The Son of the Wolf | Page 6

a
something so indefinite that he cannot characterize it. If his comrades
have no more experience than himself, they will shake their heads
dubiously and dose him with strong physic. But the hunger will
continue and become stronger; he will lose interest in the things of his

everyday life and wax morbid; and one day, when the emptiness has
become unbearable, a revelation will dawn upon him.
In the Yukon country, when this comes to pass, the man usually
provisions a poling boat, if it is summer, and if winter, harnesses his
dogs, and heads for the Southland. A few months later, supposing him
to be possessed of a faith in the country, he returns with a wife to share
with him in that faith, and incidentally in his hardships. This but serves
to show the innate selfishness of man. It also brings us to the trouble of
'Scruff' Mackenzie, which occurred in the old days, before the country
was stampeded and staked by a tidal-wave of the che-cha-quas, and
when the Klondike's only claim to notice was its salmon fisheries.
'Scruff' Mackenzie bore the earmarks of a frontier birth and a frontier
life.
His face was stamped with twenty-five years of incessant struggle with
Nature in her wildest moods,--the last two, the wildest and hardest of
all, having been spent in groping for the gold which lies in the shadow
of the Arctic Circle. When the yearning sickness came upon him, he
was not surprised, for he was a practical man and had seen other men
thus stricken. But he showed no sign of his malady, save that he
worked harder. All summer he fought mosquitoes and washed the
sure-thing bars of the Stuart River for a double grubstake. Then he
floated a raft of houselogs down the Yukon to Forty Mile, and put
together as comfortable a cabin as any the camp could boast of. In fact,
it showed such cozy promise that many men elected to be his partner
and to come and live with him. But he crushed their aspirations with
rough speech, peculiar for its strength and brevity, and bought a double
supply of grub from the trading-post.
As has been noted, 'Scruff' Mackenzie was a practical man. If he
wanted a thing he usually got it, but in doing so, went no farther out of
his way than was necessary. Though a son of toil and hardship, he was
averse to a journey of six hundred miles on the ice, a second of two
thousand miles on the ocean, and still a third thousand miles or so to
his last stamping-grounds,--all in the mere quest of a wife. Life was too
short. So he rounded up his dogs, lashed a curious freight to his sled,

and faced across the divide whose westward slopes were drained by the
head-reaches of the Tanana.
He was a sturdy traveler, and his wolf-dogs could work harder and
travel farther on less grub than any other team in the Yukon. Three
weeks later he strode into a hunting-camp of the Upper Tanana Sticks.
They marveled at his temerity; for they had a bad name and had been
known to kill white men for as trifling a thing as a sharp ax or a broken
rifle.
But he went among them single-handed, his bearing being a delicious
composite of humility, familiarity, sang-froid, and insolence. It
required a deft hand and deep knowledge of the barbaric mind
effectually to handle such diverse weapons; but he was a past-master in
the art, knowing when to conciliate and when to threaten with Jove-like
wrath.
He first made obeisance to the Chief Thling-Tinneh, presenting him
with a couple of pounds of black tea and tobacco, and thereby winning
his most cordial regard. Then he mingled with the men and maidens,
and that night gave a potlach.
The snow was beaten down in the form of an oblong, perhaps a
hundred feet in length and quarter as many across. Down the center a
long fire was built, while either side was carpeted with spruce boughs.
The lodges were forsaken, and the fivescore or so members of the tribe
gave tongue to their folk-chants in honor of their guest.
'Scruff' Mackenzie's two years had taught him the not many hundred
words of their vocabulary, and he had likewise conquered their deep
gutturals, their Japanese idioms, constructions, and honorific and
agglutinative particles. So he made oration after their manner,
satisfying their instinctive poetry-love with crude flights of eloquence
and metaphorical contortions. After Thling-Tinneh and the Shaman had
responded in kind, he made trifling presents to the menfolk, joined in
their singing, and proved an expert in their fifty-two-stick gambling
game.

And they smoked his tobacco and were pleased. But among the
younger men there was a defiant attitude, a spirit