Breed of the Wolf/Chapter 31

In the unwritten law of the North no one in peril shall ask for succor in vain. So universal is this creed, so general its acceptance and observance throughout the vast land of silence, that when word is brought in to settlement, fur post, or lonely cabin, that help is needed, it is a matter of course that a relief party takes the trail, however long and hazardous. And so it was with John Hunter, clergyman, physician, and man. New to the North, he had come from England at the call for volunteers to shepherd the souls and bodies of the people of the solitudes and, without hesitation, he agreed to undertake a journey which the elder heads at Fort George knew might well culminate in the discovery later, by a searching party, of two stiffened bodies buried beside a starved dog team, somewhere in the drifts behind the Cape of the Four Winds.

Marcel and the dogs were in sore need of a few hours’ rest for the grilling duel with snow and wind before them, so, when he had eaten, Jean turned into a bed in the mission.

At midnight Jean hitched his dogs and waked Hunter. Leaving Fort George asleep in the smother of snow, the dog team plunged down to the river trail, into the white drive of the norther.

Giving the trailwise Fleur her head in the black night, Jean, with Hunter, followed the sled carrying their food and robes. Turning from the swept river ice into the bay, dogs and men met the full beat of the blasts with heads lowered to ease the hammering of the pin-pointed scourge whipping their faces like shot. With the neighboring shore smothered in murk, still trusting to Fleur’s instinct to keep the trail over the blurred white floor which only increased the blackness above, Marcel followed the sled he could barely see. Speed against the wind was impossible, and at all hazards he must keep the trail, for if they swung to the west on the sea ice they were doomed to wander until they froze.

He would push on and camp until daylight, in the lee of the Isle of Graves. With the light they would begin to travel. Then on the open ice, where there was little drift, he would give Fleur and her pups the chance to prove their mettle, for there would be little rest. And beyond, at the Cape of the Four Winds—a midwinter vortex of unleashed arctic blasts—they would have ten miles inland through the drifts. The unproven sons of Fleur would indeed need the stamina of wolves to take them through the days to come.

At last the trail which the lead dog had held solely by keeping her nose to the ice, ran in under the bold shore of Wastikun. There, after feeding the dogs, they burrowed into the snow in the lee of the cliffs, wrapped in their fur robes. With the wind, the temperature had risen and men and dogs slept hard until dawn. Then, hot tea, bread, and pemmican spurred the fighting heart of Marcel with hope. The wind had eased, but powdery snow still drove down, blanketing the near shore.

Daylight found them on their way. Due to the wind there was as yet little snow on the trail over the bay ice and the freshened dogs, with lowered heads, swung up the coast at a trot. All day, with but short respite, men and dogs battled on against the norther. The mouth of the Little Salmon was the goal Marcel had set for himself—the river valley from which they would cut overland behind the gray cape, to the north coast. Forty miles away it lay—forty cruel miles of the torturing beat of shotlike snow in the faces of men and dogs, forty miles of endless pull and drag for the iron thews of Fleur and the whelps of the wolf. This was the mark which the now ruthless Frenchman, with but one thought, one vision, set for the shaggy beasts he loved.

Hunter, game though he was, at last was forced to ride on the sled, so fierce was their pace into the wind. The great beasts steadily ate up the miles. At noon, floundering through drifts like the billows of a broken sea, with Marcel ahead breaking trail, they crossed Caribou Point, with Hunter, refusing to burden the dogs, wallowing behind the sled. There they boiled tea, then pushed on to the mouth of the Roggan.

At Ominuk night fell like a tent, and again a white wraith of a lead dog, blinded by (he fury she faced, kept the trail by instinct, backed loyally by her brood of ice-sheathed wolves.

The coast swung sharply. They were in the lee of the cape. But a few miles farther and a long rest in the sheltered river valley awaited them. Marcel stopped his dogs and went to Fleur lying on the trail, her hot breath freezing as it left her panting mouth. Kneeling on the snow beside her with his back to the drive, he examined each hairy paw for pad cracks or balled snow between the toes, but the feet of the Ungava were iron; then he took in his hands her great head with its battered nose, blood caked from the snow barrage she had faced all day. Rubbing the ice from her masked eyes, Jean placed his hooded face against his dog’s. She turned her nose and her rough tongue touched his frost-blackened cheek.

“Fleur,” he said, “we are doin’ it for Julie—you an’ Jean Marcel. We mus’ mak’ de Salmon to-night. Some day we weel hav’ de beeg sleep—you and Jean.”

Again he stroked her massive head with his red, unmittened hand, then for an instant resting his face against the scarred nose, sprang to his feet. With a glance at the paws, and a word for each of the whining puppies whose white tails switched in answer, Jean cracked his whip and they plunged forward.

Late that night a huge fire burned in the timber of the sheltered mouth of the little Salmon. Two men and a dog team ate ravenously, then slept like the dead, while over them roared the norther, rocking the spruce and jack pine in the river bottom, heaping the drifts high on the Whale River trail.

In three days of grueling toil Marcel had got within ninety miles of his goal—had got back within a day and a half of Whale River, had the trail been ice hard. But now it would be days longer—how many he dared not guess.

Had the weather held for him, four days from the night of his starting would have brought him home, for on an iced trail his great dogs would have run at his call like wolves at the rallying cry of the pack. As he drew his stiffened legs from the rabbit skins to freshen the fire at dawn, he bit his cracked lips until they bled at the thought of what the blizzard had meant to Julie Breton, waiting, waiting, for the dog team creeping up the east coast, baffled by head wind and drift.

The dogs had won a long rest and Marcel did not start breaking trail inland until after, daylight. With the sunrise the wind had increased and the heartsick Marcel groaned at the strength-sapping floundering in breast-high drifts which faced his devoted dogs, when he needed them fresh for the race up the sea ice of the coast beyond. Before he slept he had weighed the toil of ten miles of drift-barred short cut across the cape against the alternative of doubling the headland on the ice. He had decided that no men or dogs could face the maelstrom of wind and snow which churned around the cape’s bald buttresses, no strength force its way, no endurance prevail against it.

With Marcel in the lead as trail breaker, and the missionary, who took the punishment without murmur, following the sled, Fleur led her sons up to their Calvary in the hills.

As they left the valley and reached the open tundra above, they met the full force of the gale. For an instant men and dogs stopped dead in their tracks, then with heads down they hurled themselves into the white fury which had buried the trail beyond all tracing.

But the desperate Frenchman pushed on in the direction of the north coast followed by Fleur with her whitened nose at the tails of his snowshoes. At times, when the force of the snow swirls sucked their very breath, men and dogs threw themselves panting on the snow, until, with wind regained, they could go on again. Often plunging to their collars in the new snow, the huskies traveled solely by leaps, until, stalled nose-deep, tangled in traces and held by the drag of the overturned sled, Marcel and the exhausted Hunter came to their rescue. Heartbreaking mile after mile of the country over which Marcel had sped two days before they painfully put behind them.

At noon the man who lived his creed, his strength sapped, crumpled in the snow. Wrapping him in robes, Marcel lashed him on the sled and pressed forward.

Through a break in the snow, before the light waned, Marcel made out in the north the dim silhouette of Big Island. He was over the divide and well on his way to the coast. With the night the wind eased, though the snow held, and although he was off the trail, the new snow on the exposed north slope of the cape was either wind-packed or swept from the frozen tundra and again the exhausted dogs found good footing.

For some time the team had been working easily downhill, Marcel often forced to brake the toboggan with his feet. He knew he had worked to the west of the trail and was swinging in a circle to regain it. Worried by the sting of the cold which was growing increasingly bitter as the wind fell off, he stopped to rub the muffled, frost-cracked face, and hands of his spent passenger, cheering him with the promise of a roaring fire. When he started the team, Colin, stiffened by the rest, limped badly, and Jules, who had bucked the deep snow all day like a veteran of the mail teams, gamely following his herculean mother, hobbled along head and tail down, with a wrenched shoulder. It was high time they found a camping place. With the falling wind they would freeze in the open. So he pushed on through the murk, seeking the beach where there was wood and a lee.

They were swiftly dropping down to the sea ice, but snow and darkness drew around them an impenetrable curtain. Seizing the gee pole, Marcel had thrown his weight back on the sled to keep it off the dogs on a descent when suddenly Fleur, whose white back he could barely see moving in front, with a whine stopped dead in her tracks and flattened on the snow. Her tired sons at once lay down behind her. The sled slid into Angus and stopped.

Mystified, Marcel called: “Marche, Fleur! Marche!” fearing to find, when she rose, that his rock and anchor had suddenly broken on the trail. But the great dog, ignoring the command, raised her nose in a low growl as Marcel reached her.

“What troubles you, Fleur?” he asked, on his knees beside her, brushing the crusted snow from her ears and slant eyes. Again Fleur whined mysteriously.

“Where ees de pain, Fleur? Get up!” he ordered sharply, thinking to learn where her iron body had received its hurt. But the dog lay rigid, her throat still rumbling.

“By gar, dis ees queer t’ing!” muttered Marcel, his mittened hand on the massive head.

Then some strange impulse led him to advance into the blackness ahead, when, with fierce protest, Fleur, jerking Jules to his feet, leaped forward, straining to reach her master.

The Frenchman, checked by the dog’s action, stared out into the darkness until, at length, he saw that the white tundra at his feet fell away before his snowshoes and he looked out into gray space. As he crouched peering ahead, his senses slowly warned him that he stood on a shoulder of cliff falling sheer to the invisible beach below.

He had driven his dogs to the lip of a ghastly death! And Julie

Turning back, he flung himself beside the trembling Fleur, and with his arm circling the great neck, kissed the battered nose. Fleur, with the uncanny instinct of the born lead dog, had scented the open space, divined the danger, and had lain down, saving them all.

Swinging his team off the brow of the cliff, he worked back and finally down to the beach, and his muffled passenger, drowsy, with swiftly numbing limbs, never knew that he had ridden calmly, that night, out to the doors of doom.

In the lee of an island Marcel made camp and boiled life-giving tea—the panacea of the North—and pemmican, which soon revived the frozen Hunter.

To his joy, he realized that the back of the blizzard was broken, for as the wind and snow eased, the temperature rapidly fell to an arctic cold. With Whale River eighty miles away, his dogs, broken by lack of rest and stiff from the wrenching and exhaustion of the battle with the deep snow, his own legs twinging with mal racquette, Marcel thanked God—for the dawn would see the wind dead and if his dogs did not fail him, in two days he would reach the post.