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of Her People
Bucky Severn
His First Penitent
Peter God
The Mouse

BACK TO GOD'S COUNTRY
When Shan Tung, the long-cued Chinaman from Vancouver, started up
the Frazer River in the old days when the Telegraph Trail and the
headwaters of the Peace were the Meccas of half the gold-hunting
population of British Columbia, he did not foresee tragedy ahead of
him. He was a clever man, was Shan Tung, a cha-sukeed, a very devil
in the collecting of gold, and far-seeing. But he could not look forty
years into the future, and when Shan Tung set off into the north, that
winter, he was in reality touching fire to the end of a fuse that was to
burn through four decades before the explosion came.
With Shan Tung went Tao, a Great Dane. The Chinaman had picked
him up somewhere on the coast and had trained him as one trains a
horse. Tao was the biggest dog ever seen about the Height of Land, the
most powerful, and at times the most terrible. Of two things Shan Tung
was enormously proud in his silent and mysterious oriental way--of
Tao, the dog, and of his long, shining cue which fell to the crook of his
knees when he let it down. It had been the longest cue in Vancouver,
and therefore it was the longest cue in British Columbia. The cue and
the dog formed the combination which set the forty-year fuse of
romance and tragedy burning. Shan Tung started for the El Dorados
early in the winter, and Tao alone pulled his sledge and outfit. It was no
more than an ordinary task for the monstrous Great Dane, and Shan
Tung subserviently but with hidden triumph passed outfit after outfit
exhausted by the way. He had reached Copper Creek Camp, which was
boiling and frothing with the excitement of gold-maddened men, and
was congratulating himself that he would soon be at the camps west of
the Peace, when the thing happened. A drunken Irishman, filled with a
grim and unfortunate sense of humor, spotted Shan Tung's wonderful
cue and coveted it. Wherefore there followed a bit of excitement in
which Shan Tung passed into his empyrean home with a bullet through
his heart, and the drunken Irishman was strung up for his misdeed
fifteen minutes later. Tao, the Great Dane, was taken by the leader of
the men who pulled on the rope. Tao's new master was a "drifter," and
as he drifted, his face was always set to the north, until at last a new

humor struck him and he turned eastward to the Mackenzie. As the
seasons passed, Tao found mates along the way and left a string of his
progeny behind him, and he had new masters, one after another, until
he was grown old and his muzzle was turning gray. And never did one
of these masters turn south with him. Always it was north, north with
the white man first, north with the Cree, and then wit h the
Chippewayan, until in the end the dog born in a Vancouver kennel died
in an Eskimo igloo on the Great Bear. But the breed of the Great Dane
lived on. Here and there, as the years passed, one would find among the
Eskimo trace-dogs, a grizzled-haired, powerful-jawed giant that was
alien to the arctic stock, and in these occasional aliens ran the blood of
Tao, the Dane.
Forty years, more or less, after Shan Tung lost his life and his cue at
Copper Creek Camp, there was born on a firth of Coronation Gulf a
dog who was named Wapi, which means "the Walrus." Wapi, at full
growth, was a throwback of more than forty dog generations. He was
nearly as large as his forefather, Tao. His fangs were an inch in length,
his great jaws could crack the thigh-bone of a caribou, and from the
beginning the hands of men and the fangs of beasts were against him.
Almost from the day of his birth until this winter of his fourth year, life
for Wapi had been an unceasing fight for existence. He was
maya-tisew--bad with the badness of a devil. His reputation had gone
from master to master and from igloo to igloo; women and children
were afraid of him, and men always spoke to him with the club or the
lash in their hands. He was hated and feared, and yet because he could
run down a barren-land caribou and kill it within a mile, and would
hold a big white bear at bay until the hunters came, he was not
sacrificed to this hate and fear. A hundred whips and clubs and a
hundred pairs of hands were against him between Cape Perry and the
crown of Franklin Bay--and the fangs of twice