The Honor of the Big Snows

by James Oliver Curwood

"No," said Cummins shortly. "Neither has the mail. He is with that."

He did not notice the sudden tremble of Jan's fingers, nor did he see the startled look that shot into the boy's down-turned eyes. Jan finished his bandaging without betraying his emotion, and went back with Cummins to the company's store.

The next morning, two Chippewayans trailed in with a team of mongrel curs from the south. Thereafter Cummins found but little time to devote to Mélisse. The snow was softening rapidly, and the daily increasing warmth of the sun hastened the movement of the trappers. Mukee's people from the western Barren Lands arrived first, bringing with them great loads of musk-ox and caribou skins, and an army of big-footed, long-legged Mackenzie hounds that pulled like horses and wailed like whipped puppies when the huskies and Eskimo dogs set upon them.

From east and west and south all trails now led to the post. By the end of the third day after the arrival of the company's supplies, a babel of fighting, yelling, ceaselessly moving discord had driven forth the peace and quiet in which Cummins' wife had died. The fighting and discord were among the dogs, and the yelling was a necessary human accompaniment. Half a hundred packs, almost as wild and as savage as the wolves from whom half of them possessed a strong inheritance of blood, were thrown suddenly into warring confusion.

All the dogs were fighters except the big, soft-throated Mackenzie hounds, with the slow strength of oxen in their movements, and the quarter-strained and half-strained mongrels from the south; and upon these unfortunates the others preyed. Packs of fierce Labrador dogs, never vanquished except by death, came from close to Hudson's Bay. Team after team of the little yellow and gray Eskimo dogs, as quick with their fangs as were their black and swift-running masters with their hands and feet, met the much larger and darker-colored Malemutes from the Athabasca. Enemies of all these, fighting, snapping, and snarling, with the lust of killing deep born in them from their wolf progenitors, packs of fierce huskies trailed in from all sides.

There was no cessation in the battle of the fangs. It began with the first brute arrivals. It continued from dawn through the day, and around the campfires at night. There was never an end to the strife between the dogs, and between the men and the dogs. The snow was stained and trailed with blood, and the scent of it added greater fierceness to the wolf-breeds. Half a dozen battles were fought to the death each day and night. Those that died were chiefly the south-bred curs—mixtures of mastiff, Great Dane, and sheep-dogs—and the fatally slow Mackenzie hounds.

From its towering height the sentinel spruce frowned down upon the savage life that had come to outrage the grave it guarded. Yet beyond all this discord and bloody strife there was a great, throbbing human happiness—a beating of honest hearts filled to overflowing with the joys of the moment, a welding of new friendships, a renewal of old ones, a closer union of the brotherhood that holds together all things under the cold gray of the northern skies.

There were no bickerings among the hunters, no anger of man against man in the fierce voices that emphasized the slashing cuts of the caribou-whips. If the fangs of a Hudson's Bay husky let out the life-blood from the soft throat of a Mackenzie hound, it was a matter of the dogs, and not of their owners. They did not quarrel.

One day a fierce Eskimo pack cornered a giant husky under the big spruce, and slew him. When Cummins came from the company's store in the afternoon, he saw a number of men, with bared heads, working about the grave. He drew near enough to see that they were building around it a barricade of saplings; and his breath choked him as he turned to the cabin and Mélisse. He noticed, too, that no fires were built near the spot consecrated to the memory of the dead woman; and to his cabin the paths in the snow became deeper and wider where trod the wild forest men who came to look upon the little Mélisse.

These were days of unprecedented prosperity and triumph for the baby, as they were for the company. The cabin was half filled with strange things, for all who came gave something to Mélisse. There were polar bears' teeth, brought down by the little black men who in turn had got them from the coast people; strange gods carved from wood; bits of fur, bushy fox tails, lynx paws, dried fruits, candy bought at fabulous prices in the store, and musk—always and incessantly musk—from Mukee's people of the west barrens.