The Going of the White Swan | Page 2

in as though he endured physical pain. He got to his feet
and paced the floor. For weeks he had listened to the same kind of talk
from this wounded, and, as he thought, dying son, and he was getting
less and less able to bear it. The boy at nine years of age was, in
manner of speech, the merest child, but his thoughts were sometimes
large and wise. The only white child within a compass of a hundred
miles or so; the lonely life of the hills and plains, so austere in winter,
so melted to a sober joy in summer; listening to the talk of his elders at
camp-fires and on the hunting-trail, when, even as an infant almost, he
was swung in a blanket from a tree or was packed in the torch-crane of
a canoe; and more than all, the care of a good, loving--if
passionate--little mother: all these had made him far wiser than his
years. He had been hours upon hours each day alone with the birds, and
squirrels, and wild animals, and something of the keen scent and
instinct of the animal world had entered into his body and brain, so that
he felt what he could not understand.
He saw that he had worried his father, and it troubled him. He thought
of something.
"Daddy," he said, "let me have it."
A smile struggled for life in the hunter's face, as he turned to the wall
and took down the skin of a silver fox. He held it on his palm for a
moment, looking at it in an interested, satisfied way, then he brought it
over and put it into the child's hands; and the smile now shaped itself,
as he saw an eager pale face buried in the soft fur.
"Good! good!" he said involuntarily.
"Bon! bon!" said the boy's voice from the fur, in the language of his
mother, who added a strain of Indian blood to her French ancestry.
The two sat there, the man half-kneeling on the low bed, and stroking
the fur very gently. It could scarcely be thought that such pride should
be spent on a little pelt, by a mere backwoodsman and his nine-year-old
son. One has seen a woman fingering a splendid necklace, her eyes
fascinated by the bunch of warm, deep jewels--a light not of mere

vanity, or hunger, or avarice in her face--only the love of the beautiful
thing. But this was an animal's skin. Did they feel the animal
underneath it yet, giving it beauty, life, glory?
The silver-fox skin is the prize of the north, and this one was of the
boy's own harvesting. While his father was away he saw the fox
creeping by the hut. The joy of the hunter seized him, and guided his
eye over the sights of his father's rifle as he rested the barrel on the
windowsill, and the animal was his! Now his finger ran into the hole
made by the bullet, and he gave a little laugh of modest triumph.
Minutes passed as they studied, felt, and admired the skin, the hunter
proud of his son, the son alive with a primitive passion, which inflicts
suffering to get the beautiful thing. Perhaps the tenderness as well as
the wild passion of the animal gets into the hunter's blood, and tips his
fingers at times with an exquisite kindness--as one has noted in a lion
fondling her young, or in tigers as they sport upon the sands of the
desert. This boy had seen his father shoot a splendid moose, and, as it
lay dying, drop down and kiss it in the neck for sheer love of its
handsomeness. Death is no insult. It is the law of the primitive
world--war, and love in war.

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II
They sat there for a long time, not speaking, each busy in his own way:
the boy full of imaginings, strange, half-heathen, half-angelic feelings;
the man roaming in that savage, romantic, superstitious atmosphere
which belongs to the north, and to the north alone. At last the boy lay
back on his pillow, his finger still in the bullet-hole of the pelt. His eyes
closed, and he seemed about to fall asleep, but presently looked up and
whispered: "I haven't said my prayers, have I?"
The father shook his head in a sort of rude confusion.
"I can pray out loud if I want to, can't I?"

"Of course, Dominique." The man shrank a little.
"I forget a good many times, but I know one all right, for I said it when
the bird was singing. It isn't one out of the book Father Corraine sent
mother by Pretty Pierre; it's one she taught me out of her own head.
P'r'aps I'd better say it."
"P'r'aps,