Northland Stories (45 page)

The man sat up in the snow for a moment and struggled for calmness. Then he pulled on his mittens, by means of his teeth, and got upon his feet. He glanced down at first in order to assure himself that he was really standing up, for the absence of sensation in his feet left him unrelated to the earth. His erect position in itself started to drive the webs of suspicion from the dog's mind; and when he spoke peremptorily, with the sound of whip-lashes in his voice, the dog rendered its customary allegiance and came to him. As it came within reaching distance, the man lost his control. His arms flashed out to the dog, and he experienced genuine surprise when he discovered that his hands could not clutch, that there was neither bend nor feeling in the fingers. He had forgotten for the moment that they were frozen and that they were freezing more and more. All this happened quickly, and before the animal could get away, he encircled its body with his arms. He sat down in the snow, and in this fashion held the dog, while it snarled and whined and struggled.

But it was all he could do, hold its body encircled in his arms and sit there. He realized that he could not kill the dog. There was no way to do it. With his helpess hands he could neither draw nor hold his sheath-knife nor throttle the animal. He released it, and it plunged wildly away, with tail between its legs, and still snarling. It halted forty feet away and surveyed him curiously, with ears sharply pricked forward. The man looked down at his hands in order to locate them, and found them hanging on the ends of his arms. It struck him as curious that one should have to use his eyes in order to find out where his hands were. He began threshing his arms back and forth, beating the mittened hands against his sides. He did this for five minutes, violently, and his heart pumped enough blood up to the surface to put a stop to his shivering. But no sensation was aroused in the hands. He had an impression that they hung like weights on the ends of his arms, but when he tried to run the impression down, he could not find it.

A certain fear of death, dull and oppressive, came to him. This fear quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet, but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him. This threw him into a panic, and he turned and ran up the creek-bed along the old, dim trail. The dog joined in behind and kept up with him. He ran blindly, without intention, in fear such as he had never known in his life. Slowly, as he ploughed and floundered through the snow, he began to see things again,—the banks of the creek, the old timber-jams, the leafless aspens, and the sky. The running made him feel better. He did not shiver. Maybe, if he ran on, his feet would thaw out; and, anyway, if he ran far enough, he would reach camp and the boys. Without doubt he would lose some fingers and toes and some of his face; but the boys would take care of him, and save the rest of him when he got there. And at the same time there was another thought in his mind that said he would never get to the camp and the boys; that it was too many miles away, that the freezing had too great a start on him, and that he would soon be stiff and dead. This thought he kept in the background and refused to consider. Sometimes it pushed itself forward and demanded to be heard, but he thrust it back and strove to think of other things.

It struck him as curious that he could run at all on feet so frozen that he could not feel them when they struck the earth and took the weight of his body. He seemed to himself to skim along above the surface, and to have no connection with the earth. Somewhere he had once seen a winged Mercury, and he wondered if Mercury felt as he felt when skimming over the earth.

His theory of running until he reached camp and the boys had one flaw in it: he lacked the endurance. Several times he stumbled, and finally he tottered, crumpled up, and fell. When he tried to rise, he failed. He must sit and rest, he decided, and next time he would merely walk and keep on going. As he sat and regained his breath, he noted that he was feeling quite warm and comfortable. He was not shivering, and it even seemed that a warm glow had come to his chest and trunk. And yet, when he touched his nose or cheeks, there was no sensation. Running would not thaw them out. Nor would it thaw out his hands and feet. Then the thought came to him that the frozen portions of his body must be extending. He tried to keep this thought down, to forget it, to think of something else; he was aware of the panicky feeling that it caused, and he was afraid of the panic. But the thought asserted itself, and persisted, until it produced a vision of his body totally frozen. This was too much, and he made another wild run along the trail. Once he slowed down to a walk, but the thought of the freezing extending itself made him run again.

And all the time the dog ran with him, at his heels. When he fell down a second time, it curled its tail over its forefeet and sat in front of him, facing him, curiously eager and intent. The warmth and security of the animal angered him, and he cursed it till it flattened down its ears appeasingly. This time the shivering came more quickly upon the man. He was losing in his battle with the frost. It was creeping into his body from all sides. The thought of it drove him on, but he ran no more than a hundred feet, when he staggered and pitched headlong. It was his last panic. When he had recovered his breath and control, he sat up and entertained in his mind the conception of meeting death with dignity. However, the conception did not come to him in such terms. His idea of it was that he had been making a fool of himself, running around like a chicken with its head cut off—such was the simile that occurred to him. Well, he was bound to freeze anyway, and he might as well take it decently. With this new-found peace of mind came the first glimmerings of drowsiness. A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death. It was like taking an anæsthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die.

He pictured the boys finding his body next day. Suddenly he found himself with them, coming along the trail and looking for himself. And, still with them, he came around a turn in the trail and found himself lying in the snow. He did not belong with himself any more, for even then he was out of himself, standing with the boys and looking at himself in the snow. It certainly was cold, was his thought. When he got back to the States he could tell the folks what real cold was. He drifted on from this to a vision of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek. He could see him quite clearly, warm and comfortable, and smoking a pipe.

“You were right, old hoss; you were right,” the man mumbled to the old-timer of Sulphur Creek.

Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a long, slow twilight. There were no signs of a fire to be made, and, besides, never in the dog's experience had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire. As the twilight drew on, its eager yearning for the fire mastered it, and with a great lifting and shifting of forefeet, it whined softly, then flattened its ears down in anticipation of being chidden by the man. But the man remained silent. Later, the dog whined loudly. And still later it crept close to the man and caught the scent of death. This made the animal bristle and back away. A little longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.

EXPLANATORY NOTES

Jack London's references to specific towns and geographical features in Alaska and the Canadian Yukon are for the most part highly accurate in these stories. Given my own emphasis on treating London's Northland as an abstract symbolic terrain, I have refrained from glossing particular locations, which can easily be identified by consulting any detailed map of the Yukon Territory.

“The White Silence”

2 [Epworth] The Epworth League was a Methodist youth organization founded in 1889.

3 [gee-pole] A steering mechanism attached to the front right runner of the dog sled.

7 [bench claim] Title for a piece of mining property issued by a judge or law court.

“The Son of the Wolf”

19 [Jelchs, the Raven] In the mythology of the Indians of Upper Tanana in northern Alaska (where this story takes place), as well as Northwest Coast tribes such as the Tlingit, the totemic figure of the Raven plays the role of Transformer or Creator. One Tlingit creation myth in particular recounts how a spirit called Yehlh, appearing in the form of a Raven, released the sun and gave fire and light to the earth.

“In a Far Country”

28 [
voyageur
] A person who transported goods and men by boat during the Canadian fur trade.

32 [Yukon stove-pipe] The Yukon stove was a portable contraption that was for used for cooking as well as heating.

33 [to clip his coupons] The practice by which owners of stock routinely redeemed their corporate dividends.

34 [slush-lamp] A primitive lamp usually made of a tin can which used bacon grease instead of oil.

37 [Caliban] The savage, deformed slave of the exiled Duke Prospero in Shakepeare's
The Tempest.

“To the Man on Trail”

43 [Lochinvar] The hero of a ballad in Sir Walter Scott's
Marmion,
who runs away with another lover just as she is about to be married to someone else.

49 [P. C. store] The store of a trading company (presumably the Alaska Commercial Company), which often served as a bank for its customers.

50 [Captain Constantine] Beginning in 1895, Inspector Charles Constantine was the chief land agent, collector of customs, as well as the leader of the Northwest Mounted Police in the Yukon District.

51 [jumps the limit, and drops the whole sack] Instead of purchasing a claim in Dawson City for Westondale, Castrell gambles away the entire sum.

“The Wisdom of the Trail”

58 [Factor] The principal financial agent of a trading company.

“An Odyssey of the North”

61 [Yukon stove] See note 32.

61 [
voyageurs
] See note 28.

61 [Wolseley] In 1884-1885 Garnet Joseph Wolseley headed the British military campaign along the Nile River to the city of Khartoum.

61 [Louis Reil (sic)] In 1869-1870 and in 1885 Louis Riel unsuccessfully led Frenchmen, Indians, and half-breeds to fight for their cultural and political rights by rebelling against British rule in the Northwest Territories.

62 [
coureurs du bois
] An unlicensed French or French-Indian fur trader or trapper.

62 [
bois brules
] Literally, burnt wood, Canadian term for French-Indian half-breeds.

67 [a king of Eldorado] A miner who has struck it rich in the Klondike's Eldorado Creek, named after the mythic New World land of limitless gold.

69 [quartz ... placer] Quartz gold is embedded in rocks, usually a more substantial source than placer gold, which is gold mixed in with sand or gravel.

70 [slush-lamp] See note 34.

73 [oomiak] Same as umaik, a large, open boat made of skins used by Eskimos for transporting goods.

90 [Constantine] See note 50.

“The God of His Fathers”

94 [Chief Factor] See note 58.

“Siwash”

106 [Yukon stove] See note 32.

“Grit of Women”

121 [Sulphur Creek stampede] One important site of the early rush to the Klondike gold fields.

124 [factor's] See note 58.

128 [sun-dogs] Colloquial for parhelions, bright, colored spots of light sometimes seen in conjunction with a solar halo.

“The Law of Life”

147 [bald-face] A type of grizzly bear.

“The Death of Ligoun”

162 [bald-face] See note 147.

“The League of the Old Men”

187 [time of the captains] During the early stages of settlement, the Yukon was under paramilitary control by the officers of the Northwest Mounted Police, before a governor was assigned to oversee the region. The Yukon was not officially declared a Territory of the Canadian Dominion until 1898. As the story opens Old Imber is waiting for trial in the Barracks headquarters of the Mounted Police.

189 [Eldorado king's sombrero] See note 67.

“The Story of Jees Uck”

206 [clipped coupons] See note 33.

217 [Rhodes of Alaska] Cecil J. Rhodes (1853-1902), financier and colonial administrator who helped develop South Africa under British rule.

“The Sun-Dog Trail”

246 [title] See note 128.

247 [“Leda and the Swan”] Leading to the birth of Helen of Troy, this mythic rape between the woman Leda and the god Zeus (disguised as a swan) was the subject of numerous fin-de-siècle paintings.

254 [stampede] See note 121.

“To Build a Fire”

268 [niggerheads] dark bunches of vegetation spotting the Yukon landscape.

273 [wires were pretty well down] A metaphor taken from telegraph transmission to explain the man's loss of control over his body.

APPENDIX

This is the order of stories as published in Jack London's first three collected Northland volumes, followed parenthetically by places and dates of initial periodical publication.