by John Buchan
The letter, written on a dirty half-sheet of mission paper, and secured between two pieces of birch-bark, was from the priest, Father Duplessis, who had taken Father Wentzel’s place for the winter. It was written with indelible pencil in a foreign pointed script.
‘They tell me you are recovering health, my friend, and for your sake I rejoice. Also for my own, for I am enabled to make you an appeal. My poor people here are in great sorrow. They have little food, and they will not try to get more, for a disease has come upon them, a dreadful accidie which makes them impotent and without hope. Food must be found for them, and above all they must be roused out of their stupor and made to wish to live. I wrestle with them, and I have the might of the Church behind me, but I am alone and I am but a weak vessel. If you can come to my aid, with God’s help we may prevail, but if not I fear this little people will be blotted out of the book of life.’
5
THAT night after supper four men sat in council. Johnny made his report, much interrupted by Lew’s questions, and once or twice the two Hares were summoned to give information. Johnny was a very weary man, for his bandy legs had broken the trail for the dogs through the snow-encumbered forest, and he had forced the pace for man and beast. His pale blue eyes, which had none of Lew’s brilliance, had become small and troubled. One proof of his discomfort was that when he broke off to speak to his brother it was in the Cree tongue. Never before had Leithen heard him use his mother’s speech.
Leithen found himself presiding over the council, for the others seemed to defer to him, after Lew had cross-examined his brother about what supplies he had brought.
‘Father Duplessis says there’s trouble in the Hares’ camp,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear more about it. Father Wentzel in the fall was afraid of something of the sort.’
Johnny scratched the tip of one of his bat’s ears.
‘Sure there’s trouble. Them darned Hares has gone loony and it ain’t the first time neither. They think they’re Christians, but it’s a funny kind of religion, for they’re always hankerin’ after old bits of magic. Comin’ up in the fall I heard they’d been consultin’ the caribou bone.’
He explained a little shamefacedly.
‘It’s a caribou’s shoulder-blade, and it’s got to be an old buck with a special head of horns. They’d got one and there’s a long crack down the middle, and their medicine men say that means famine.’
Lew snorted. ‘They needn’t have gone to an old bone for that. This year the hares and rabbits has gone sick and that means that every other beast is scarce. The Hares ain’t much in the way of hunters – never have been – but they know all about rabbits. That’s how they’ve gotten their name. Maybe you thought they was so-called because they hadn’t no more guts than a hare. That ain’t right. They’re a brave enough tribe, though in old days the Crees and the Chipewyans had the upper hand of them. But the truth is that they haven’t much sense and every now and then they go plumb crazy.’
‘You say they’re starving.’ Leithen addressed Johnny. ‘Is that because they cannot get food or because they won’t try to get it?’
‘Both,’ was the answer. ‘I figured it out this way. As a general thing they fish all summer and dry their catch for the winter. That gives ’em both man’s meat and dog’s meat. But this year the white fish and pike was short in the lakes and the rivers. I heard that in the fall when we were comin’ in. Well then, it was up to them to make an extra good show with the fall huntin’. But, as Lew says, the fall huntin’ was a washout anyhow. Moose and caribou and deer were scarce, because the darned rabbits had gone sick. It happens that way every seven years or so. So them pitiful Hares started the winter with mighty poor prospects.’
Johnny spat contemptuously.
‘For you and me that would’ve meant a pretty hard winter’s work. There’s food to be got up in them mountains even after the freeze-up, if you know where to look for it. You can set bird traps, for there’s more partridges here than in Quebec. You can have dead-falls for deer, and you can search out the moose’s stamping grounds. I was tellin’ you that the moose were shifting further north. The Hares ain’t very spry hunters, as Lew says, for they’ve got rotten guns, but they’re dandies at trappin’. Well, as I was sayin’, if it’d been you and me we’d have got busy, and, though we’d have had to draw in our belts, somehow or other we’d have won through. But what does them crazy Hares do?’
Johnny spat again, and Lew joined him in the same gesture of scorn.
‘They done nothin’! Jest nothin’. The caribou shoulder-blade had ’em scared into fits. It’s a blight that comes on ’em every now and then, like the rabbit sickness. If a chief dies they mourn for him, sittin’ on their rumps, till they’re pretty well dead themselves. In the old fightin’ days what they lost in a battle was nothin’ to what they lost afterwards lamentin’ it. So they’re takin’ their bad luck lyin’ down and it jest ain’t sense. It looks as if that tribe was fixed to be cleaned out before spring.’
Johnny’s contemptuous eyes became suddenly gentle.
‘It’s a pitiful business as ever I seen. Their old chief – Zacharias they call him – he must be well on in the eighties, but he’s the only one that ain’t smit with paralysis. Him and Father Duplessis. But Zacharias is mighty bad with lumbago and can’t get about enough, and the Father ain’t up to the ways of them savages. He prays for ’em and he argues with ’em, but he might as well argue and pray with a skunk. A dog whip would be the thing if you’d the right man to handle it.’
Johnny’s melancholy eyes belied his words. They were not the eyes of a disciplinarian.
‘And yet,’ he went on, ‘I don’t know, but I somehow can’t keep on bein’ angry with the creatures. They sit in their shacks and but for the women they’d freeze, for they don’t seem to have the strength to keep themselves warm. The children are bags of bones and crawl about like a lot of little starved owls. It’s only the women that keep the place goin’, and they won’t be able to stick it much longer, for everythin’s runnin’ short – food for the fire as well as food for the belly. The shacks are fallin’ into bits and the tents are gettin’ ragged, and the Hares sit like broody hens reflectin’ on their sins and calculatin’ how soon they’ll die. You couldn’t stir ’em if you put a charge of dynamite alongside of ’em – you’d blow ’em to bits, but they’d die broody.’
‘Father Duplessis has the same story,’ Leithen said.
‘Yep, and he wants your help. I guess he’s asked for it. He says it’s a soldier’s job and you and him are two old soldiers, but that he’s a private and you’re the sergeant-major.’
Galliard, who had been listening with bowed head, suddenly looked up.
‘You fought in the War?’ he asked.
Leithen nodded. His eyes were on Lew’s face, for he saw something there for which he was not prepared. Lew had hitherto said little, and he had been as scornful as Johnny about the Hares. The brothers had never shown any pride in their Indian ancestry; their pride was reserved for the Scots side. They had treated the Hares with friendliness, but had been as aloof from them and their like as Leithen and Galliard. It was not any sense of kinship that had woke the compassion in Lew’s face and the emotion in his voice.
‘You can’t be angry with the poor devils,’ he said. ‘It’s an act of God, and as much a disease as T.B. I’ve seen it happen before, happen to tougher stocks than the Hares. Dad used to talk about the Nahannis that once ranged from the Peace to the Liard. Where are the Nahannis today? Blotted out by sickness of mind. Blotted out like the Snakeheads and the White Pouches and the Big Bellies. And the Hares are going the same way, and then it’ll be the turn of the Chipewyans and the Yellow Knives and the Slaves. We white folk can treat the poor devils’ bodies, but we don’t seem able to do anything for their minds.’
No, it was not race loyalty. Leithen saw in Lew and Johnny at that moment something finer than the duty of kinship. It was the brotherhood of all men, white and red and brown, who h
ave to fight the savagery of the North.
His eyes turned to Galliard, who was looking puzzled. He wondered what thoughts this new situation had stirred in that subtle and distracted brain.
‘We’d better sleep over this,’ he announced, for Johnny seemed dropping with fatigue …
Yet Johnny was the last to go to bed. Leithen was in the habit of waking for a minute or two several times in the night. When his eyes opened shortly after midnight he saw Johnny before the fire, not mending it, but using its light to examine something. It was the shoulder-blade of a caribou, which he had dug out of the rubbish-heap behind the camp. The Hares were not the only dabblers in the old magic.
6
LEITHEN slept ill that night. He seemed to have been driven out of a sanctuary into the turmoil of the common earth. Problems were being thrust on him, and he was no longer left to that narrow world in which he was beginning to feel almost at ease.
Of course he could do nothing about the wretched Hares. Father Duplessis’ appeal left him cold. He had more urgent things to think about than the future of a few hundred degenerate Indians who mattered not at all in his scheme of things. His business was with Galliard, who mattered a great deal. But he could not fix his mind on Galliard, and presently he realised something which made him wakeful indeed and a little ashamed. At the back of his head was the thought of his own health. The curtain which had shut down on his life was lifting a corner and revealing a prospect. He was conscious, miserably conscious, that the chief hope in his mind was that he might possibly recover. And that meant a blind panicky fear lest he should do anything to retard recovery.
He woke feeling a tightness in his chest and a difficulty in breathing, from which for some weeks he had been free. He woke, too, to an intense cold. The aurora had been brilliant the night before; and now in the pale sky there were sun-dogs, those mock suns which attend the extreme winter rigours of the North. Happily there was no wind, but the temperature outside the hut struck him like a blow, and he felt that his power of resistance had weakened. This was how he had felt on the road to the Sick Heart River.
He was compelled by his weakness to lie still much of the day and could watch the Frizels and Galliard. Something had happened to change the three – subtly, almost imperceptibly in Galliard’s case, markedly in the other two. Johnny had a clouded face; he had seen the Hares’ suffering and could not forget it. In Lew’s face there were no clouds, but it had sharpened into a mask of intense vitality, in which his wonderful eyes blazed like planets. The sight made Leithen uneasy. Lew had shed the sobriety for which he had been conspicuous in recent weeks. He looked less responsible, less intelligent, almost a little mad. Leithen, intercepting his furtive looks, was unpleasantly reminded of the man who had met him at Sick Heart River. As for Galliard, he was neither dejected nor exalted, but he seemed to have much to think about. He was doing his jobs with a preoccupied face, and he, too, was constantly stealing a glance at Leithen. He seemed to be waiting for a lead.
It was this that Leithen feared. For some strange reason he, a sick man – till the other day, and perhaps still, a dying man – was being forced by a silent assent into the leadership of the little band. It was to him that Father Duplessis had appealed, but that was natural, for they had served together under arms. But why this mute reference to his decision of the personal problems of all the others? These men were following the urge of a very ancient loyalty. Perhaps even Galliard. Who was he to decide on a thing wholly outside his world?
His own case was first in mind. All his life he had been mixed up in great affairs. He had had his share in ‘moulding a state’s decrees’ and ‘shaping the whisper of a throne.’ He had left England when Europe was a powder magazine and every patriot was bound to put himself at the disposal of his distracted land. Well, he had cast all that behind him – rightly, for he had to fight his own grim battle. In that battle he seemed to have won a truce, perhaps even a victory, and now he was being asked to stake all his winnings on a trivial cause – the malaise of human kites and crows roosting at the end of the earth.
It may have been partly due to the return of his malady, but suddenly a great nausea filled his mind. He had been facing death with a certain courage because an effort was demanded of him, something which could stir the imagination and steel the heart. But now he was back among trivialities. It was not a surrender to the celestial will that was required of him, but a decision on small mundane questions – how to return a batch of lunatics to sanity, what risks a convalescent might safely run? He felt a loathing for the world, a loathing for himself, so when Lew sat himself down beside him he found sick eyes and an ungracious face.
‘We’ve got to leave,’ Lew said. ‘We’re too high up here for the winter hunting, and it’ll be worse when the big snows come in February. We should be getting down to the bird country and the moose country. I reckon we must take the Hares’ camp on our road to see about our stuff. There’s a lot of tea and coffee left cached in the priest’s cellar.’
Leithen turned a cold eye on him.
‘You want to help the Hares?’ he said.
‘Why, yes. Johnny and me thought we might give the poor devils a hand. We could do a bit of hunting for them. We know the way to more than one moose ravage, and a few meals of fresh deer meat may put a little life into them.’
‘That sounds a big job. Am I fit to travel?’
‘Sure you’re fit to travel! We’ve got the huskies and we’ll go canny. It’s cold, but you’ll be as snug in a hole in the snow as in this camp. When you’re in good timber and know the way of it you can be mighty comfortable though its fifty under. Man! it’s what’s wanted to set you up. By the time the thaw-out comes you’ll be the toughest of the bunch.’
‘But what can I do? Hunt? I haven’t the strength for it, and I would only be an encumbrance.’
‘You’ll hunt right enough.’
Lew’s frosty eyes had a smile in their corners. He had clearly expected argument, perhaps contradiction, but Leithen had no impulse to argue. He was too weary in body and sick in soul.
It was different when Galliard came to him. Here was a man who had nothing to suggest, one who was himself puzzled. Confined for months to a small company, Leithen had become quick to detect changes of temper in his companions. Johnny never varied, but he could read Lew’s mutations like a book. Now he saw something novel in Galliard, or rather an intensifying of what he had already observed. This man was afraid, more than afraid; there was something like panic in his face when he allowed it to relax from restraint. This tale of the Hares’ madness had moved him strongly – not apparently to pity, but to fear, personal fear. It was another proof of the North’s malignity and power.
He was clinging to Leithen through fear, clinging like a drowning man to a log. Leithen could bring the forces of a different world to fight the dominance of that old world which had mastered him. He wanted to be reassured about Leithen, to know that this refuge could be trusted. So he asked him a plain question.
‘Who are you? I know your name. You know my friends. But I know nothing more about you … except that you came out here to die – and may live.’
The appeal in Galliard’s voice was so sincere that his question had no tinge of brusqueness. It switched Leithen’s mind back to a forgotten world which had no longer any meaning. To reply was like recalling a dream.
‘Yes, you are entitled to ask me that,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I should have been more candid with you … My name is Edward Leithen – Sir Edward Leithen – they knighted me long ago. I was a lawyer – with a great practice. I was also for many years a Member of Parliament. I was for a time the British Attorney-General. I was in the British Cabinet, too – the one before the present.’
Galliard repeated the name with mystified eyes which seemed straining after a recollection.
‘Sir Edward Leithen! Of course I have heard of you. Many people have spoken of you. You were for my wife’s uncle in the Continental Nickel case. You had a big
reputation in the States … You are a bachelor?’
‘I have no wife or any near relations.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I don’t know. But I was once what I suppose you would call a sportsman. I used to have a kind of reputation as a mountaineer. I was never sick or sorry until this present disease got hold of me – except for a little damage in the War.’
Galliard nodded. ‘You told me you were in the War. As what?’
‘I was chief staff officer of a rather famous British division.’
Galliard looked at him steadily and in his face there was something like hope.
‘You have done a lot. You are a big man. To think of you roosting with us in this desert! – two half-breeds, two Indians, and a broken man like me. By God! Sir Edward, you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to get well, for I’m sunk without you.’
He seized the other’s right hand and held it in both his own. Leithen felt that if he had been a woman he would have kissed it.
7
GALLIARD’S emotion gave the finishing touch to Leithen’s depression. He ate no supper and fell early asleep, only to waken in the small hours when the fire was at its lowest and the cold was like the clutch of a dead hand. He managed to get a little warmth by burying his head in the flap of his sleeping-bag. Drowsiness had fled from him, and his brain was racing like a flywheel.
He had lost all his philosophy. The return of pain and discomfort after an apparent convalescence had played havoc with his stoicism. Miserably, penitently, he recalled the moods he had gone through since he had entered the North. At first there had been sullen, hopeless fortitude, a grim waiting upon death. There had been a sense of his littleness and the omnipotence of God, and a resignation like Job’s to the divine purpose. And then there had come a nobler mood, when he had been conscious not only of the greatness but of the mercy of God, and had realised the vein of tenderness in the hard rock of fate. He had responded again to life, and after that response his body seemed to have laboured to reach the sanity of his mind. His health had miraculously improved … And now he had lost all the ground he had made, and was down in the dust again.