Transcribed from the 1906 Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons edition byDavid Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
Contents:
The God of His Fathers
The Great Interrogation
Which Make Men Remember
Siwash
The Man with the Gash
Jan, the Unrepentant
Grit of Women
Where the Trail Forks
A Daughter of the Aurora
At the Rainbow’s End
The Scorn of Women
These tales have appeared in “McClure’s,” “Ainslee’s,”“Outing,” the “Overland Monthly,” the “Wave,”the “National,” and the San Francisco “Examiner.” To the kindness of the various editors is due their reappearance inmore permanent form.
TO THE DAUGHTERS OF THE WOLF WHO HAVE BRED AND SUCKLED A RACE OFMEN
On every hand stretched the forest primeval,—the home of noisycomedy and silent tragedy. Here the struggle for survival continuedto wage with all its ancient brutality. Briton and Russian werestill to overlap in the Land of the Rainbow’s End—and thiswas the very heart of it—nor had Yankee gold yet purchased itsvast domain. The wolf-pack still clung to the flank of the cariboo-herd,singling out the weak and the big with calf, and pulling them down asremorselessly as were it a thousand, thousand generations into the past. The sparse aborigines still acknowledged the rule of their chiefs andmedicine men, drove out bad spirits, burned their witches, fought theirneighbors, and ate their enemies with a relish which spoke well of theirbellies. But it was at the moment when the stone age was drawingto a close. Already, over unknown trails and chartless wildernesses,were the harbingers of the steel arriving,—fair-faced, blue-eyed,indomitable men, incarnations of the unrest of their race. Byaccident or design, single-handed and in twos and threes, they camefrom no one knew whither, and fought, or died, or passed on, no oneknew whence. The priests raged against them, the chiefs calledforth their fighting men, and stone clashed with steel; but to littlepurpose. Like water seeping from some mighty reservoir, they trickledthrough the dark forests and mountain passes, threading the highwaysin bark canoes, or with their moccasined feet breaking trail for thewolf-dogs. They came of a great breed, and their mothers weremany; but the fur-clad denizens of the Northland had this yet to learn. So many an unsung wanderer fought his last and died under the cold fireof the aurora, as did his brothers in burning sands and reeking jungles,and as they shall continue to do till in the fulness of time the destinyof their race be achieved.
It was near twelve. Along the northern horizon a rosy glow,fading to the west and deepening to the east, marked the unseen dipof the midnight sun. The gloaming and the dawn were so commingledthat there was no night,—simply a wedding of day with day, a scarcelyperceptible blending of two circles of the sun. A kildee timidlychirped good-night; the full, rich throat of a robin proclaimed good-morrow. From an island on the breast of the Yukon a colony of wild fowl voicedits interminable wrongs, while a loon laughed mockingly back acrossa still stretch of river.
In the foreground, against the bank of a lazy eddy, birch-bark canoeswere lined two and three deep. Ivory-bladed spears, bone-barbedarrows, buckskin-thonged bows, and simple basket-woven traps bespokethe fact that in the muddy current of the river the salmon-run was on. In the background, from the tangle of skin tents and drying frames,rose the voices of the fisher folk. Bucks skylarked with bucksor flirted with the maidens, while the older squaws, shut out from thisby virtue of having fulfilled the end of their existence in reproduction,gossiped as they braided rope from