The Faith of Men

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THE FAITH OF MEN


Contents:

A Relic of the Pliocene
A Hyperborean Brew
The Faith of Men
Too Much Gold
The One Thousand Dozen
The Marriage of Lit-lit
Batard
The Story of Jees Uck




A RELIC OF THE PLIOCENE


I wash my hands of him at the start. I cannot father his tales, nor will
I be responsible for them. I make these preliminary reservations,
observe, as a guard upon my own integrity. I possess a certain definite
position in a small way, also a wife; and for the good name of the
community that honours my existence with its approval, and for the sake
of her posterity and mine, I cannot take the chances I once did, nor
foster probabilities with the careless improvidence of youth. So, I
repeat, I wash my hands of him, this Nimrod, this mighty hunter, this
homely, blue-eyed, freckle-faced Thomas Stevens.

Having been honest to myself, and to whatever prospective olive branches
my wife may be pleased to tender me, I can now afford to be generous. I
shall not criticize the tales told me by Thomas Stevens, and, further, I
shall withhold my judgment. If it be asked why, I can only add that
judgment I have none. Long have I pondered, weighed, and balanced, but
never have my conclusions been twice the same--forsooth! because Thomas
Stevens is a greater man than I. If he have told truths, well and good;
if untruths, still well and good. For who can prove? or who disprove? I
eliminate myself from the proposition, while those of little faith may do
as I have done--go find the same Thomas Stevens, and discuss to his face
the various matters which, if fortune serve, I shall relate. As to where
he may be found? The directions are simple: anywhere between 53 north
latitude and the Pole, on the one hand; and, on the other, the likeliest
hunting grounds that lie between the east coast of Siberia and
farthermost Labrador. That he is there, somewhere, within that clearly
defined territory, I pledge the word of an honourable man whose
expectations entail straight speaking and right living.

Thomas Stevens may have toyed prodigiously with truth, but when we first
met (it were well to mark this point), he wandered into my camp when I
thought myself a thousand miles beyond the outermost post of
civilization. At the sight of his human face, the first in weary months,
I could have sprung forward and folded him in my arms (and I am not by
any means a demonstrative man); but to him his visit seemed the most
casual thing under the sun. He just strolled into the light of my camp,
passed the time of day after the custom of men on beaten trails, threw my
snowshoes the one way and a couple of dogs the other, and so made room
for himself by the fire. Said he'd just dropped in to borrow a pinch of
soda and to see if I had any decent tobacco. He plucked forth an ancient
pipe, loaded it with painstaking care, and, without as much as by your
leave, whacked half the tobacco of my pouch into his. Yes, the stuff was
fairly good. He sighed with the contentment of the just, and literally
absorbed the smoke from the crisping yellow flakes, and it did my
smoker's heart good to behold him.

Hunter? Trapper? Prospector? He shrugged his shoulders No; just sort
of knocking round a bit. Had come up from the Great Slave some time
since, and was thinking of trapsing over into the Yukon country. The
factor of Koshim had spoken about the discoveries on the Klondike, and he
was of a mind to run over for a peep. I noticed that he spoke of the
Klondike in the archaic vernacular, calling it the Reindeer River--a
conceited custom that the Old Timers employ against the _che-chaquas_
and all tenderfeet in general. But he did it so naively and as such a
matter of course, that there was no sting, and I forgave him. He also
had it in view, he said, before he crossed the divide into the Yukon, to
make a little run up Fort o' Good Hope way.

Now Fort o' Good Hope is a far journey to the north, over and beyond the
Circle, in a place where the feet of few men have trod; and when a
nondescript ragamuffin comes in out of the night, from nowhere in
particular, to sit by one's fire and discourse on such in terms of
"trapsing" and "a little run," it is fair time to rouse up and shake off
the dream. Wherefore I looked about me; saw the fly and, underneath, the
pine boughs spread for the sleeping furs; saw the grub sacks, the camera,
the frosty breaths of the dogs circling on the edge of the light; and,
above, a great streamer of the aurora, bridging the zenith from south-
east to north-west. I shivered. There is a magic in the Northland
night, that steals in on one like fevers from malarial marshes. You are
clutched and downed before you are aware. Then I looked to the
snowshoes, lying prone and crossed where he had flung them. Also I had
an eye to my tobacco pouch. Half, at least, of its goodly store had
vamosed. That settled it. Fancy had not tricked me after all.

Crazed with suffering, I thought, looking steadfastly at the man--one of
those wild stampeders, strayed far from his bearings and wandering like a
lost soul through great vastnesses and unknown deeps. Oh, well, let his
moods slip on, until, mayhap, he gathers his tangled wits together. Who
knows?--the mere sound of a fellow-creature's voice may bring all
straight again.

So I led him on in talk, and soon I marvelled, for he talked of game and
the ways thereof. He had killed the Siberian wolf of westernmost Alaska,
and the chamois in the secret Rockies. He averred he knew the haunts
where the last buffalo still roamed; that he had hung on the flanks of
the caribou when they ran by the hundred thousand, and slept in the Great
Barrens on the musk-ox's winter trail.

And I shifted my judgment accordingly (the first revision, but by no
account the last), and deemed him a monumental effigy of truth. Why it
was I know not, but the spirit moved me to repeat a tale told to me by a
man who had dwelt in the land too long to know better. It was of the
great bear that hugs the steep slopes of St Elias, never descending to
the levels of the gentler inclines. Now God so constituted this creature
for its hillside habitat that the legs of one side are all of a foot
longer than those of the other. This is mighty convenient, as will be
reality admitted. So I hunted this rare beast in my own name, told it in
the first person, present tense, painted the requisite locale, gave it
the necessary garnishings and touches of verisimilitude, and looked to
see the man stunned by the recital.

Not he. Had he doubted, I could have forgiven him. Had he objected,
denying the dangers of such a hunt by virtue of the animal's inability to
turn about and go the other way--had he done this, I say, I could have
taken him by the hand for the true sportsman that he was. Not he. He
sniffed, looked on me, and sniffed again; then gave my tobacco due
praise, thrust one foot into my lap, and bade me examine the gear. It
was a _mucluc_ of the Innuit pattern, sewed together with sinew threads,
and devoid of beads or furbelows. But it was the skin itself that was
remarkable. In that it was all of half an inch thick, it reminded me of
walrus-hide; but there the resemblance ceased, for no walrus ever bore so
marvellous a growth of hair. On the side and ankles this hair was well-
nigh worn away, what of friction with underbrush and snow; but around the
top and down the more sheltered back it was coarse, dirty black, and very
thick. I parted it with difficulty and looked beneath for the fine fur
that is common with northern animals, but found it in this case to be
absent. This, however, was compensated for by the length. Indeed, the
tufts that had survived wear and tear measured all of seven or eight
inches.

I looked up into the man's face, and he pulled his foot down and asked,
"Find hide like that on your St Elias bear?"

I shook my head. "Nor on any other creature of land or sea," I answered
candidly. The thickness of it, and the length of the hair, puzzled me.

"That," he said, and said without the slightest hint of impressiveness,
"that came from a mammoth."

"Nonsense!" I exclaimed, for I could not forbear the protest of my
unbelief. "The mammoth, my dear sir, long ago vanished from the earth.
We know it once existed by the fossil remains that we have unearthed, and
by a frozen carcase that the Siberian sun saw fit to melt from out the
bosom of a glacier; but we also know that no living specimen exists. Our
explorers--"

At this word he broke in impatiently. "Your explorers? Pish! A weakly
breed. Let us hear no more of them. But tell me, O man, what you may
know of the mammoth and his ways."

Beyond contradiction, this was leading to a yarn; so I baited my hook by
ransacking my memory for whatever data I possessed on the subject in
hand. To begin with, I emphasized that the animal was prehistoric, and
marshalled all my facts in support of this. I mentioned the Siberian
sand-bars that abounded with ancient mammoth bones; spoke of the large
quantities of fossil ivory purchased from the Innuits by the Alaska
Commercial Company; and acknowledged having myself mined six- and eight-
foot tusks from the pay gravel of the Klondike creeks. "All fossils," I
concluded, "found in the midst of _debris_ deposited through countless
ages."

"I remember when I was a kid," Thomas Stevens sniffed (he had a most
confounded way of sniffing), "that I saw a petrified water-melon. Hence,
though mistaken persons sometimes delude themselves into thinking that
they are really raising or eating them, there are no such things as
extant water-melons?"

"But the question of food," I objected, ignoring his point, which was
puerile and without bearing. "The soil must bring forth vegetable life
in lavish abundance to support so monstrous creations. Nowhere in the
North is the soil so prolific. Ergo, the mammoth cannot exist."

"I pardon your ignorance concerning many matters of this Northland, for
you are a young man and have travelled little; but, at the same time, I
am inclined to agree with you on one thing. The mammoth no longer
exists. How do I know? I killed the last one with my own right arm."

Thus spake Nimrod, the mighty Hunter. I threw a stick of firewood at the
dogs and bade them quit their unholy howling, and waited. Undoubtedly
this liar of singular felicity would open his mouth and requite me for my
St. Elias bear.

"It was this way," he at last began, after the appropriate silence had
intervened. "I was in camp one day--"

"Where?" I interrupted.

He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the north-east, where
stretched a _terra incognita_ into which vastness few men have strayed
and fewer emerged. "I was in camp one day with Klooch. Klooch was as
handsome a little _kamooks_ as ever whined betwixt the traces or shoved
nose into a camp kettle. Her father was a full-blood Malemute from
Russian Pastilik on Bering Sea, and I bred her, and with understanding,
out of a clean-legged bitch of the Hudson Bay stock. I tell you, O man,
she was a corker combination. And now, on this day I have in mind, she
was brought to pup through a pure wild wolf of the woods--grey, and long
of limb, with big lungs and no end of staying powers. Say! Was there
ever the like? It was a new breed of dog I had started, and I could look
forward to big things.

"As I have said, she was brought neatly to pup, and safely delivered. I
was squatting on my hams over the litter--seven sturdy, blind little
beggars--when from behind came a bray of trumpets and crash of brass.
There was a rush, like the wind-squall that kicks the heels of the rain,
and I was midway to my feet when knocked flat on my face. At the same
instant I heard Klooch sigh, very much as a man does when you've planted
your fist in his belly. You can stake your sack I lay quiet, but I
twisted my head around and saw a huge bulk swaying above me. Then the
blue sky flashed into view and I got to my feet. A hairy mountain of
flesh was just disappearing in the underbrush on the edge of the open. I
caught a rear-end glimpse, with a stiff tail, as big in girth as my body,
standing out straight behind. The next second only a tremendous hole
remained in the thicket, though I could still hear the sounds as of a
tornado dying quickly away, underbrush ripping and tearing, and trees
snapping and crashing.

"I cast about for my rifle. It had been lying on the ground with the
muzzle against a log; but now the stock was smashed, the barrel out of
line, and the working-gear in a thousand bits. Then I looked for the
slut, and--and what do you suppose?"

I shook my head.

"May my soul burn in a thousand hells if there was anything left of her!
Klooch, the seven sturdy, blind little beggars--gone, all gone. Where
she had stretched was a slimy, bloody depression in the soft earth, all
of a yard in diameter, and around the edges a few scattered hairs."

I measured three feet on the snow, threw about it a circle, and glanced
at Nimrod.

"The beast was thirty long and twenty high," he answered, "and its tusks
scaled over six times three feet. I couldn't believe, myself, at the
time, for all that it had just happened. But if my senses had played me,
there was the broken gun and the hole in the brush. And there was--or,
rather, there was not--Klooch and the pups. O man, it makes me hot all
over now when I think of it Klooch! Another Eve! The mother of a new
race! And a rampaging, ranting, old bull mammoth, like a second flood,
wiping them, root and branch, off the face of the earth! Do you wonder
that the blood-soaked earth cried out to high God? Or that I grabbed the
hand-axe and took the trail?"

"The hand-axe?" I exclaimed, startled out of myself by the picture. "The
hand-axe, and a big bull mammoth, thirty feet long, twenty feet--"

Nimrod joined me in my merriment, chuckling gleefully. "Wouldn't it kill
you?" he cried. "Wasn't it a beaver's dream? Many's the time I've
laughed about it since, but at the time it was no laughing matter, I was
that danged mad, what of the gun and Klooch. Think of it, O man! A
brand-new, unclassified, uncopyrighted breed, and wiped out before ever
it opened its eyes or took out its intention papers! Well, so be it.
Life's full of disappointments, and rightly so. Meat is best after a
famine, and a bed soft after a hard trail.

"As I was saying, I took out after the beast with the hand-axe, and hung
to its heels down the valley; but when he circled back toward the head, I
was left winded at the lower end. Speaking of grub, I might as well stop
long enough to explain a couple of points. Up thereabouts, in the midst
of the mountains, is an almighty curious formation. There is no end of
little valleys, each like the other much as peas in a pod, and all neatly
tucked away with straight, rocky walls rising on all sides. And at the
lower ends are always small openings where the drainage or glaciers must
have broken out. The only way in is through these mouths, and they are
all small, and some smaller than others. As to grub--you've slushed
around on the rain-soaked islands of the Alaskan coast down Sitka way,
most likely, seeing as you're a traveller. And you know how stuff grows
there--big, and juicy, and jungly. Well, that's the way it was with
those valleys. Thick, rich soil, with ferns and grasses and such things
in patches higher than your head. Rain three days out of four during the
summer months; and food in them for a thousand mammoths, to say nothing
of small game for man.

"But to get back. Down at the lower end of the valley I got winded and
gave over. I began to speculate, for when my wind left me my dander got
hotter and hotter, and I knew I'd never know peace of mind till I dined
on roasted mammoth-foot. And I knew, also, that that stood for _skookum_
_mamook pukapuk_--excuse Chinook, I mean there was a big fight coming.
Now the mouth of my valley was very narrow, and the walls steep. High up
on one side was one of those big pivot rocks, or balancing rocks, as some
call them, weighing all of a couple of hundred tons. Just the thing. I
hit back for camp, keeping an eye open so the bull couldn't slip past,
and got my ammunition. It wasn't worth anything with the rifle smashed;
so I opened the shells, planted the powder under the rock, and touched it
off with slow fuse. Wasn't much of a charge, but the old boulder tilted
up lazily and dropped down into place, with just space enough to let the
creek drain nicely. Now I had him."

"But how did you have him?" I queried. "Who ever heard of a man killing
a mammoth with a hand-axe? And, for that matter, with anything else?"

"O man, have I not told you I was mad?" Nimrod replied, with a slight
manifestation of sensitiveness. "Mad clean through, what of Klooch and
the gun. Also, was I not a hunter? And was this not new and most
unusual game? A hand-axe? Pish! I did not need it. Listen, and you
shall hear of a hunt, such as might have happened in the youth of the
world when cavemen rounded up the kill with hand-axe of stone. Such
would have served me as well. Now is it not a fact that man can outwalk
the dog or horse? That he can wear them out with the intelligence of his
endurance?"

I nodded.

"Well?"

The light broke in on me, and I bade him continue.

"My valley was perhaps five miles around. The mouth was closed. There
was no way to get out. A timid beast was that bull mammoth, and I had
him at my mercy. I got on his heels again hollered like a fiend, pelted
him with cobbles, and raced him around the valley three times before I
knocked off for supper. Don't you see? A race-course! A man and a
mammoth! A hippodrome, with sun, moon, and stars to referee!

"It took me two months to do it, but I did it. And that's no beaver
dream. Round and round I ran him, me travelling on the inner circle,
eating jerked meat and salmon berries on the run, and snatching winks of
sleep between. Of course, he'd get desperate at times and turn. Then
I'd head for soft ground where the creek spread out, and lay anathema
upon him and his ancestry, and dare him to come on. But he was too wise
to bog in a mud puddle. Once he pinned me in against the walls, and I
crawled back into a deep crevice and waited. Whenever he felt for me
with his trunk, I'd belt him with the hand-axe till he pulled out,
shrieking fit to split my ear drums, he was that mad. He knew he had me
and didn't have me, and it near drove him wild. But he was no man's
fool. He knew he was safe as long as I stayed in the crevice, and he
made up his mind to keep me there. And he was dead right, only he hadn't
figured on the commissary. There was neither grub nor water around that
spot, so on the face of it he couldn't keep up the siege. He'd stand
before the opening for hours, keeping an eye on me and flapping
mosquitoes away with his big blanket ears. Then the thirst would come on
him and he'd ramp round and roar till the earth shook, calling me every
name he could lay tongue to. This was to frighten me, of course; and
when he thought I was sufficiently impressed, he'd back away softly and
try to make a sneak for the creek. Sometimes I'd let him get almost
there--only a couple of hundred yards away it was--when out I'd pop and
back he'd come, lumbering along like the old landslide he was. After I'd
done this a few times, and he'd figured it out, he changed his tactics.
Grasped the time element, you see. Without a word of warning, away he'd
go, tearing for the water like mad, scheming to get there and back before
I ran away. Finally, after cursing me most horribly, he raised the siege
and deliberately stalked off to the water-hole.

"That was the only time he penned me,--three days of it,--but after that
the hippodrome never stopped. Round, and round, and round, like a six
days' go-as-I-please, for he never pleased. My clothes went to rags and
tatters, but I never stopped to mend, till at last I ran naked as a son
of earth, with nothing but the old hand-axe in one hand and a cobble in
the other. In fact, I never stopped, save for peeps of sleep in the
crannies and ledges of the cliffs. As for the bull, he got perceptibly
thinner and thinner--must have lost several tons at least--and as nervous
as a schoolmarm on the wrong side of matrimony. When I'd come up with
him and yell, or lain him with a rock at long range, he'd jump like a
skittish colt and tremble all over. Then he'd pull out on the run, tail
and trunk waving stiff, head over one shoulder and wicked eyes blazing,
and the way he'd swear at me was something dreadful. A most immoral
beast he was, a murderer, and a blasphemer.

"But towards the end he quit all this, and fell to whimpering and crying
like a baby. His spirit broke and he became a quivering jelly-mountain
of misery. He'd get attacks of palpitation of the heart, and stagger
around like a drunken man, and fall down and bark his shins. And then
he'd cry, but always on the run. O man, the gods themselves would have
wept with him, and you yourself or any other man. It was pitiful, and
there was so I much of it, but I only hardened my heart and hit up the
pace. At last I wore him clean out, and he lay down, broken-winded,
broken-hearted, hungry, and thirsty. When I found he wouldn't budge, I
hamstrung him, and spent the better part of the day wading into him with
the hand-axe, he a-sniffing and sobbing till I worked in far enough to
shut him off. Thirty feet long he was, and twenty high, and a man could
sling a hammock between his tusks and sleep comfortably. Barring the
fact that I had run most of the juices out of him, he was fair eating,
and his four feet, alone, roasted whole, would have lasted a man a
twelvemonth. I spent the winter there myself."

"And where is this valley?" I asked

He waved his hand in the direction of the north-east, and said: "Your
tobacco is very good. I carry a fair share of it in my pouch, but I
shall carry the recollection of it until I die. In token of my
appreciation, and in return for the moccasins on your own feet, I will
present to you these _muclucs_. They commemorate Klooch and the seven
blind little beggars. They are also souvenirs of an unparalleled event
in history, namely, the destruction of the oldest breed of animal on
earth, and the youngest. And their chief virtue lies in that they will
never wear out."

Having effected the exchange, he knocked the ashes from his pipe, gripped
my hand good-night, and wandered off through the snow. Concerning this
tale, for which I have already disclaimed responsibility, I would
recommend those of little faith to make a visit to the Smithsonian
Institute. If they bring the requisite credentials and do not come in
vacation time, they will undoubtedly gain an audience with Professor
Dolvidson. The _muclucs_ are in his possession, and he will verify, not
the manner in which they were obtained, but the material of which they
are composed. When he states that they are made from the skin of the
mammoth, the scientific world accepts his verdict. What more would you
have?




A HYPERBOREAN BREW


[The story of a scheming white man among the strange people who live on
the rim of the Arctic sea]

Thomas Stevens's veracity may have been indeterminate as _x_, and his
imagination the imagination of ordinary men increased to the nth power,
but this, at least, must be said: never did he deliver himself of word
nor deed that could be branded as a lie outright. . . He may have played
with probability, and verged on the extremest edge of possibility, but in
his tales the machinery never creaked. That he knew the Northland like a
book, not a soul can deny. That he was a great traveller, and had set
foot on countless unknown trails, many evidences affirm. Outside of my
own personal knowledge, I knew men that had met him everywhere, but
principally on the confines of Nowhere. There was Johnson, the ex-Hudson
Bay Company factor, who had housed him in a Labrador factory until his
dogs rested up a bit, and he was able to strike out again. There was
McMahon, agent for the Alaska Commercial Company, who had run across him
in Dutch Harbour, and later on, among the outlying islands of the
Aleutian group. It was indisputable that he had guided one of the
earlier United States surveys, and history states positively that in a
similar capacity he served the Western Union when it attempted to put
through its trans-Alaskan and Siberian telegraph to Europe. Further,
there was Joe Lamson, the whaling captain, who, when ice-bound off the
mouth of the Mackenzie, had had him come aboard after tobacco. This last
touch proves Thomas Stevens's identity conclusively. His quest for
tobacco was perennial and untiring. Ere we became fairly acquainted, I
learned to greet him with one hand, and pass the pouch with the other.
But the night I met him in John O'Brien's Dawson saloon, his head was
wreathed in a nimbus of fifty-cent cigar smoke, and instead of my pouch
he demanded my sack. We were standing by a faro table, and forthwith he
tossed it upon the "high card." "Fifty," he said, and the game-keeper
nodded. The "high card" turned, and he handed back my sack, called for a
"tab," and drew me over to the scales, where the weigher nonchalantly
cashed him out fifty dollars in dust.