Tales of the Klondyke by Jack London
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
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THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS
On every hand stretched the forest primeval,–the home of noisy
comedy and silent tragedy. Here the struggle for survival
continued to wage with all its ancient brutality. Briton and
Russian were still to overlap in the Land of the Rainbow’s End–
and this was the very heart of it–nor had Yankee gold yet
purchased its vast 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 as remorselessly as were it a thousand,
thousand generations into the past. The sparse aborigines still
acknowledged the rule of their chiefs and medicine men, drove out
bad spirits, burned their witches, fought their neighbors, and ate
their enemies with a relish which spoke well of their bellies.
But it was at the moment when the stone age was drawing to 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. By
accident or design, single-handed and in twos and threes, they
came from no one knew whither, and fought, or died, or passed on,
no one knew whence. The priests raged against them, the chiefs
called forth their fighting men, and stone clashed with steel; but
to little purpose. Like water seeping from some mighty reservoir,
they trickled through the dark forests and mountain passes,
threading the highways in bark canoes, or with their moccasined
feet breaking trail for the wolf-dogs. They came of a great
breed, and their mothers were many; 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 fire of 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 destiny of
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
dip of the midnight sun. The gloaming and the dawn were so
commingled that there was no night,–simply a wedding of day with
day, a scarcely perceptible blending of two circles of the sun. A
kildee timidly chirped 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 voiced its interminable wrongs, while
a loon laughed mockingly back across a still stretch of river.
In the foreground, against the bank of a lazy eddy, birch-bark
canoes were lined two and three deep. Ivory-bladed spears, bone-
barbed arrows, buckskin-thonged bows, and simple basket-woven
traps bespoke the 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 bucks or flirted with the maidens, while the
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older squaws, shut out from this by virtue of having fulfilled the
end of their existence in reproduction, gossiped as they braided
rope from the green roots of trailing vines. At their feet their
naked progeny played and squabbled, or rolled in the muck with the
tawny wolf-dogs.
To one side of the encampment, and conspicuously apart from it,
stood a second camp of two tents. But it was a white man’s camp.
If nothing else, the choice of position at least bore convincing
evidence of this. In case of offence, it commanded the Indian
quarters a hundred yards away; of defence, a rise to the ground
and the cleared intervening space; and last, of defeat, the swift
slope of a score of yards to the canoes below. From one of the
tents came the petulant cry of a sick child and the crooning song
of a mother. In the open, over the smouldering embers of a fire,
two men held talk.
“Eh? I love the church like a good son. Bien! So great a love
that my days have been spent in fleeing away from her, and my
nights in dreaming dreams of reckoning. Look you!” The half-
breed’s voice rose to an angry snarl. “I am Red River born. My
father was white–as white as you. But you are Yankee, and he was
British bred, and a gentleman’s son. And my mother was the
daughter of a chief, and I was a man. Ay, and one had to look the
second time to see what manner of blood ran in my veins; for I
lived with the whites, and was one of them, and my father’s heart
beat in me. It happened there was a maiden–white–who looked on
me with kind eyes. Her father had much land and many horses; also
he was a big man among his people, and his blood was the blood of
the French. He said the girl knew not her own mind, and talked
overmuch with her, and became wroth that such things should be.
“But she knew her mind, for we came quick before the priest. And
quicker had come her father, with lying words, false promises, I
know not what; so that the priest stiffened his neck and would not
make us that we might live one with the other. As at the
beginning it was the church which would not bless my birth, so now
it was the church which refused me marriage and put the blood of
men upon my hands. Bien! Thus have I cause to love the church.
So I struck the priest on his woman’s mouth, and we took swift
horses, the girl and I, to Fort Pierre, where was a minister of
good heart. But hot on our trail was her father, and brothers,
and other men he had gathered to him. And we fought, our horses
on the run, till I emptied three saddles and the rest drew off and
went on to Fort Pierre. Then we took east, the girl and I, to the
hills and forests, and we lived one with the other, and we were
not married,–the work of the good church which I love like a son.
“But mark you, for this is the strangeness of woman, the way of
which no man may understand. One of the saddles I emptied was
that of her father’s, and the hoofs of those who came behind had
pounded him into the earth. This we saw, the girl and I, and this
I had forgot had she not remembered. And in the quiet of the
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evening, after the day’s hunt were done, it came between us, and
in the silence of the night when we lay beneath the stars and
should have been one. It was there always. She never spoke, but
it sat by our fire and held us ever apart. She tried to put it
aside, but at such times it would rise up till I could read it in
the look of her eyes, in the very in-take of her breath.
“So in the end she bore me a child, a woman-child, and died. Then
I went among my mother’s people, that it might nurse at a warm
breast and live. But my hands were wet with the blood of men,
look you, because of the church, wet with the blood of men. And
the Riders of the North came for me, but my mother’s brother, who
was then chief in his own right, hid me and gave me horses and
food. And we went away, my woman-child and I, even to the Hudson
Bay Country, where white men were few and the questions they asked
not many. And I worked for the company a hunter, as a guide, as a
driver of dogs, till my woman-child was become a woman, tall, and
slender, and fair to the eye.
“You know the winter, long and lonely, breeding evil thoughts and
bad deeds. The Chief Factor was a hard man, and bold. And he was
not such that a woman would delight in looking upon. But he cast
eyes upon my woman-child who was become a woman. Mother of God!
he sent me away on a long trip with the dogs, that he might–you
understand, he was a hard man and without heart. She was most
white, and her soul was white, and a good woman, and–well, she
died.
“It was bitter cold the night of my return, and I had been away
months, and the dogs were limping sore when I came to the fort.
The Indians and breeds looked on me in silence, and I felt the