The Son of the Wolf | Page 9

the
door.
The song of the men broke suddenly and there was a hubbub of many
voices as he whirled the old woman roughly to her couch of skins.
'Again I cry--listen, O Thling-Tinneh! The Wolf dies with teeth
fast-locked, and with him there shall sleep ten of thy strongest
men,--men who are needed, for the hunting is not begun, and the
fishing is not many moons away. And again, of what profit should I die?
I know the custom of thy people; thy share of my wealth shall be very
small. Grant me thy child, and it shall all be thine. And yet again, my
brothers will come, and they are many, and their maws are never filled;
and the daughters of the Raven shall bear children in the lodges of the
Wolf. My people are greater than thy people. It is destiny. Grant, and
all this wealth is thine.' Moccasins were crunching the snow without.
Mackenzie threw his rifle to cock, and loosened the twin Colts in his
belt.
'Grant, O Chief!' 'And yet will my people say no.' 'Grant, and the
wealth is thine. Then shall I deal with thy people after.' 'The Wolf will
have it so. I will take his tokens,--but I would warn him.' Mackenzie
passed over the goods, taking care to clog the rifle's ejector, and
capping the bargain with a kaleidoscopic silk kerchief. The Shaman and
half a dozen young braves entered, but he shouldered boldly among
them and passed out.
'Pack!' was his laconic greeting to Zarinska as he passed her lodge and
hurried to harness his dogs. A few minutes later he swept into the
council at the head of the team, the woman by his side. He took his
place at the upper end of the oblong, by the side of the chief. To his left,
a step to the rear, he stationed Zarinska, her proper place. Besides, the
time was ripe for mischief, and there was need to guard his back.
On either side, the men crouched to the fire, their voices lifted in a

folk-chant out of the forgotten past. Full of strange, halting cadences
and haunting recurrences, it was not beautiful. 'Fearful' may
inadequately express it. At the lower end, under the eye of the Shaman,
danced half a score of women. Stern were his reproofs of those who did
not wholly abandon themselves to the ecstasy of the rite. Half hidden in
their heavy masses of raven hair, all dishevelled and falling to their
waists, they slowly swayed to and fro, their forms rippling to an
ever-changing rhythm.
It was a weird scene; an anachronism. To the south, the nineteenth
century was reeling off the few years of its last decade; here flourished
man primeval, a shade removed from the prehistoric cave-dweller,
forgotten fragment of the Elder World. The tawny wolf-dogs sat
between their skin-clad masters or fought for room, the firelight cast
backward from their red eyes and dripping fangs. The woods, in
ghostly shroud, slept on unheeding.
The White Silence, for the moment driven to the rimming forest,
seemed ever crushing inward; the stars danced with great leaps, as is
their wont in the time of the Great Cold; while the Spirits of the Pole
trailed their robes of glory athwart the heavens.
'Scruff' Mackenzie dimly realized the wild grandeur of the setting as his
eyes ranged down the fur-fringed sides in quest of missing faces. They
rested for a moment on a newborn babe, suckling at its mother's naked
breast. It was forty below,--seven and odd degrees of frost. He thought
of the tender women of his own race and smiled grimly. Yet from the
loins of some such tender woman had he sprung with a kingly
inheritance,--an inheritance which gave to him and his dominance over
the land and sea, over the animals and the peoples of all the zones.
Single-handed against fivescore, girt by the Arctic winter, far from his
own, he felt the prompting of his heritage, the desire to possess, the
wild danger--love, the thrill of battle, the power to conquer or to die.
The singing and the dancing ceased, and the Shaman flared up in rude
eloquence.
Through the sinuosities of their vast mythology, he worked cunningly

upon the credulity of his people. The case was strong. Opposing the
creative principles as embodied in the Crow and the Raven, he
stigmatized Mackenzie as the Wolf, the fighting and the destructive
principle. Not only was the combat of these forces spiritual, but men
fought, each to his totem. They were the children of Jelchs, the Raven,
the Promethean fire-bringer; Mackenzie was the child of the Wolf, or in
other words, the Devil. For them to bring a truce to this perpetual
warfare, to marry their daughters to the arch-enemy, were