Nomads of the North

Nomads of the North

The Project Gutenberg Etext of Nomads Of The North, by James
Oliver Curwood #7 in our series by James Oliver Curwood
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg file.
We encourage you to keep this file, exactly as it is, on your own disk,
thereby keeping an electronic path open for future readers.
Please do not remove this.
This header should be the first thing seen when anyone starts to view
the etext. Do not change or edit it without written permission. The
words are carefully chosen to provide users with the information they
need to understand what they may and may not do with the etext. To
encourage this, we have moved most of the information to the end,
rather than having it all here at the beginning.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since
1971**
*****These Etexts Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get etexts, and further
information, is included below. We need your donations.
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3)
organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541

Find out about how to make a donation at the bottom of this file.

Title: Nomads Of The North
Author: James Oliver Curwood
Release Date: December, 2003 [Etext #4704] [Yes, we are more than
one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on March 3,
2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
The Project Gutenberg Etext of Nomads Of The North, by James
Oliver Curwood ***********This file should be named nmdnt10.txt
or nmdnt10.zip***********
Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, nmdnt11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, nmdnt10a.txt
Produced by Robert Rowe, Charles Franks and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team.
Project Gutenberg Etexts are often created from several printed editions,
all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US unless a
copyright notice is included. Thus, we usually do not keep etexts in
compliance with any particular paper edition.
The "legal small print" and other information about this book may now
be found at the end of this file. Please read this important information,
as it gives you specific rights and tells you about restrictions in how the
file may be used.

NOMADS OF THE NORTH
A STORY OF ROMANCE AND ADVENTURE UNDER THE OPEN
STARS
BY JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
CHAPTER ONE
It was late in the month of March, at the dying-out of the Eagle Moon,
that Neewa the black bear cub got his first real look at the world.
Noozak, his mother, was an old bear, and like an old person she was
filled with rheumatics and the desire to sleep late. So instead of taking a
short and ordinary nap of three months this particular winter of little
Neewa's birth she slept four, which, made Neewa, who was born while
ms mother was sound asleep, a little over two months old instead of six
weeks when they came out of den.
In choosing this den Noozak had gone to a cavern at the crest of a high,
barren ridge, and from this point Neewa first looked down into the
valley. For a time, coming out of darkness into sunlight, he was blinded.
He could hear and smell and feel many things before he could see. And
Noozak, as though puzzled at finding warmth and sunshine in place of
cold and darkness, stood for many minutes sniffing the wind and
looking down upon her domain.
For two weeks an early spring had been working its miracle of change
in that wonderful country of the northland between Jackson's Knee and
the Shamattawa River, and from north to south between God's Lake
and the Churchill.
It was a splendid world. From the tall pinnacle of rock on which they
stood it looked like a great sea of sunlight, with only here and there
patches of white snow where the winter winds had piled it deep. Their
ridge rose up out of a great valley. On all sides of them, as far as a
man's eye could have reached, there were blue and black patches of
forest, the shimmer of lakes still partly frozen, the sunlit sparkle of
rivulet and stream, and the greening open spaces out of which rose the

perfumes of the earth. These smells drifted up like tonic and food to the
nostrils of Noozak the big bear. Down there the earth was already
swelling with life. The buds on the poplars were growing fat and near
the bursting point; the grasses were sending out shoots tender and
sweet; the camas were filling