CHAPTER I
A Mystery of Birth
A bear came out of the brush immediately behind the drying racks, attracted by the odor of curing fish. Once in the open she halted defensively, not because she had seen the man and woman near the falls but because of a sound beneath the roar of the water and because of something small and chubby and dimpled that was waving within six feet of her nose.
A baby, laced securely in his back cradle, had been set upright against a boulder. As the bear wrinkled her black nose and peered at this strange living thing with her small, beady eyes the infant waved both hands ecstatically.
The man and the woman, who had seen the bear when it emerged from the brush, did not move. Only their eyes proclaimed animation and those of both were bright with interest and delight. Even when the bear took a slow, stealthy step forward, wrinkling her nose curiously, they remained motionless. But the man's lips parted and he hissed the word, "Wee-sah-nah!"
The woman nodded almost imperceptibly and with suppressed excitement as the bear took another slow step forward, peering into the face of the gurgling child. Suddenly the great head swung swiftly around, the beady eyes stared at the man and woman for a moment and then with a grunt the huge animal turned and shambled back into the brush.
Instantly the man and the woman were confronting each other, both radiant.
"Muk-wah!" the woman cried. "A bear!"
"Wah-bee-muk-wah!" the man shouted excitedly. "A white bear!"
The woman's elation vanished and her black eyes widened in sudden terror.
"Kah-win!" she shrieked, uttering the negative with a panic stricken expression unattainable with the one-syllable English word.
The man stared at her in amazement. They had spoken in Ojibwa because it was the only language he knew. His first word, "wee-sah-nah," is not translatable unless it be construed as "personal totem." It denotes some animal which visits all Ojibwa children in their infancy, apparently coming to the camp for the sole purpose of seeing the child.
While they cannot tell clearly why they do so, Ojibwas treasure the name of this animal throughout their lives. The child's mother watches eagerly for its approach and it is never molested, even though the family be starving and the visitor is wanted for food.
No animal had ever come to look at Wen-dah-ban, the boy in the back cradle, and both Wazh-e-na-be, the man, and Nee-tah-wee-gan, the woman, were over-joyed when they saw the bear watching him. To them the curiosity of the animal was indicative of a profound and kindly interest in this particular child, a fact which made Nee-tah-wee-gan's terror the more inexplicable to her husband.
"She was white," he protested. "She was very old and the hair on her face had turned gray. It is not often a bear lives so long and it must mean something to the boy, perhaps that the white men will take him sometime and——"
"Kah-win!" (No!)
Nee-tah-wee-gan's fierce denial cut off his idle interpretation. She stood glaring at him, her face contorted with rage and terror. Wazh-e-na-be was accustomed to her shrill outbursts but never had he seen her thus. He stared for a moment and then glanced in wonder at the child.
"So you do not like it that the wee-sah-nah should have a touch of white," he said. "And you are afraid. Is it because you do not wish to lose the boy? Yet you never fondle him as do other mothers. I wonder," and a taunting note crept into his voice, "if the white bear does not tell the truth?"
"Kah-win! Kah-win!" Nee-tah-wee-gan's voice had risen to a shrill scream. "The boy is not white. His father was a white man but I am his mother."
Wazh-e-na-be's eyes lighted with vicious cruelty at this frenzied protestation.
"You have told me about the father," he said. "The boy was born when I took you for my woman and I did not care. But why did you say the boy was ill and always keep his face covered? Why did you make me leave Fort James? Why did you never go near the post or the other Indians after—"
He paused and grinned maliciously as she shrank from him.
"—after the house of the manager burned and his wife and son died in the fire?"
Nee-tah-wee-gan was paralyzed by terror. She could not take her eyes from Wazh-e-na-be's face. He continued to grin evilly and then suddenly his own eyes widened in astonishment.
"So that is what happened!" he cried. "I was a fool not to have seen it long ago."
He laughed more maliciously than before as his wife cowered in panic.
"And the child's father was white!" he taunted. "Yes, his father and his mother, too. You were the cook at Fort James. You lived in the dwelling house. You were there the night of the fire. And the body of the child they found with the white woman's! That was not hers. It was yours. You saved the other and kept it and you became my woman and made me find a new hunting ground so that no one would know."
He had begun with little more than a conjecture but before he finished he read confirmation in Nee-tah-wee-gan's utter terror and he grinned exultantly because he knew he was torturing her. Like most Ojibwas, he loved to watch others in torment and now he saw an unending means of entertainment through the long winter.
"A white child!" he jeered. "And you took it because you had lost your own. What a story to tell!"
He had turned away as he finished, back to his fishing, and he did not see the sudden stiffening of Nee-tah-wee-gan's body or the desperate, savage light in her black eyes.
She stood still, watching his every movement as he picked up the dip net, attached to a long pole, and walked to the edge of the rock that hung over the falls. Below him, she knew, the river plunged violently through a narrow gorge, the current twisted and flung aside by huge boulders.
And as she watched her terror left her. Her body, stiff with fear, now became tense with fierce passion. She leaned forward, eager and determined, as the man, catching a gleam of silver in the water far below, plunged in his net. He lifted it, a large whitefish struggling in the folds, but when he turned with a graceful sweep and deposited it on the rock beside Nee-tah-wee-gan she was stooping over to pick up her knife.
"A white child!" he taunted.
As if she had not heard, Nee-tah-wee-gan grasped the fish to slit it and place it on the drying rack, but the moment she saw that Wazh-e-na-be was again looking down into the water she started forward.
There was the stealth and cruelty of a cat in her movements. As the man stood there, waiting for another gleam of silver in the rushing water beneath, she crept up behind him, swiftly and with murderous fury. She saw his arms stiffen, caught the swift descent of the net and then as he leaned over the brink she hurled herself against him and he went out and down.
When the black head was no longer visible in the boiling water she turned away. Rage and fear had left her and she smiled triumphantly as she picked up the fish.
A week passed and an Indian paddled up the river. From the bend he saw Nee-tah-wee-gan, outlined against the blue October sky, as she stood on a rock above the falls and plunged a dip net into the roaring current. A frown crossed his face. He had believed this hunting ground unoccupied and he had come a long way to claim it for his own.
Later, when he emerged from the brush that flanked the portage trail and saw the drying racks heavy with the manna of the north, he frowned again. All this might have been his had he come sooner, and had he been blessed with a woman so industrious.
But the frown vanished and his eyes lighted expectantly when a high, shrill wail sounded through the roar of the falls. He turned to see Nee-tah-wee-gan huddled beside the door of her wigwam, a blanket over her head.
Nee-tah-wee-gan's acting was convincing. Her death howl was as dismal and depressing as any Pe-tah-bo, the man, had ever heard. He sat down and waited for half an hour. Then she lifted the blanket and started as if in amazement.
By sunset the simple arrangements were made. Nee-tah-wee-gan was without a man because hers had been careless at the brink of the gorge, when his moccasins were wet and slippery. She faced the winter without a hunter and provider. Pe-tah-bo, wifeless, lacking a place to hunt, believed the situation to be nothing less than miraculously arranged. The next morning he plunged into the winter's work, a sense of good fortune doubling his industry.
In many ways Pe-tah-bo was an excellent husband. He was good natured, fond of laughter and jests, and he lacked the savage cruelty of his race. He was richly endowed, too, with that Ojibwa characteristic, a love for children. He had never had any of his own and from the beginning he took great delight in Wen-dah-ban.
It was inevitable that he should discover that the boy's hair was not coarse, that his skin was fair, his features not those of an Indian. From the first he had seen that Nee-tah-wee-gan was a half-breed but even this did not explain the child.
"What is his wee-sah-nah?" he asked one day as he fashioned a snowshoe frame.
Nee-tah-wee-gan hesitated an instant. Then she said shortly,
"Muk-wah."
"That is good. It means he will be big and strong and a great hunter."
"Of course he will be a hunter!" Nee-tah-wee-gan cried.
Her vehemence startled him but when he looked up at her his eyes were squinting shrewdly.
"You have told me you once lived at Fort Bruce," he said. "All the post managers gather there in the summer. When there are so few white women it is natural that the men should turn to our people. And you were there."
"What do you mean?" Nee-tah-wee-gan demanded with just a trace of unsteadiness in her voice.
"Nothing," Pe-tah-bo laughed, "except it is as I thought. Wen-dah-ban's father was white."
The woman's black eyes were brilliant with sudden anger, but she had learned one lesson. With an effort she controlled herself.
"It is none of your affair," she snapped.
"No, and I do not care. You were not my woman then."
"He is my child, and an Indian," she rushed on. "He will always be an Indian, and a hunter."
Pe-tah-bo let the matter drop there for the time. When he took it up again it was not that he was doubtful of Wen-dah-ban's parentage. That had been explained to his satisfaction. But he did take a mischievous delight in referring to Wen-dah-ban's father because he saw that it angered Nee-tah-wee-gan.
"How you hate the white man!" he laughed one day. "Wouldn't he take you for his woman? Did you expect to live in the fort and have other women cook for you?"
"I would not live with the 'big trader' himself," she answered viciously.
"Who could it have been?" Pe-tah-bo mused, pretending great concern but watching her slyly. "Two years ago! I went to Fort Bruce that summer with the Kenogami fur brigade. The 'big trader' was there, and MacKar. I remember John Corrigal of Fort James, but he had just taken a white woman and would not look at a red one. Layard was not there, was he?"
"You'll never know," Nee-tah-wee-gan cried angrily. "It was my own affair."
He grinned and smoked his pipe in silence for a time, watching his wife's wrathful face. Then he turned to Wen-dah-ban, poking his finger at the boy's ribs and smiling contentedly when the child chuckled with mirth.
"But you will call him your son?" Nee-tah-wee-gan demanded suddenly.
Pe-tah-bo glanced at her in astonishment. She was no longer angry. She was pleading that he do this.
"Of course," he said good naturedly. "He is a fine boy. I would like to call him my son. I will make of him a good hunter. And I will watch his wigwam when it is time for him to fast, when he will learn Po-wah-gom, 'The Thing You Dream About.'"
Several times that winter Pe-tah-bo jested about the boy's father, but not with the cruel satisfaction of Wazh-e-na-be. Nor did he obtain the same result. Nee-tah-wee-gan became angry and delighted him with her outbursts, but she was crafty in her rage. She knew she had severed the last connection with Fort James and that no one in this distant place would guess her secret.
Pe-tah-bo, unsuspecting, content with his simple amusement, did not give the matter much thought. Nee-tah-wee-gan was proving a good mate and he possessed only an idle curiosity as to whom the white man may have been.
But when spring came and they were ready for the long journey to the fort with the winter's harvest of fur he was amazed by the woman's refusal to accompany him. It is the big event in the Indian's year, this journey to the trading post with its purchase of goods, the gathering of the band, the gossiping with friends and relatives, the long, sunny, lazy days in the great clearing.
Yet Nee-tah-wee-gan not only refused to go but she refused to give a reason. At last Pe-tah-bo loaded his canoe and departed, wondering and also a little angry because he had to do all the paddling and portaging, and cook his own meals.
He returned in the early fall, his canoe filled with supplies for the winter, his head with news of the trading and the gathering of the band and of his long journey as one of the crew of the fur brigade.
Year after year this continued. Each spring Nee-tah-wee-gan refused to go to the fort. Pe-tah-bo understood it was her hatred of a white man, which had become a hatred of all things white, that kept her away. Sometimes he poked fun at her. Always he marveled that this hatred had endured. It was incomprehensible to his easy-going nature.
Meanwhile Wen-dah-ban had graduated from his back cradle to a small bow and arrows, to a tiny paddle wielded in the bow of the canoe, to a lively interest in all the marvelous and attractive things about his home. But no brothers or sisters came to keep him company. Only on rare occasions did he ever see other Indians or their children. He never knew the glorious, romping summer days at the fort, when scores of wild youngsters played through the long days.
Buried in the depths of the wilderness, cut off even from his own small world, sensing from the beginning a coldness in Nee-tah-wee-gan's attitude, the little boy became at last a starved and lonely figure. He had been happy when still a romping child but as his sphere remained unchanging, as his growing mind began to reach out for other things than the isolated camp afforded, a cloud passed beneath the sun of childhood.
His eyes lost the brightness of anticipation, for no new delights unfolded before them. His spirit grew heavy, for there were no fresh joys to uplift it. Often he sat for a long time in the sun, staring across the lake, oblivious of his surroundings. Pe-tah-bo watched him thus one day and when at last a moose swam out from a point and the boy did not see it the man turned to his wife in astonishment.
"Wen-dah-ban has a spirit that leaves his body," he said in an awed tone. "He sits there, his eyes open, and yet he does not see the moose."
He marveled silently for a time and then he exclaimed with sudden inspiration:
"It is the white blood in him!"
"Kah-win!" Nee-tah-wee-gan cried so loudly Wen-dah-ban heard and looked around.
"But you are half white and his father is white," Pe-tah-bo persisted. "The boy is far more white than red. Why should he not be more like a white man? I remember a trader at the fort who sat thus, looking but never seeing. He was young and lonely. He suffered from the sickness of long, long thinking."
"And you believe Wen-dah-ban, too, is homesick," Nee-tah-wee-gan scoffed. "A boy who has never been away from his people."
"Perhaps that is it. Perhaps the white blood in him is crying. White men are different. They do wonderful things. They can make things we cannot make. They do not have to work hard as we do. Men paddle and cook and carry burdens for them."
"Yes," she agreed, "and why? They cheat and rob. They take what is ours. They take our women but scorn our children. They are liars, thieves—these white men."
Wen-dah-ban had crept close to listen and, as there is no seclusion either for the body or for the spirit in an Ojibwa home, it was inevitable that throughout his boyhood he should hear many things that troubled him. Unconscious of Pe-tah-bo's amusement in stirring Nee-tah-wee-gan to anger, he believed the entrancing tales of the white people and sensed something unfair in Nee-tah-wee-gan's bitter tirades against them.
"All my life I have traded with the men of the Hudson's Bay," Pe-tah-bo would protest, "and never have I been cheated."
"It is because you are a fool and do not know when they rob you," always was Nee-tah-wee-gan's retort.
Wen-dah-ban learned, too, in countless hours of gossip, that the families of all the other hunters made the long journey to the fort each summer, that all gathered in a huge clearing strewn with wigwams, that many children played games through the long, careless days.
But these things interested him only casually. It was in the white race, of which Pe-tah-bo seemed never to tire of telling, that his curiosity centered. As he grew older this theme occupied his thoughts more and more, until one day he was driven to expression.
"If my father was white and my mother is half white, then I am more white than Indian and I should be a white man," he said.
Pe-tah-bo, highly amused because of the effect he knew this would have on Nee-tah-wee-gan, burst into loud laughter but his mirth was quickly stilled by the fury of the woman's outburst.
For a time she was incoherent in her rage. Ten years of isolation and hatred had made a fearsome thing of her.
"You white!" she screamed at last. "You are an Indian. You are my son and I am an Indian. As long as you live you can never escape it. Tell a white man you are white and he would laugh at you."
The boy crept away, in abashed silence.
Once Pe-tah-bo brought forth a similar explosion. He had been talking at random and his hand was on Wen-dah-ban's head. A close bond had grown between them—Nee-tah-wee-gan's bitterness driving them together. As he idly stroked the boy's hair, he stooped suddenly and looked at it.
"See!" he exclaimed. "It is not all black like an Indian's. There is brown in it and it is softer. And his lips. They are thin. His skin is white beneath his shirt. His eyes are not nearly so dark as ours."
Nee-tah-wee-gan was beside herself with fury. She picked up a heavy knife and charged at her husband so quickly that he was forced to turn and flee. Wen-dah-ban, frightened by her murderous passion, ran into the forest and did not return for two days.
But Nee-tah-wee-gan's fits of rage did not affect the boy's desire to see these white people of whom he had heard so much and when he was thirteen years old he decided that he would act. He knew better than to broach the subject to Nee-tah-wee-gan but when Pe-tah-bo was ready for his annual journey to the fort Wen-dah-ban slipped away into the brush. An hour later he waved from a point far down the lake and the Indian, chuckling over the joke he was playing on his wife, took the boy with him.
It was as a journey around the world for a city youngster who had never been farther from his home than the city park. The four hundred men, women and children gathered at the fort frightened Wen-dah-ban at first. He was as shy as any animal of the forest, but his compelling curiosity and longing soon drove him forth.
He did not play with the other youngsters or listen to the men as they smoked and told stories of the winter's hunt or of their journeys to the great headquarters post with the fur brigade. The fort attracted and held him—the huge structures of logs, their white-washed sides glistening in the sunshine, the constant bustle and activity, the trade shop crammed with dazzling goods, and, most of all, the three white people.
Merton Layard was manager of the Hudson's Bay post at Kenogami. He had been there for several years with his wife, Evelyn, and their six-year-old daughter, Janet. Layard fascinated Wen-dah-ban. He went about confidently, with his head high. His words were sharp and quick, even in the Ojibwa language, and when he spoke men sprang to do as he told them.
To Wen-dah-ban, accustomed only to Nee-tah-wee-gan's shrill voice and bitter disposition and to Pe-tah-bo's careless good nature, knowing only the laxity and aimlessness of a savage's home, Layard was a superman.
And this conception of the white man was not wholly extravagant. The post manager was a splendid example of those youths who come in an endless stream from England and Scotland, their minds aflame with brilliant romance, their hearts eager for dazzling adventure. Dreams have painted the wilderness as a land of colorful deeds, its brown people as brave, wise and noble, life in its solitudes as a succession of glad hazards.
Those dreams endure. They continue despite hardship and isolation, despite monotony and disillusionment. And coupled with them there grows something else, something bigger, finer and more concrete. The Hudson's Bay Company is a stern parent, exacting and unsparing, but it is understanding, protective and beneficent. It demands much and it gives much. It pardons, humors and condones, and it enjoys a loyalty that borders on the fanatic.
The Hudson's Bay demands loneliness and it gives unlimited power. It insists that a man isolate himself from others of his race and it makes him a ruler over hundreds of childlike men and women. It places him in a position where he may be generous and fair, just and scrupulous. He is made law-giver, judge and executive and he becomes father of a people.
Behind him are two and a half centuries of achievement, a precedent that becomes a creed, a history that embraces deeds of cruelty and greed and yet stands resplendent because of the faith, the integrity and the enduring dreams of these Scotch and English lads who are lured to wide adventure and remain to be the real rulers of an immense empire. The almost bloodless story of Canada's Indians testifies to their fidelity to an ideal.
Merton Layard was one of the best of these silent, unsung barons of fur land. In his mind there was disillusionment but in his heart the early visions persisted. He knew the Indian to be a child, and he treated him as such, kindly and firmly, guiding, aiding and encouraging, by ruse if necessary but always with a beneficent purpose.
Yet when June came and dozens of wigwams lined the shore, when yellow bark canoes floated on the blue waters of the lake, when half-wild children romped and shrieked in the great, green clearing, when women laughed and gossiped and men stretched on the grass and smoked and talked in slow, measured tones, when trade goods—blankets, capotes, brilliant assumption belts, tobacco, kettles, gilling twine, yards of colored strouds, beads, guns, shot, powder, powder horns and bars of lead for bullets—when all these passed over the counter and the fur loft was piled with pelts—beaver, fox, otter, wolf, mink, bear, fisher, ermine, lynx, muskrat and wolverine—then all the colorful romance of Layard's boyish dreams returned and the north became a land of glorious adventure.
Yes, Fort Kenogami in June was a colorful place. For nine months each Indian family had been cut off from relatives and friends, struggling against cold and hunger, fighting desperately to exist. Now they came, one, two, three canoes at a time, from a hundred miles in every direction. Men chuckled, women shrieked greetings and jests. Laughter was everywhere. Happiness and contentment and comfort brought out the natural, mirth-loving spirits of these forest people.
They were as excited as children. The fur was to be traded, "debt" wiped out, and then would come the spending of the surplus in a glad, frantic riot of selection, rejection and vituperative family squabbles. A distant fur post in June is like an orphan asylum on a holiday.
It was into such a scene that Wen-dah-ban had been thrust and in those first astounding days that he encountered the color line and recognized that Nee-tah-wee-gan was not alone in distinguishing between the races. He had quickly discovered that the dwelling house in which the three marvelous white people lived was surrounded by a picket fence and that within this fence Janet Layard played.
Indian women hung about, marveling at the child's golden hair and coaxing her near enough so that they might feel of it. Youngsters pressed their faces close between the pickets but never did a hunter or his wife or children invade the yard, sacred to the smiling, happy, little girl of the golden hair and white and pink skin.
Wen-dah-ban spent long hours staring through the fence at Janet and her parents. From the time of his arrival he had been set apart as much by his history as by his own actions. He was known to every Indian at the fort as Nee-tah-wee-gan's child—the one she had kept hidden in the bush since infancy. For years he had been the subject of much wigwam gossip, and now that he had come to Kenogami at last he was the object of all the curiosity and cruelty that is characteristic of the Ojibwa.
A group of women would stop him as he passed, grasp him by an arm and form a circle about him.
"See that hair!" one would cry as she felt of it. "Soft like a mink's, and with the same brown in it."
"Like a white man's," another would protest. "The trader's hair is like that. And the eyes, too."
Purposely they acted as if he were a sled dog and discussed him as freely and impersonally.
"Look!" one would exclaim as she ripped open the boy's shirt and exposed the white skin beneath. "He must be nearly all white," and there would follow an obscene joke that brought a storm of laughter. Sex is almost the sole source of the Ojibwa's humor.
The first time the women stopped Wen-dah-ban he was gratified by their declarations that he appeared to be white. But he quickly sensed the ridicule and shrank from it even as it mystified him.
"Why do you laugh?" he burst forth one day. "The trader is white and he is a big chief. It is good to be white."
The women shrieked their mirth and gathered about him in a close circle. Like taunting children they bent down, felt of his hair, peered into his eyes.
"I know who it is that he looks like!" one exclaimed. "It is the 'big trader' himself who is his father."
"Kah-win!" another protested. "He walks like John Corrigal."
"A walk means nothing," a third declared. "It is the eyes. Do you remember Nicol MacKar? That is the man."
Something in the boy rebelled. He did not feel any disgrace but he resented ridicule of something that he felt to be so important, of something that was closest to his heart. In sudden fury he burst through the circle and escaped.
He went at once to the picket fence to watch Janet Layard at play. He wanted consolation. His yearning, empty heart craved something that he could gratify only by watching this white child.
As always, she seemed oblivious of his presence and then suddenly she approached him.
"You are the boy whose mother would not let him come to the fort," she said in Ojibwa.
He nodded.
"You have always lived in the bush and have never seen white people?"
Again he gave dumb acknowledgment.
"They say your father is white and your mother half white but that makes no difference. You are an Indian just the same."
Anger such as he had never known seized Wen-dah-ban. Nee-tah-wee-gan, in her wild outbursts, had often said the same thing and had cowed him with her vehemence. The Indian woman had silenced him with her ridicule but from this white child the statement was a taunt and a challenge and it brought forth a quick, passionate retort.
"Kah-win!" he exclaimed fiercely. "I am not an Indian. I am white."
Janet drew back, startled by the violence of his protest and a little frightened at the blazing wrath of this wild creature who stared through the picket fence. Then she turned and ran to the house.