The Luck of the Kid

by Ridgwell Cullum

“Does it matter, Usak?” she asked. “Old Ben Needham has gone, an’ the store’s closed down. If you made good trade I guess we’d be left with it piling in our store.” She shook her head almost disconsolately. “Ther’s only Placer for us now. We’ll need to make the trip once a year, and trade the small truck we can scratch together. It’s that or—”

The girl broke off. Ben Needham had gone. Bill Wilder and his party had vanished up the river. Quite suddenly the desolation of it all seemed complete.

There was moisture in her eyes as she turned from the man’s dark face to the familiar scenes about her. The wide Caribou River Valley was bright green with a wealth of summer grass and tiny flowers which the spring floods had left behind them. The river was shrunken now to its normal bed in the heart of the valley, which was walled in by high shoulders separated by nearly two miles of flat. So it went on for many miles; sometimes narrowing, sometimes widening. Sometimes the valley was almost barren of all but the Arctic lichens. Sometimes it was filled with wind-swept pine bluffs, often dwarfed, but occasionally extensive and of primordial characteristics. The farm was set in a deep shelter of a bluff of the latter kind. The house lay behind them, nestling just within great lank trees that in turn were sheltered by a granite spur of the great walls which lined the course of the valley. It was a crude but snug enough home. It was a structure that had grown as the mood and ability of Usak, and the needs of those who had elected to share it with him, had prompted.

It was seven years since the change had taken place. Before that, for eight long years, it had been the home of the child Felice and her Indian, self-appointed, guardian. Usak had been as good as his word. Felice had been left to the care of Hesther and Jim McLeod while he went on his mission of vengeance after he had been left wifeless, and Felice had been left a helpless orphan. He had returned as he said he would. He had returned to claim the orphaned child of his “good boss.”

The whiteman and his wife had been reluctant. They had realised their duty. Usak was an Indian, and they felt that in giving the child into his keeping they were committing a serious wrong.

But it so happened that with the return of Usak from his journey into the great white void of the North, the story of which he refused to reveal, Hesther’s first baby was about to be born. And the coming of that new life pre-occupied both husband and wife to the exclusion of all else, and helped to blind them to their sense of duty. So the Indian’s appeal had double force. And finally they yielded, convinced of the man’s honesty, convinced that in denying him they would have inflicted a grievous wound on the already distraught creature.

So Usak had come into possession of the treasure he claimed as an offset to the monstrous grief of his own personal loss, and he set about the task of raising the child with the inimitable devotion of a single-minded savage.

The man had laboured for her with every waking moment. He had laboured to replace the mother woman who had nursed her, and the great white father whom he had loved. He had laboured to build up about her the farm which was to yield her that means of livelihood which his simple understanding warned him that Marty, himself, would have desired for her.

It had been a great struggle with his limited education and only his savage mind to guide him in the barter which was the essence of the success he desired. Then, too, with each passing year the depredations of the invading Euralians spread wider and wider afield as the central control, which apparently had always existed, seemed to lose its grip on the rapidly increasing numbers of the foreign marauders. Futhermore, his trade with the little people of the Arctic had in consequence receded farther and farther, till, as he had just said, it had passed almost beyond his reach.

So things had gone on till eight years had passed and the dark eyes of the man saw the womanly development of the pretty white child. Then had happened another one of those strokes of ill-fortune which so often react in a direction quite undreamed.