The Golden Snare | Page 4

him at times a man with a soul, and
at others a brute with the heart of a devil. In this story of Bram, and the
girl, and the other man, Bram himself should not be blamed too much.

He was pathetic, and yet he was terrible. It is doubtful if he really had
what is generally regarded as a soul. If he did, it was hidden--hidden to
the forests and the wild things that had made him.
Bram's story started long before he was born, at least three generations
before. That was before the Johnsons had gone north of Sixty. But they
were wandering, and steadily upward. If one puts a canoe in the Lower
Athabasca and travels northward to the Great Slave and thence up the
Mackenzie to the Arctic he will note a number of remarkable
ethnological changes. The racial characteristics of the world he is
entering change swiftly. The thin-faced Chippewa with his alert
movements and high-bowed canoe turns into the slower moving Cree,
with his broader cheeks, his more slanting eyes, and his racier
birchbark. And even the Cree changes as he lives farther north; each
new tribe is a little different from its southernmost neighbor, until at
last the Cree looks like a Jap, and the Chippewyan takes his place. And
the Chippewyan takes up the story of life where the Cree left off.
Nearer the Arctic his canoe becomes a skin kaiak, his face is still
broader, Ms eyes like a Chinaman's, and writers of human history call
him Eskimo.
The Johnsons, once they started, did not stop at any particular point.
There was probably only one Johnson in the beginning of that hundred
year story which was to have its finality in Bram. But there were more
in time. The Johnson blood mixed itself first with the Chippewa, and
then with the Cree--and the Cree-Chippewa Johnson blood, when at
last it reached the Eskimo, had in it also a strain of Chippewyan. It is
curious how the name itself lived. Johnson! One entered a tepee or a
cabin expecting to find there a white man, and was startled when he
discovered the truth.
Bram, after nearly a century of this intermixing of bloods, was a
throwback--a white man, so far as his skin and his hair and his eyes
went. In other physical ways he held to the type of his half- strain
Eskimo mother, except in size. He was six feet, and a giant in strength.
His face was broad, his cheek-bones high, his lips thick, his nose flat.
And he was WHITE. That was the shocking thing about it all. Even his
hair was a reddish blonde, wild and coarse and ragged like a lion's
mane, and his eyes were sometimes of a curious blue, and at
others--when he was angered--green like a cat's at night-time.

No man knew Bram for a friend. He was a mystery. He never remained
at a post longer than was necessary to exchange his furs for supplies,
and it might be months or even years before he returned to that
particular post again. He was ceaselessly wandering. More or less the
Royal Northwest Mounted Police kept track of him, and in many
reports of faraway patrols filed at Headquarters there are the laconic
words, "We saw Bram and his wolves traveling northward" or "Bram
and his wolves passed us"--always Bram AND HIS WOLVES. For two
years the Police lost track of him. That was when Bram was buried in
the heart of the Sulphur Country east of the Great Bear. After that the
Police kept an even closer watch on him, waiting, and expecting
something to happen. And then--the something came. Bram killed a
man. He did it so neatly and so easily, breaking him as he might have
broken a stick, that he was well off in flight before it was discovered
that his victim was dead. The next tragedy followed quickly--a
fortnight later, when Corporal Lee and a private from the Fort Churchill
barracks closed in on him out on the edge of the Barren. Bram didn't
fire a shot. They could hear his great, strange laugh when they were
still a quarter of a mile away from him. Bram merely set loose his
wolves. By a miracle Corporal Lee lived to drag himself to a
half-breed's cabin, where he died a little later, and the half-breed
brought the story to Fort Churchill.
After this, Bram disappeared from the eyes of the world. What he lived
in those four or five years that followed would well be worth his
pardon if his experiences could be made to appear between the covers
of a book. Bram--AND HIS WOLVES! Think of it. Alone. In all that
time without a voice to talk to him. Not once