store. He took his pack to the sledge and dogs in the edge of the spruce, and Kazan leaped to greet him at the end of his babiche. This night as Jan traveled through the forest he did not notice the stars or the friendly shadows.

"A year," he repeated to himself, again and again, and once, when Kazan rubbed against his leg and looked up into his face, he said, "Ah, Kazan, our Mélisse went away with the Englishman. May the Great God give them happiness!"

The forest claimed him more than ever after this. He did not go back to Oxford House in the spring but sold his furs to a passing half-breed, and wandered through all of that spring and summer in the country to the west. It was January when he returned to his cabin, when the snows were deepest, and three days later he set out to outfit at the Hudson's Bay post on God's Lake instead of at Oxford House. It was while they were crossing a part of the lake that Kazan leaped aside for an instant in his traces and snapped at something in the snow.

Jan saw the movement but gave no attention to it until a little later, when Kazan stopped and fell upon his belly, biting at the harness and whining in pain. The thought of Kazan's sudden snap at the snow came to him then like a knife-thrust, and with a low cry of horror and fear he fell upon his knees beside the dog. Kazan whimpered and his bushy tail swept the snow as Jan lifted his great wolfish head between his two hands. No other sound came from Jan's lips now, and slowly he drew the dog up to him until he held him in his arms as he might have held a child, Kazan stilled the whimpering sounds in his throat. His one eye rested on his master's face, faithful, watching for some sign—for some language there, even as the burning fires of a strange torture gnawed at his life, and in that eye Jan saw the deepening reddish film which he had seen a hundred times before in the eyes of foxes and wolves killed by poison bait.

A moan of anguish burst from Jan's lips and he held his face close down against Kazan's head, and sobbed now like a child, while Kazan rubbed his hot muzzle against his cheek and his muscles hardened in a last desire to give battle to whatever was giving his master grief. It was a long time before Jan lifted his face from the shaggy head, and when he did he knew that the last of all love, of all companionship, of all that bound him to flesh and blood in his lonely world, was gone. Kazan was dead.

From the sledge he took a blanket and wrapped Kazan in it, and carried him a hundred yards back from the trail. With bowed head he came behind his four dogs into God's House. Half an hour later he turned back into the wilderness with his supplies. It was dark when he returned to where he had left Kazan. He placed him upon the sledge and the four huskies whined as they dragged on their burden, from which the smell of death came to them. They stopped in the deep forests beyond the lake and Jan built a fire.

This night, as on all nights in his lonely life, Jan drew Kazan close to him, and he shivered as the other dogs slunk back from him suspiciously and the fire and the spruce tops broke the stillness of the forest. He looked at the crackling flames, at the fitful shadows which they set dancing and grimacing about him, and it seemed to him now that they were no longer friends, but were taunting him—gloating in Kazan's death, and telling him that he was alone, alone, alone. He let the fire die down, stirring it into life only when the cold stiffened him, and when at last he fell into an unquiet slumber it was still to hear the spruce tops whispering to him that Kazan was dead, and that in dying he had broken the last fragile link between Jan Thoreau and Mélisse.

He went on at dawn, with Kazan wrapped in his blanket on the sledge. He planned to reach the cabin that night, and the next day he would bury his old comrade. It was dark when he came to the narrow plain that lay between him and the river. The sky was brilliant with stars when he slowly climbed the big, barren ridge at the foot of which was his home. At the summit he stopped and seated himself on the edge of a rock, with nothing but a thousand miles of space between him and the pale glow of the northern lights. At his feet lay the forest, black and silent, and he looked down to where he knew his cabin was waiting for him, black and silent, too.