The Faith of Men | Page 6

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?"